The Unwritten #22

From Vertigo's celebrated series about the power of stories, this April 2011 issue finds a young man perched atop a vast open book as stormy seas surge from its pages and a red-sailed ship looms in the starlit sky above him — a striking image that captures the series' core tension between the literary and the literal. Yuko Shimizu's cover art is genuinely beautiful, blending ink-wash turbulence with delicate line work, while two enormous hands clutching the book's spine hint at forces far greater than any single reader at play. "Leviathan 4" promises that Mike Carey and Peter Gross's meditation on narrative and identity is sailing into deep, thrilling waters.