The Unwritten #26

Peter Gross and Mike Carey's The Unwritten reaches its second part of "Citizen Taylor" with this unsettling August 2011 Vertigo entry. Yuko Shimizu's cover is immediately arresting — a figure pressed against the inside of what appears to be a glass-fronted, wire-laden machine, breathing apparatus over his face and hands splayed outward, while a second figure lies below him, head tilted back as though unconscious or in a trance, both enveloped in an eerie aquatic glow. The image captures the series' ongoing fascination with confinement, duality, and the blurry line between reality and fiction in a way that lingers well after you set the issue down.