The Unwritten #4

Peter Gross and Mike Carey's Vertigo series takes a striking turn with this fourth issue, closing out the "Tommy Taylor and the Bogus Identity" arc in October 2009. Cover artist Yuko Shimizu renders the protagonist tumbling through a fantastical map-world, clutching a suitcase as he falls past a richly illustrated landscape teeming with literary imagery — a pirate galleon, a hot-air balloon, a whale, a submarine, a fairy-tale castle, and the ominous warning "here be monsters" inscribed in the waters below. It's a cover that captures the series' central thrill: one young man adrift in a world where the boundaries between fiction and reality have become dangerously, beautifully blurred.