The Walking Dead #29

Robert Kirkman and Charlie Adlard's post-apocalyptic survival series delivers a visceral gut-punch with issue #29, and Adlard's cover art makes the stakes unmistakably clear. A figure is overwhelmed from above by a mass of rotting, grasping zombie hands and gnashing dead faces — rendered in Cliff Rathburn's haunting purple-grey tones — as a gun is pressed desperately into the fray. It's the kind of image that captures exactly what makes The Walking Dead so compelling in 2006: the relentless, suffocating pressure of a world where the dead never stop coming.