The Walking Dead #49

Few images in 2008 comics carry this much quiet weight: a blood-spattered adult figure — face unseen, turned away from the viewer — walks hand in hand with a grim-faced young boy in a sheriff's hat through a dim, tree-lined road at night. The boy's expression is startlingly hardened for his age, and both figures bear the stains of whatever they've just survived. Charlie Adlard's cover art for this forty-ninth issue strips the zombie apocalypse down to its rawest emotional core — two people, one small hand gripping another, pressing forward into the dark.