The Walking Dead #50

Reaching its 50th issue milestone, The Walking Dead marks the occasion with a cover that is quietly gut-wrenching: young Carl, cowboy hat pulled low and pistol raised in a two-handed grip, stands his ground as a press of grasping undead hands closes in from every direction. Charlie Adlard's stark composition — a lone child against an encircling darkness — captures exactly the kind of desperate, small-scale courage that made Kirkman and Adlard's series so compelling in 2008. Half a hundred issues in, the book shows no sign of letting readers breathe.