Survival Chronicles

What is this?

It all started with a diary. Pages written during a collapse. Notes from someone trying to survive when the world falls apart.

That diary exists. You can read it here, on this website. It's raw, unfiltered, uncomfortable. And now it's going to become a graphic novel.

The contest

I launched a different kind of proposal. I didn't want portfolios, or resumes, or lists of publishers. None of that mattered to me.

The only thing I asked was simple: read the diary.

The project is born from that text. Everything starts there. If you didn't read it, you couldn't understand what I was looking for. And if you didn't understand it, you couldn't be part of this.

Page 1 — Why I write

"I don't really know why I write."

The first page sets the tone for the entire work. An intimate reflection on the act of writing as a form of resistance. The protagonist wonders why he needs to leave a record of his existence, why he feels the urgency not to become just another nameless body that ends up blending with the dust.

The urban landscape—skyscrapers, elevated highways, structures rising toward an empty sky—contrasts with the intimacy of the act of writing. A hand holds a pen over an open notebook. A solitary figure watches the city from somewhere high above.

"Writing gives me a shape, however minimal. It reminds me that I still think, that I can observe and record, that I'm still someone and not just a body breathing out of habit."

Page 2 — The dead city

"The air up here is thick and gray. It has that smell of dust and metal that sticks in your throat."

The second page immerses us in Chernogorsk, a city that looks like an old photograph. From the rooftop, the protagonist contemplates a devastated urban landscape: buildings that look like open tombs, streets turned into cracks where memory escapes.

The illustrations capture the desolation with expressive strokes: thick smoke rising between crumbling skyscrapers, silhouettes of buildings against a threatening sky, and in the lower panel, a solitary figure watching the sea from the ruins.

"On clear days you can see the sea, though it no longer has color or reflection, just a thick movement that smells of rusted iron."

Page 3 — The shelter

"Sometimes I think the sea rots just like us."

I live on the highest floor of a building that a plane crashed into when everything went to hell. The fuselage got embedded in the facade, as if a giant hand had pushed it until it fit. It's an absurd image, but I've grown used to it.

In the first days, it unsettled me to think it could fall at any moment, crushing everything and burying me with the rest. Now it's part of the landscape, like a rusted rib that holds up my shelter.

"Here nothing falls completely; everything is held up by pure exhaustion."

My shelter is a room without windows, with a thin mattress and a blanket that barely warms. I sleep next to my weapons because it makes me feel less vulnerable. Though I know that, when the time comes, nothing will help much.