illustration — comic — 2022
Connext
A hero rises against an invisible enemy — a full comic drawn and lettered in Albanian, from the first panel of the pandemic to the last page of the fight.
Twenty-five pages, one palette: red as the virus, blue as the man who stands in front of it.
The story opens in a heaven of borrowed icons, cuts to a microscope in Wuhan, and then hands the world to a single fighter. Colour does the narrating: the red spreads, floods the city, swallows the sky.
Panels break their own frames as the fight escalates — hand-drawn sound effects run across gutters, and the last pages drop to flat black and flat red, where the win costs more than it pays.
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why the hero dies
Connext didn't survive the pandemic. RedCloud walked out of its ashes.
The comic is a Dragon Ball reference told about an agency. Connext is the hero in blue — the one who trains, charges up, and throws everything he has at an invisible enemy. Covid is the red: formless, everywhere, impossible to punch. He loses. Not dramatically, not heroically — he simply runs out of what the world had left to give him.
Connext went bankrupt in that period and rebranded as RedCloud. So the last pages hand the fight to a red-haired fighter riding a red cloud, who steps on the virus almost casually — and then carries the body of the one who came before him. The death of one studio and the birth of the next, drawn as a fight scene: victory, but with a price, and a name that keeps the red.
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