The Webcomics Weekly is back in your life. This week we’re starting spooky Halloween times a little early with “Survival Diary”. I like to think of it as one graphic memoir nonfiction.
Survival Diary
Chapters 1-12
Updates Saturdays
Created by SSurplus man
Reviewed by Mel Lake
Forgive me, folks. I wrote about vampires in a metal band, then a giant cursed eel. Now this week, I’ve got zombies on the brain. There’s just something about that undead life that appeals to me, I guess. Vampires, zombies, and the like allow us to explore what it means to be alive in extreme situations that bring out the best, and worst, of humanity.
In “Survival Diary,” which is listed as a thriller series on Webtoon, we explore a post-apocalyptic world through the eyes of Lynn, an infected person who managed to keep her sense of self. She goes through her days foraging for non-perishable food and avoiding the hordes of undead brain-eating zombies who fill her neighborhood. Although she is infected herself, she remains self-aware and able to use reason, unlike the masses who took over the rest of the world. They mostly leave her alone, though encounters with them and the humans they prey on remain terrifying. When she meets an uninfected man and helps him survive, Lynn tells him how she came to be living among zombies and what happened to her only friend, Ollie. They then set out to find the man’s family, encountering a dangerous group of infected people who prey on both the infected and uninfected alike.
A young girl teaming up with an older man to fight zombies … yes, it sounds familiar. And there really isn’t much here that’s novel. In fact, the fact that the zombies’ eyes become red after they turn is very similar to what happens in the popular manga, Tokyo Ghoul. If you liked The Last of Us or iZombie, you might like “Survival Diary.” There are tragic backstories and zombie tropes aplenty here, which isn’t a bad thing. It would be strange if a story about a self-aware zombie didn’t make the zombie girl grapple with her lost humanity, even if it’s done in a familiar way.
The comic uses color extremely sparingly, showing only Lynn’s red eyes and Mister’s blue ones, with the occasional pop of yellow and the intense dark red of blood. Otherwise, the world is shown in shades of gray, which lend a feeling of hopelessness and starkness to the surroundings and make the eyes of the infected stand out. It also emphasizes the gruesomeness of the gore, both as zombies eat their victims and as Mister hacks them apart in self-defense. “Survival Diary” isn’t the goriest webcomic I’ve read, nor is it rife with psychological horror, but it doesn’t shy away from showing what life is like after the undead take over. Both infected and uninfected humans are dangerous in this world, and though Lynn professes to believe that killing is unnatural, violence happens in every chapter of her journey.
I chose to read this comic because of the art style, which almost reminds me of Yuki Urushibara’s manga series, “Mushishi.” The man Lynn meets and calls “Mister” is a glasses-wearing mystery man with a penchant for violence—in other words, my absolute favorite character type. The fact that he wears a mask like Kakashi from “Naruto” is even better. The manga-inspired horror vibes work for this story, in my opinion, as does the way the backgrounds are sometimes entirely absent. My only real criticism of the story so far is that the story moves slowly and includes too much filler dialogue — but given the Webtoon format, the story choices make sense because Webtoon comics thrive on drawing out the story over many episodes. I get impatient and prefer a faster pace than most Webtoons provide, which is a “me” problem.
“Survival Diary” does contain a warning for violence and blood. Heed it and read at your own discretion. The story’s themes are dark and the world isn’t pretty. On the spectrum of zombie stories, this one is closer to The Walking Dead than Santa Clarita Diet, though fans of either might find something to like.
