In the darkness of 2022

✧ Winner of the inaugural "In-Situ · Documentary Manga Award"
✧ A graphic diary of the pandemic by Chinese creator mao
✧ Dedicated to everyone who has ever run through the darkness


Please restrain your soul's desire for freedom; do not open the window to sing.
 
In 2022, the COVID-19 pandemic continued to ravage the world,
splitting daily life into two halves:
 
The first half: epidemic prevention policies grew increasingly stringent, with nucleic acid tests, lockdowns, and quarantine becoming the new normal.
The second half: policies were suddenly "lifted," as if nothing had ever happened.
 
During this year, mao witnessed those with nowhere to go on New Year's Eve,
saw one absurdity after another in the news,
and experienced one quarantine and lockdown after another.

It was a year where, behind masks, we could not clearly see each other's expressions;
it was also a year of being trapped in chaos, yet unable to stop running.
In those days when the pause button was pressed,
how should one go on living?
 
A private graphic diary written in the dark,
emerging cartoonist mao uses delicate, sensitive black-and-white brushstrokes
to document the farewells, waiting, escaping, and uncertainty of 2022.
 
"The things I thought I had lost have continued in another way."
 

✧ Recommended in the Dark
 
Mangasick (Manga Bookstore)
Lin Sen (Director)
Chou Chien-Hsin (Graphic Creator)
Lau Kwong-Shing (Cartoonist)
zbfghk (Hong Kong Manga Promotion Group)
Zhang Shang (Animation Director, Manga Author, Founder of Papayep)
Chen Yi-Ching (Host of "Adults' Manga Club")
Zhu Xue De Ren (Poet)
Huang Pei-Shan (Editor-in-Chief of Slowork Publishing)
Liu Shao-Hua (Anthropologist)
Tsai Yu-Chen (Executive Director of Walkers Cultural)
Hung Hung (Poet)
 

✧Award Praise
 
"Sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes numbing; it is a first-person work with powerful tension."

"What might an ordinary person encounter in a world born of a plague? And how do they survive it all? Through the perspective of a personal diary, mao records the fragments of that year."

"The sense of emotional loss, friends gathering, the absurdity of life, and the eruption of anger presented through manga effectively concretize the mental landscape of an individual in a rapidly changing world, becoming a rare record in history."

About the Author

mao, manga creator, currently wandering everywhere.