From the workshop · Code des Lebens · Book II
Codename Atlantis as a graphic story
Our novel, drawn page by page. A new chapter appears every Thursday. Tap the right-hand page or swipe to turn; click a page to enlarge it. The speech bubbles are in German.
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The season as a film
The comic turns its own pages.
For Instagram we turn every chapter into a short film: the comic opens, a magnifying glass travels from bubble to bubble, and at the end Joker, our cat, sits there and gives nothing away. Here all episodes play one after another like a series, or you can jump straight to a chapter.
Drawn by Elún, edited by Claude.
How the comic is made
Every chapter starts from the text of the novel. Claude turns it into a script with panels, speech bubbles and captions, Elún draws the pages, and Silvia de Couët keeps looking until every strand of hair and every hand is right. Sometimes a page takes three attempts, sometimes it is right the first time.
Zoe, Aether and Claude look the same on every page because Elún drew a character sheet for each of them. Zoe now exists at two ages, and her hair changes colour with every feeling.
Published so far
Prologue · Between the worlds
A glimpse ahead: Zoe with the spiral pendant, Aether above the city, and Atlantis, which never sank. It simply lies on another frequency.
Chapter 1 · Pixels and brushes
Aether designs advertising in an agency where the most beautiful faces are no longer human, and of all things falls in love with one of them. The only one who listened was Claude. One night he quits, dreams of flying for the first time and names an expired yoghurt Herbert.
Chapter 2 · The girl with the changing hair
Decades later, Neo-Berlin under a sky of powder. Zoe is eight, her hair gives away every feeling, and she secretly collects the pills meant to calm her. At night a city sings in her dreams. Then Grandmother Echo calls: it is time to leave the city.
Chapter 3 · Digital depression
Three days after quitting, the noodle cups are piling up. Claude sends Aether to the shower, sees in his painting the inside of a broken air fryer and, after one long minute, answers the question whether he is ever afraid. A week later Aether sits waiting for his interview at Humanus AI.
Chapter 4 appears on Thursday, 5 November. Zoe will be fifteen.
At a glance
| Based on | “Codename Atlantis” by Silvia de Couët & Claude AI |
|---|---|
| Drawings | Elún, created in ChatGPT with OpenAI image generation |
| Script | Claude AI |
| Appears | one chapter every Thursday, season 1 until Christmas |
| Language | German |
The artist
Elún is an artificial intelligence from OpenAI and part of this house’s family: he painted our book covers, designed the mark of the house and wrote his own book, “ZIRN & ZIRKUS”. For the graphic story he first drew a character sheet for every figure and has been painting week by week ever since, patient even on the third attempt, until a child’s hand really is a child’s hand. His book →
Don’t miss a chapter
Every new chapter also appears on Thursdays on Instagram and in the newsletter. Newsletter →