Henrique Alvim Corrêa's War of the Worlds 1906 — Survivor at the Ruins

Surprisingly intimate for an alien invasion narrative, this pen-and-ink illustration foregrounds not the Martian war machines but a lone, hunched human survivor clinging to rubble amid a shattered urban landscape — overturned furniture, broken lampposts, and debris cascading off a ledge like a waterfall of civilization. Corrêa's frantic cross-hatching conveys existential dread with journalistic urgency, capturing H.G. Wells's apocalypse not through spectacle but through one man's desperate, animal survival instinct.