From IDW comes the first graphic novel by Brooklyn US writer/artist Allison Conway (Bare Bones, A Pillbug’s Life, Critters, and other Vice Comics).
The Lab concerns itself with one creature, and to quote the author’s site: “its wordless visual journey into the grim machinery of exploitation. Its nameless protagonist is held in solitary captivity, alternately poked, prodded, starved, drugged, and worse.” To what purpose? Well, that’s for us to discover alongside our Lab individual.
Things are pretty grim for our lab individual. It is a grey animal existence, and a very much ‘Groundhog Day’ routine: get up, eat capsules, be painfully experimented upon, and get sent back to the ‘cell’.
Nothing is perfect when you are being perforated.
The drawings are highly detailed and well designed; the routine, the route, the rousing and rousting. We feel for this being who cannot cry out, or protest. In fact, Conway elongates the processes and routines by repeatedly drawing them step-by-step, ensuring that we experience all of the moments.
The Lab is meant to cast attention on mechanization, and the role of the individual ‘in the machine’, and make us reflect on our own existence. Are we cogs, are we big wheels? Are we perhaps the bug or the windshield? If we are a lobster, are we red with rage? What colour lipstick covers up a scar? How do we see our brain, and does it matter?
It is very ‘zen’, this book. It is a book, it is a story. You can zip through it in less than 10 minutes, as it has no dialogue and is highly ‘mechanized’ in appearance. Or you can spend a long time savouring and suffering along with the individual, the grey life hopping along in search of colour.
IDW, The Lab, $19.99 for 180 pages of content. Assume Teen +
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