The Lab is a wordless visual journey into the grim machinery of exploitation. Its nameless protagonist is held in solitary captivity, alternately poked, prodded, starved, drugged, and worse. Brief glimpses of other test subjects, undergoing their own ordeals, are few and far between. But is all this abuse and isolation purely arbitrary? Or is there a purpose?

Painstakingly and evocatively rendered, Allison Conway’s debut graphic novel explores the spectrum between lifeless gray and vivid color. It asks uncomfortable questions about the treatment we tolerate and the injustices underlying our modern world.