Lab Rat is a promotional webcomic for the game Portal 2, co-illustrated by comic book artist Michael Avon Oeming and illustrator Andrea Wicklund.
The comic sets itself apart with its innovative and visually engaging layouts, beautiful illustrations, and range of art style shifts and textures. Oeming is responsible for the box-breaking, stylised layouts, as well as the flashback sequences, where Wicklund illustrates the comic’s main story.
The diversity of the two illustrators’ styles and techniques, as well as the changes in how the traditional comic boxes — or lack thereof — are laid-out, separates the past from the present. The linear, monotonous, half-tone-textured style of Oeming for the past events, and the shifting, texture-riddled and often abstract style of Wicklund for the present, when Rattman has been driven into hiding and his schizophrenia is no longer being suppressed.
