Shadowplay (Book 1): Midnight School by Samuel Fonseca
Top Shelf Productions (February 11, 2025)
Reviewed by Joshua Gage
Sam Fonseca has been drawing comics since he discovered that the anime he watched on TV as a child came from manga — and that it was possible to create all that stuff by himself using paper and pencil (still his tools of choice). Nowadays, he alternates duties between art direction, storyboard art, script writing for animation and TV projects, and creating comics. His comic project Age of Rust was nominated three times for the HQMix Prize, and his other title, Dynamite & Laser Beam, won in the “best webcomic” category. Sam also has the strange hobby of creating soundtracks for his comics. His newest collection is the dystopian nightmare, Shadowplay.
Shadowplay focuses on three students who are simply trying to survive a brutal school. One could easily describe this world as Kafka-esque, in that students are routinely tortured, insulted, assaulted, and punished, seeming meaninglessly and randomly. There are students in the classrooms that seem to have the system figured out, but our three protagonists struggle and simply want to escape the daily nightmare of the education and classrooms. By night they are trapped in small prison cells, seemingly at the whim of the school. This graphic novel is a dark nihilistic struggle for freedom.
What makes the book even more spectacular is the artwork. The opening is a near monochrome, and hints and bits of color come sneaking in, slowly and surely, as the tale proceeds. Everything is extremely stylized and distorted, almost tapping into early expressionism and magical realist painting techniques, which further intensifies the extreme plot and surreal narrative.
Samuel Fonseca’s Shadowplay is a really intense read. While not exactly torture porn, the physical and mental abuse the students in this graphic novel face are extreme and violent. This violence only escalated by the contorted and hyper-stylized illustrations. As a whole, this book is a dystopian nightmare critiquing both the modern education system as well contemporary power structures, one that any horror reader will want to read immediately.
