If you were a child of the ’90s who grew up watching Disney movies and possibly the works of Don Bluth, you know some of those animated films did not hold back on showing genuine horror. Bluth, in particular, had a reputation of killing innocent characters in his films, from The Land Before Time to All Dogs Go to Heaven. That sense of horror was evoked to a greater effect with Image Comics’ Stray Dogs, where the titular canines found themselves in Silence of the Lambs territory. Now the same creative team bring their horror sensibilities towards cats that look like they could have been in Disney’s The Aristocats.
When three indoor cats, Elsie, Lord Fluffy Britches, and Patch, are taken away from the homes, a car accident leads them to get lost in the wilderness. In a desperate attempt to get back home with the help of fellow stray felines, the cats find themselves in a nightmarish rabies outbreak as they are prey to a bunch of rabid beasts.
From the above synopsis, if you’re well-versed in horror, you will notice that Feral deliberately evokes not only viral outbreak movies, but also the zombie genre (if the variant covers that nod to George A. Romero’s Trilogy of the Dead didn’t give it away). While the mixing of zombie movie tropes and cutesy drawn cats is a fun premise, it feels a little familiar if you’ve read the creator’s previous breakout comic.
Image Comics
This volume, which covers the first five issues, sees the creators being more ambitious than what they did with Stray Dogs as we are expecting more issues featuring these characters surviving their own vision of a zombie apocalypse. And yet, one of the strengths of Stray Dogs was that it was a complete narrative that didn’t overstretch its quirky premise beyond five issues. I don’t think we are going to get 193 issues of Feral like The Walking Dead achieved.
Whilst I’m more a dog person than a cat person – hence why Stray Dogs did a better job of getting under my skin – writer Tony Fleecs and artists Trish Forstner and Tone Rodriguez keep you engaged with the peril that these characters go through, such as the innocent Lord who is mentally not quite there and gets himself and other in heaps of trouble. There are some strange moments when the book tries to evoke the likes of Watership Down and The Lion King, even going as far as Elsie getting advice from someone resembling the spiritual Mufasa, which only happens twice.
Again, because this book follows the tropes of zombie/outbreak movies, you can pinpoint the character dynamics and you can predict which one of them will bite the dust, whether by the savagery from the rabid beasts or the artillery of the humans assigned to terminate anything four-legged. However, that balance of cute cartoony cats and a plethora of horror elements is stunningly realized through Forstner and Rodriguez’s artistry, as the scenes of bloody violence is clearly not meant by a younger readership, especially if they love cats.
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