Taking cues from the animated films of Don Bluth, who took great pleasure in placing innocent, anthropomorphic animals in dark scenarios, Image Comics’ Stray Dogs presented its titular canines in a situation not dissimilar to Silence of the Lambs. Having pushed that sense of horror towards cutesy dogs, the creative team of writer Tony Fleecs and artists Trish Forstner and Tone Rodiguez have decided to do the same thing with cats in Feral.
Whereas Stray Dogs worked as a self-contained five-issue miniseries, the creators are being more ambitious with Feral, an ongoing series about stray cats trying to survive a nightmarish rabies outbreak. While it’s an interesting spin on the zombie apocalypse story that we have seen so many times, the first volume showed how limited this fun premise actually was, creating concern over whether this could work as a continuing title.
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Picking up where the previous volume left off, the three main protagonists are separated from one another: Lord is missing, and Patch is infected. As for Elsie, she finds herself with a bunch of cats she barely knows – Gigi and her three children – on the run from rabid rats, hidden traps, and whatever terror lurks in a creepy old shack.
As before, the creators maintain that sense of peril these characters feel, especially when you throw kittens into the mix, which just raises the tension. It also helps that the art team does a great job conveying the danger from the terrified expressions, from the cats themselves to the cute-turned-hellish designs of the infected animals. Another benefit of the book is colorist Brad Simpson, who boldly uses red in certain sequences to show how horrific these felines can lose themselves when infected, best represented when we first see Patch in his current state.
If you’ve read Stray Dogs, you will feel an element of repetition with the cats going through the same scenario as the dogs did as they confront a sinister human who has the ability to turn a group of animals against each other. As Elsie and Gigi witness the horror around them, where these other cats behave as if they are in a cult, plaudits towards the creators for going down a disturbing direction in their storytelling, particularly when the gore kicks in.
Volume 2 is a step up from the previous volume, especially when it comes to pushing the horror, but Feral still stumbles in over-familiarity while maintaining just enough interest to see what other terrors the cats will face.
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