Feral vol. 1: Indoor Cats

Writer Tony Fleecs and artist Trish Forstner, with Tone Rodriguez on layouts, scored a major hit with “Stray Dogs” a couple years back and now they’re back with a cat-focused follow-up.  It’s about one family’s three cats – Elsie, Patch, and Lord Fluffy Britches – as they find themselves in the middle of a highly contagious rabies outbreak.  It’s bad enough that not only are all pets being rounded up, but the ones that are free and look just a little funny are being shot on sight.  Our three kitty protagonists are on their way to a quarantine site when their car crashes and they find themselves in the middle of the forest surrounded on all sides by animals who want to kill, eat, and/or infect them.  Their only option?  RUN – and hope they don’t get caught!

While I’d like to say that this first volume of “Feral” is superior to “Stray Dogs” simply due to the fact that cats are now the main characters here, that’s not quite the case.  Fleece, Forstner, and Rodriguez’s previous series benefitted from the fact that it was a tightly plotted suspense thriller told from an unusual perspective that also leaned into how its protagonists would act as animals rather than small furry humans.  All of those strengths feel lessened here as the cats are basically thrown into a “28 Days Later”-style zombie movie and, with the occasional memorable exception, do feel more like small furry humans.

That’s not to say what’s here isn’t entertaining as the focus on cats as protagonists does provide a new angle for a zombie story and you’re never far away from finding out “What’s infected now?” here.  Fleecs is good with making his cast likable – in spite of the surprising ruthlessness he displays when determining who should live and die.  This is also strengthened by great art from Forstner and (now co-artist) Rodriguez that manages to make the cute co-exist with the terrifying.  So even if this first volume wasn’t everything I was hoping for, it was still good enough to get me onboard with how these cats survive this experience.