Stray Dogs

Sophie is a dog, and she’s just found herself a new home.  There are plenty of other dogs there and most of them seem pretty nice.  This home also has a master who feeds them all, looks after them, and forbids them from going in his special room.  It seems like Sophie could get used to this… until she remembers that she had another master.  What’s more is that she thinks that this new master may have done something bad to her old master.  This has her thinking that she and all of her new dog friends may be in trouble, unless she can convince them of New Master’s true nature.

That’s going to be tougher than it sounds because writer Tony Fleecs and artist Trish Forstner set out the rules of how their dogs act very early on.  It’s not that they all act like small, energetic humans.  It’s that they act like small, energetic humans with retrograde amnesia.  This lack of short-term-memory on the part of these dogs actually has them feeling genuinely animal-like in their actions and thought processes.  It leads to laughs in some scenes, and a genuinely uneasy feeling of suspense in others.

That suspense comes from the clash of tones in the narrative and the art.  While this is very much a suspense story, Forstner’s art has this looking like a Don Bluth production.  It all looks very family friendly, until it’s decidedly not.  That gives the story some needed edge as things start going from bad to worse for the dogs at the center of the story.  It’s because of this clash that “Stray Dogs” works as well as it does as it provides a new twist on a familiar kind of story.  I am a little concerned with how the creators will be expanding on this story in a follow-up anthology after things were definitively wrapped up here, but I can’t deny that I’d like to see what Fleecs and Forstner do with the style they’ve developed here.