Feral #17 // Review
It’s a dark time in the suburbs. Gigi is taking her kittens to the cubbies. Elsie would rather they just leave the Pet City megastore altogether. It IS, after all, being attacked by a marauding pack of wild house cats. There’s a cat being torn to pieces not far from the entrance. The blood is everywhere. Some have been able to find higher ground. There isn’t much time to make a proper decision in Feral #17. Writer Tony Fleecs continues his post-apocalyptic pet survival tale with artists Trish Forstner and Tone Rodriguez. Color comes to the page courtesy of Brad Simpson.
Somewhere in the midst of everything, the cats who had placed themselves in charge of Pet City have made their decision: Gigi, Elsie and the rest are outsiders who are not at all welcome. A bit of a strange moment at which to make a decision like that as it is the case that the whole place is being overrun by scarred, red-eyed monster cats that are making a mess of everything. Lives hang in the balance and the chaos hangs heavily in the air. Gigi and company are going to have a hell of a time...particularly as they don’t have the higher ground...
Fleecs works with a surprisingly dizzying array of different elements that all play into the same story of survival. There are the feral cats from outside. They are the native cats of Pet City. And then there's a central ensemble that's been through way too much over the course of the past 16 issues. Everything seems to be coaling a very brutal sort of a drama of it still manages to be totally overwhelming even though it's just a bunch of cats. There is a real sense of a media that helps a danger that Fleecs manages to maintain from cover to cover.
The blood is getting all over everything.Simpson’s colors do a pretty good job of making it look, cruising. Although this bladder effects don't necessarily: less in a way that respects the three dimensionality of everything. There are some really dramatic angles that are being attempted by.Forstner and Rodriguez that to a brilliant job of bringing it across some of the intensity of everything. The action hits the page with the savage ferocity. The intensity of the drama is hitting a peak at this point so there isn't a whole lot of room for nuance. It's not really missed in an issue like this which is really a pretty high climax to the action and the whole saga of Pet City.
It seems like Fleecs and company are moving towards a sense of resolution about things. It will be interesting to see where things go from here. After all, the pet food superstore had clearly been a problem from the beginning. And there's no way that they're going to be able to survive there. But where did they go from here? And where is Fleecs I'm going to be able to take it that will top what’s happened so far?
