Feral #19 / Review
Mr. Axe worked hard to prepare the meal. It’s wet food. It doesn’t look like it’s come out of a can, though. It looks...fresh. (And not in a good way.) The Pet City pets seem perfectly happy to eat it, though. This isn’t a huge endorsement of it. They WERE eating some pretty horrifying stuff prior to the arrival of the outsiders. Things are looking pretty bleak all over in Feral #19. Writer Tony Fleecs continues a long and winding tale of feline survival with the art team of Trish Forstner and Tone Rodriguez. Color comes to the page courtesy of Brad Simpson.
Lucky is tryin to keep everything together. He’s not doing a terribly good job, but at least there’s some sense of order. It’s not the kind of order there was under the leadership of Mother Helena, but back then they were literally eating kittens for survival, so things were pretty bad with her at the helm as well. There are those who came into the Pet City with Lucky. There are those of them who want to leave. Lucky doesn’t like it, but he’s not in a really strong position to make them stay. This is not to say that he’s not going to try...
The horror keeps getting more and more heavy as the series progresses. Fleecs doesn’t provide the reader a whole lot of hope in the course of the 19th issue of the series. Somewhere in the midst of the past few issues, Fleecs has really turned the series in a direction that has tilted it from darkness into something far more depressing that seems to suggest a particularly disheartening reflection of the current state of affairs in the larger world. It’s pretty bleak stuff. If things continue to spiral downwards for Fleecs, the series runs the risk of becoming ridiculously dark parody of itself.
Forstner and Rodriguez are working their way through the bleakness of the script with some very tight close-ups on the ensemble in Pet City. There’s a coolness about Simpson’s colors that grant a soothing aura around all of the darkness that seems to be dominating every other aspect of the issue. The cool blues and grays that dominate the visuals of much of Pet City occasionally give way to disturbing reds which revel the horror that is lurknig around the edges of the central drama.
The darkness of the story isn’t entirely unlike stories that have been told before. The things which must be sacrificed for survival are always around the edges of adventure fiction. The compromises that lead to corruption have been analyzed quite a lot over the years. The big advancement with Feral seems to be the fact that it’s focused on domestic cats. This would normally make the cat-based nature of the story feel a bit like a gimmick. Fleecs and company have done a good job of finding the right balance for a largely satisfying survival horror drama that just happens to be about cats.
