Feral #15 // Review
The strays have found their way to a pet food store. It’s a huge big box store. They’ve joined a whole bunch of other cats who inhabit the store. Everything should be fine, right? They can snuggle-into the store and eat perfectly well until help comes to find them. So everything should be fine, right? Everything should be more than okay in Feral #15. Really. Writer Tony Fleecs hasn’t ever steered the strays in a negative direction before, has he? And the art team of Trish Forstner and Tone Rodriguez are doing some very cute work as the cats explore a cozy, little space that’s colored by Brad Simpson. What could possibly go wrong?
Actually...Lord is getting hungry. Local pet shop leader Niko doesn’t exactly feel comfortable giving him any food just yet. It may be a big store, but there’s only so much food to go around and Niko wants to make sure that what they have lasts. At least...that’s the way that it would appear. It IS, however, a large store and the dry food should last for a long time even with a huge number of cats. So naturally, Lord is going to go in search of his own food. What he’s going to find is something horrifying.
Fleecs’ story has had enough twists to suggest that the strays weren’t going to find a nice, quaint home at the pet supply store. Every space that has seemed cozy and protected has turned out to be something awful. So there’s really no surprise that Pet City wasn’t going to be any kind of forever home for the strays. Still...there IS something kind of dark and foreboding about the whole thing that manages to feel more than a bit disturbing even though it’s not exactly a surprise.
Forstner and Rodriguez have found a suitably commercial look for the Pet City Supercenter that feels strikingly familiar. The remarkably clean aisles and the clean graphic appeal of the store logo give the setting the kind of realism that amplifies the intensity of the drama. Human-like cat drama plays out between nearly-arranged shelves of appealing-looking product. And then there’s the ominous red coming from the circle windows to the back room that suggests something awful. Simpson could have chosen a color cue that might have been a bit less obvious, but the alarming red of that back room contrasts beautifully against the sleepy, cool blue-dominated aisles of the Pet City sales floor.
The cat lady seemed nice until she turned out to be a kind of a monster. The pet supply store would have been a perfect place for cats looking to hide-out while everything blows-over outside. There’s no questioning that they’re going to have to leave after the events of the latest issue. The question is: where is Fleecs going to send the strays next? There’s plenty of potential for cat-based dramatic horror. The challenge is going to lie in finding new spaces and places for the cats to explore that don’t feel repetitious.
