Feral #25 // Review
The cats have met the dogs. (It happened in the middle of the 24th issue.) There’s a standoff. They’re both in what appears to be a very hostile place and they don’t know what to do and now they’re both very, very stressed out with each other in Feral #25. Writer Tony Fleecs and the art team of Trish Forstner and Tone Rodriguez move through a special “chonky-sizes” anniversary issue with colorist Brad Simpson. The crossover had been cleverly developed over the course of the past few issues. The impressive 25th issue really lives-up to the build-up.
Chloe asks Elsie what they want. She doesn’t know, though. Elsie doesn’t speak dog. If the dogs don’t speak cat, there’s a fundamental lack of communication between the cats of Feral and the Stray Dogs. It’s going to be very, very difficult to get the two tow work together long enough to escape the facility...that any human reader is going to know that they really shouldn’t try to be escaping in the first place. Thankfully, Moosh is friends with the cats. He should be able to get them to work together. The only problem is that as the issue opens, he’s strapped to a table...
Fleecs sets-up a conflict with three different groups of characters: the cats, the dogs and the people who are trying to find a cure for an epidemic. It’s a fun dynamic between the three groups that feels oddly as though it’s more or less evenly-matched. The fact that the dogs don’t understand the cats and neither of them understand the humans means that they don’t know that the humans really ARE trying to help them. It makes for a very sharply-paced and cleverly- executed suspense thriller.
Once again, Forstner and Rodriguez do a really good job of maintaining the suspense in action that shoots across the panel in various directions. All of the running around might seem A BIT repetitious in places, but the overall momentum of the book hosts more than enough variation to keep it all interesting when moving from panel to panel and page to page. Also: there’s a big fire that serves as a major turning point in the series. Simpson’s work on the fire is kind of dazzling...from the colors swirling around inside it to the nuanced lighting that it provides for the setting.
It’s pretty ominous that the 25th issue would end with a simple definition of zoontotic spillover. This suggests that things could get considerably more ugly after the 25th issue as humans start getting infected with the disease. Fleecs and company have been working with a relatively small canvas in Stray Dogs and Feral. A subsequent series involving rabid humans could be an interesting development, though it might be devoid of the pleasantly animalistic charm of Stray Dogs and Feral. Could be interesting to see Fleecs and company reach that third layer of the narrative, though. The 25th issue proves that more focus on humans doesn’t hurt the overall dynamic of the series at all.
