Feral #1

History

The series was announced in December 2023 and launched March 27, 2024, from the same core creative team behind Stray Dogs: writer Tony Fleecs, penciller/co-creator Trish Forstner, additional artist Tone Rodriguez, and colorist Brad Simpson, with Dennis Culver as editor. Fleecs has described the creative brief as a deliberate inversion of Stray Dogs' claustrophobic, single-location premise — instead of dogs trapped in a house, the team asked what was frightening about wide-open spaces, then built three distinct cat characters and dropped them into the worst imaginable version of that environment. Forstner, whose illustration background is rooted in classic 1980s–90s animation, brought the same deceptively cheerful visual register she developed on IDW's My Little Pony comics and on Stray Dogs, allowing the horror elements to land with maximum contrast against the cartoon-cute designs.

Trivia · 8 facts

• First appearances of Elsie, Lord Fluffy Britches, and Patch — the three protagonist indoor cats whose survival anchors the ongoing series.
• Published March 27, 2024, by Image Comics; 32 pages, rated T+; written by Tony Fleecs, art by Trish Forstner and Tone Rodriguez, colors by Brad Simpson, edited by Dennis Culver.
• Serves as a companion piece / stealth sequel to Fleecs and Forstner's Stray Dogs (2021), with both series confirmed to share the same fictional timeline when Stray Dogs characters make their first appearance in Feral with issue #21.
• The debut issue sold out at the distributor level, prompting a second printing on April 24, 2024 (featuring a Halloween movie poster homage cover by Tony Fleecs); a third printing followed with a Cat People movie poster homage cover.
• Issue #1 launched with approximately 26 variant covers, many of them horror film poster homages — a tradition carried over directly from Stray Dogs — including store-exclusive variants homaging It, The Shining, Night of the Living Dead, and others.
• The collected Volume 1 (issues #1–5, ISBN 9781534372962, released September 4, 2024) was honored as an American Library Association Outstanding Comics Award for Young Adults Series Honor Book (2025).
• The story premise — the inciting incident is an animal-control van crash that strands three indoor cats in a rabies-infected wilderness — functions as a zombie-outbreak narrative told entirely from the animal point of view, with the horror amplified because readers understand the danger the cats cannot fully comprehend.
• The series grew into an ongoing with at least 25 issues published through mid-2026, collected across five trade paperback volumes, and available digitally on Amazon Kindle, Apple Books, and Google Play.

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Variants (8)