Feral #16
☆ Be the first to review + Add to your collection — Join freeFeral #16 marks the formal opening of the series' third story arc — what the creative team calls the 'Battle for Pet City' — shifting the book's setting and stakes from the open wilderness of the earlier arcs into the morally claustrophobic world of an abandoned pet-supply superstore ruled by its own lawless society of cats. The issue crystalizes the central dramatic engine of the arc: the fractured relationship between protagonist Elsie and Gigi, whose personal rivalry now threatens the life of Lord Fluffy Britches, placed on death row by Pet City's kangaroo court. As a new-arc debut designed by Fleecs and Forstner to function simultaneously as a jumping-on point for fresh readers and a payoff for long-running character arcs, it represents the series maturing from a survival-horror road story into something closer to a political thriller — with rabid animals still massing at the door. The broader series of which this issue is a cornerstone earned an American Library Association Outstanding Comics Award for Young Adults Series Honor Book citation in 2025, underscoring how Feral's Don Bluth-inflected visuals wrapped around genuinely brutal horror content has resonated across readership demographics.
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We Buy Collections ▸History
Feral is the follow-up ongoing series by Tony Fleecs (writer) and Trish Forstner (artist/co-creator), who first collaborated on the 2021 Image Comics horror miniseries Stray Dogs — a five-issue run told from dogs' perspectives that approached the serial-killer genre through the lens of classic Disney animation. When developing Feral, Fleecs has stated the creative directive was deliberately to invert the formula: where Stray Dogs placed animals in a confined domestic space with an internal human threat, Feral would place cats in wide-open, threatening natural and semi-urban environments facing an external contagion — a rabies outbreak that zombifies wildlife. Feral #1 launched in March 2024 with art by Forstner and additional interior art by Tone Rodriguez, with coloring by Brad Simpson, the same core team carried through to issue #16, which arrived September 10, 2025, kicking off the arc collected in Feral Vol. 3 (released August 6, 2025, suggesting the trade preceded the single issues of the following arc in the series' rolling publication schedule). The series exists in the same shared fictional universe as Stray Dogs, and has been translated into French.
Trivia · 7 facts
- The issue opens the series' third story arc (later collected in Feral Vol. 4, released March 4, 2026), centered on the 'Battle for Pet City' — an abandoned pet-supply superstore that has become a dangerous autonomous cat society.
- Written by Tony Fleecs, with interior art by Trish Forstner and Tone Rodriguez, and covers by Fleecs and Forstner; Brad Simpson serves as colorist throughout the series.
- The issue's central conflict: Lord Fluffy Britches has been found guilty of unspecified crimes against Pet City and sentenced to death, while the only cats who might save him — Elsie and Gigi — are locked in their own violent confrontation, with the story promising that not all characters survive.
- The Elsie/Gigi rivalry driving this arc has roots in earlier issues: Gigi was introduced in issue #3 and their animosity escalated through the second arc, complicated by a shared romantic rivalry over a cat named Lucky.
- Three cover editions were solicited for issue #16: Cover A and Cover B (both by Fleecs and Forstner, with Cover B presented as a movie-poster homage variant) and a 1:10 incentive virgin variant (Cover C).
- The broader Feral series exists in the same shared fictional universe as Stray Dogs, the Fleecs/Forstner 2021 miniseries that Paramount Animation optioned for an animated film adaptation.
- Feral Vol. 1 (collecting issues #1–5) was recognized as an American Library Association Outstanding Comics Award for Young Adults Series Honor Book in 2025, and the series has been translated into French.
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