Feral #4
☆ Be the first to review + Add to your collection — Join freeFeral #4 marks the harrowing emotional pivot of the series' opening arc: the three indoor cats finally reach home only to find it evacuated, collapsing the 'get home safe' drive that powered the first three issues and forcing a harder, more open-ended survival story. Most significantly, it is the issue in which Patch fully succumbs to his infection and turns feral, transforming a sympathetic viewpoint character into a threat — a gut-punch that critics singled out as the moment the series graduated from charming animal-horror concept to genuinely affecting character drama. The issue also deepens Elsie's backstory, revealing through flashback that she was once resentful of Lord's arrival in the household, adding moral complexity to the protagonist at a point when readers had already grown attached. As part of the first collected arc (issues #1–5), #4 is structurally the 'dark night of the soul' chapter that drives re-reads and made the eventual trade paperback — itself an ALA Outstanding Comics Award for Young Adults Series Honor Book (2025) — feel essential.
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We Buy Collections ▸History
Feral is a creator-owned ongoing series by writer Tony Fleecs and artist Trish Forstner, with inks by Tone Rodriguez and colors by Brad Simpson — the same core team behind their earlier Image Comics hit Stray Dogs (2021). Forstner brings a deliberate Don Bluth–influenced animation aesthetic to the book, pairing round, expressive character designs against increasingly grim survival-horror scenarios; Fleecs, a TV writer who also worked on Netflix's My Little Pony: Make Your Mark, structured Feral as a xenofiction series told strictly from a feline point of view. Issue #4 arrived on June 19, 2024, the fourth consecutive monthly installment since the March 27, 2024 series premiere, and carried multiple cover variants including a 1:10 Virgin Variant by Trish Forstner and a 1:25 variant by Amy Mebberson alongside the standard A and B covers by Forstner and Fleecs. The series has since been translated into French and continues as an ongoing.
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- Written by Tony Fleecs; art by Trish Forstner (pencils/inks) and Tone Rodriguez (inks); colors by Brad Simpson — the same team behind Stray Dogs (Image, 2021).
- Published June 19, 2024 by Image Comics; rated T+; 28 pages, full color.
- Issue #4 is the story climax of Arc 1: the cats return to their home address only to find it evacuated, permanently closing off the 'go home' escape route as a narrative solution.
- Patch's full descent into rabid infection ('going feral') is confirmed in this issue — his loss as a lucid character is the emotional turning point of the opening arc.
- Elsie's backstory is expanded via flashback, revealing her initial resentment of Lord Fluffy Britches when he joined the household as a kitten, adding retroactive moral nuance to her protective behavior.
- The issue ends on an in-story social media post referencing 'Creek County,' one of the few geographic clues to the series' setting (fan analysis suggests Oklahoma, though this remains ambiguous).
- Cover variants for #4 included a Cover A and Cover B by Forstner & Fleecs, a 1:10 Virgin Variant by Trish Forstner, and a 1:25 variant by Amy Mebberson.
- Collected in Feral Vol. 1 Trade Paperback (issues #1–5), released September 4, 2024; the series as a whole received an American Library Association Outstanding Comics Award for Young Adults Series Honor Book citation in 2025.
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