Feral #8
☆ Be the first to review + Add to your collection — Join freeFeral #8 is a pivotal chapter in the second story arc of one of Image Comics' most distinctive ongoing horror series of 2024 — a book that carved out a genuinely new sub-genre by grafting post-apocalyptic survival horror onto a cast of anthropomorphized cats rendered in a Don Bluth–inflected animation style. The issue deepens the series' commitment to earned emotional complexity, placing protagonist Elsie inside the 'creepy old shack' location that had been ominously foreshadowed since the arc's opening, and delivering on the series' core tension between the hope of sanctuary and the reality of hidden danger. As a companion piece to Fleecs and Forstner's earlier breakout Stray Dogs, Feral #8 demonstrates the creative team's ability to sustain long-form xenofiction storytelling across an ongoing monthly format — something Stray Dogs, as a five-issue miniseries, never had to do. The series' Vol. 1 trade paperback had already earned an American Library Association Outstanding Comics Award for Young Adults Series Honor Book citation by 2025, cementing the franchise's cultural standing.
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Feral was announced in December 2023 and launched in March 2024 from Image Comics, created by Tony Fleecs (writer) and Trish Forstner (artist), the same team behind the bestselling Stray Dogs. Fleecs has described the series as a deliberate creative inversion of Stray Dogs: where that book confined dogs in a house and used an internal human villain, Feral throws cats into open, infected wilderness and pits them against an external, biological threat — a more powerful strain of rabies. Forstner, whose visual style draws heavily from classic 1980s–90s animation, brings a deliberately cute aesthetic that the horror content works directly against. Issue #8, falling in the heart of the second arc, was edited by Dennis Culver, with colors by Brad Simpson and lettering as part of the regular production crew.
Trivia · 8 facts
- Released November 27, 2024, by Image Comics; written by Tony Fleecs, with interior art by Trish Forstner and Tone Rodriguez, colors by Brad Simpson, and covers by Fleecs and Forstner.
- Issue #8 is the third chapter of the series' second story arc, set inside the 'creepy old shack' deep in the rabies-infested forest — a location first teased at the close of the first arc.
- The story pivots on Elsie's reunion with an old friend at the shack, with the central dramatic question being whether the cats living there are hiding something sinister from her.
- The A-cover features a calendar dated July 1993 visible in the artwork, sparking reader debate on TV Tropes and fan wikis about whether the series is a period piece or uses anachronistic props.
- Issue #8 ships with at least four cover editions: Cover A (Forstner & Fleecs), Cover B (Fleecs & Forstner Homage Variant, homaging the film Phenomenon), a 1:10 Virgin Variant (Fleecs), and a 1:25 Virgin Variant (Brianna Garcia).
- The series as a whole is explicitly designed as a companion piece to Fleecs and Forstner's Stray Dogs (Image, 2021), sharing the same fictional universe — a relationship that would be formally dramatized starting with Feral #22.
- Feral Vol. 1 (collecting issues #1–5) received an American Library Association Outstanding Comics Award for Young Adults Series Honor Book honor in 2025, reflecting the series' crossover appeal beyond the direct-market horror audience.
- The series carries a T+ (Teen Plus) rating from Image Comics and is part of an ongoing run that had reached at least 25 issues as of mid-2026, organized into multi-issue story arcs with collected trade paperback editions.
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