The bestselling Stray Dogs creative team—Tony Fleecs and Trish Forstner—will reunite for the upcoming Feral, first announced in an exclusive scoop last week at The Hollywood Reporter. This all-new, ongoing series will launch in March 2024 from Image Comics and is perhaps best described as The Walking Dead meets The AristoCats.
Fleecs and Forstner are the creative duo behind the bestselling, breakout phenomenon Stray Dogs—a series which has sold nearly 1 million copies across all formats and first turned heads with its descriptor “Lady and the Tramp meets The Silence of the Lambs.”
Now Fleecs and Forstner are back with a zombie-outbreak horror story for the cat-lovers.
In Feral, readers are introduced to Elsie, Lord Fluffy Britches, and Patch, three indoor cats lost in the not-so-great outdoors during a nightmarish rabies outbreak. Without their humans to protect them, the cats rush to find their way home before they’re eaten by the forest full of rabid beasts on their tails. Don’t get bit. Don’t get scratched. Don’t become…FERAL.
“We didn’t want to repeat ourselves with this follow up book so it really was at first, thinking about: Okay, Stray Dogs is dogs trapped in a house. So, let’s have this one be about what’s really frightening in wide open spaces. The antagonist in Stray Dogs is someone who’s evil from the inside out. So, let’s have these cats face something that’s like an infection. An external threat. The stray dogs were forgetful… So these cats remember EVERYTHING,” said Fleecs in The Hollywood Reporter’s coverage of the announcement. “These cats hold a grudge. That’s what we did differently. But the thing we did the same way was, we tried to build the story on characters, and how they fit together and how they clash and then just… What’s the worst possible situation we can put them in?”
Forstner added: “We are really trying to give the readers a story to remember. We’re pushing the boundaries of what we already established in our little niche of storytelling. I could have never seen myself even reading a scary story like this early on in my comics journey, but now I can’t wait to see what happens next. Every page turn is a surprise.”
Feral #1 will be available at comic book shops on Wednesday, March 27.
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