Review by Frank Plowright

It’s not many people who survive the end of the world as we know it, but Franklin is among them. He’s knocked unconscious during an extensive global meteor shower and when he awakens he learns those meteors have transformed animals into humanoid forms. He can’t get any straight answers about the world, and his life becomes a series of ever more absurd encounters with animals attempting to behave like humans, but not quite able to pull it off.

There’s mileage in the idea, and Luke Milton hits the spot at times when it comes to animals following their natural inclinations rather than the human behaviour seemingly forced on them. The ways in which the assorted animals are obviously concealing matters is also funny, and Franklin gradually adapts to the new world via realising the knowledge he has retains a currency while the animals are still trying to put things together.

Milton’s appealing cartooning adds to the flavour, adeptly transferring characteristics of the animals or deliberately playing against type for shock value. With so much going for Animals Rule This Land, it falls down on Milton being unable to decide where his focus should be, and not being able to pace events efficiently. There’s almost no variation from six equally sized panels to a page, which can be a discipline, but here becomes an artificial limitation as whatever point the story reaches needs to be shoehorned into the grid whether or not events would better suit smaller or larger panels. It’s only in the final stretch that Milton abandons his grid more frequently and the pages improve for being able to accentuate the terrors.

Halfway through there’s a change of emphasis as Franklin moves beyond the town where only the single human is allowed to explore the wider world, and it turns out there’s a bigger plot than may have been assumed. The afterword reveals it was sparked by too long spent playing Animal Crossing during lockdown.

Animals Rule This Land has funny moments, and the cartooning’s good, but ramping up the energy and imagination could have improved it no end.