Review by Frank Plowright

There’s a strange mood in New York. Spider-Man’s villains are committing senseless crimes in savage fashion, the zoo animals are suicidal and even Mary-Jane Watson’s casually playing with a knife.

Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa hadn’t written a lot of Spider-Man when he conceived Feral, and it has the feeling of him trying to cram all the associated characters he loves into a single story. However, given a little more thought it’s apparent that everyone featured has an alias derived from a living creature, and that’s key. The story is set during the first Marvel universe civil war, meaning Spider-Man appears in the modified costume created for him by Tony Stark, and that he and his family are housed in Avengers Tower.

Angel Medina’s art is very much influenced by 1990s cartoon exaggeration. The characters are stretched, twisted, compacted and expanded into jagged variations of their familiar versions in a style conveying savagery and speed, but not greatly easy on the eye. Clayton Crain’s digital painting is very different. It probably looked state of the art in 2005, but it’s not dated well, with a Fantastic Four sequence especially limited.

Aguirre-Sacasa supplies a viable cause for everything that’s happening, linking it to another Spider-Man villain with an animal alias, but there’s really not a great deal of plot here. If you want to see the likes of the Lizard and Vermin having at each other raw in tooth and claw, then this is the place, but there are better and more sophisticated Spider-Man stories more concisely told and more appealingly drawn.

See recommendations for where Aguirre-Sacasa has hit the spot.