Fauna

(Thick as Thieves, 2005)
™ and ©2005 Zack Gardner

Grab your suspension of disbelief and make tracks for Sage, the town where everybody’s human, but they’re required by law to wear animal regalia. It’s not much, just a set of ears, a tail or a shell, certainly nothing that’d make your life unbearable.

Why, then, do the police vigilantly enforce the law that citizens keep their props on at all times? Conformity is certainly one reason, obedience another, and an unwillingness to question the status quo probably tops that list of traits desired by the brutal peacekeepers in Sage. But when the props start to meld with the main characters, and they become half-animal for real, things are too freaky to bear. Befriended by an unwelcome stranger who threatens to break their willful ignorance, they look at their town in a brand new way.

Nothing too heady, but pretty engaging work from writer/artist Zack Gardner. It uses its space wisely, without falling prey to the alternative genre’s most-indulged sin of ambling. Gardner knows where his story is going and gets to it, neither too quickly nor to the exclusion of the supporting cast.

— Brendan McGinley

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Zack Gardner