Trish Forstner is a cartoonist from Baltimore, Maryland whose style draws directly from the classic animation she grew up watching — Don Bluth, Walt Disney, Warner Bros. — though she has worked hard to push that foundation into something distinctly her own. She has been drawing since she could hold a pencil, and she maintains a full-time day job while producing comics at night, working roughly eight in the evening to one in the morning on a consistent daily basis.
Her entry into professional comics came through IDW’s My Little Pony line, where she drew interior issues and provided variant covers across multiple series including My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, the 2022 My Little Pony relaunch, and associated specials. Covers on Dynamite’s Disney line followed — Darkwing Duck, Zootopia, Negaduck — franchises well-suited to her warm, expressive character work.
The project that broke her out was Stray Dogs, a horror comic co-created with writer Tony Fleecs and published by Image Comics in five issues in early 2021. The premise: Sophie, a recently rescued dog, slowly realizes that her charming new owner is the man who murdered her previous owner — and she can’t convince the other dogs in the house of the danger they’re all in. The series combined deceptively cheerful animal-cartoon artwork with genuine psychological horror, sold nearly one million copies across all formats, and earned Eisner Award and Ringo Award nominations in 2022. A two-issue companion anthology, Stray Dogs: Dog Days, followed later in 2021 and early 2022.
In 2024 Forstner and Fleecs returned with Feral, set in the same universe and published by Image Comics. Feral follows indoor cats — Elsie, Lord Fluffy Britches, and Patch — lost outside during a wildlife rabies outbreak, trying to find their way home without becoming part of the infected horde behind them. The series launched in March 2024. Brad Simpson and Tone Rodriguez round out the creative team on both Stray Dogs and Feral.
Forstner has noted in interviews that she does not do comics full-time by design — keeping a day job gives her the freedom to take only projects she can fully commit to, rather than accepting work out of financial necessity.
