This short run comic tells the story of Oliver, a good dog sent to a kennel, and how he befriends fellow inmates and helps to plan an escape. And when I say inmates, that's what I mean - the kennel is depicted as a prison, with multiple types of animals incarcerated therein. But mostly it's cats and dogs and, not surprisingly, they don't get along.

When Ollie is stressed, his mind wanders back to earlier days when he was a pup, watching cartoon musicals with his human family. There are abrupt changes in the action and artwork as the colorful cartoon world overtakes him. And all the animals around him wonder just what's going on - because it's not all in his head.

The plot is both sad and hopeful. It's amazing how much of a commentary can be made on loss and mental illness through anthropomorphism, but it really works.

All kinds of crazy fun.

The comic opens up with the main protagonist, a French Bulldog named Oliver, getting checked into the Jackson State Kennel. When stressed, Oliver seems to have these mental episodes where he starts seeing everything as an old-timey dance and singalong.

This happens quite a lot throughout his struggle to deal with prison life and interact with the other anthropomorphic animals that are imprisoned there.

The comic really delves into the lives of unwanted pets and how they deal with their abuse inside a system that is set up to ultimately kill them instead of save them. That being said, I wasn't completely into the story. It was interesting enough and I like the theme, but I totally had a different outcome in mind when reading it. I had thought that Oliver would somehow end up as the slightly crazy, but charismatic leader of everyone in the kennel. Like fight his way to the top kind of thing. Instead the story takes a different route that isn't bad, but it isn't my style.

Daniel Bayliss' art is really good, though. I really enjoyed it and hopefully look forward to reading more comics with his work in it.

This was a fantastic idea for a comic book, treating the dog shelter like it's Shawshank. However, there's very little coherent narrative here. Our hero keeps seeing things as old-timey cartoons every time he gets stressed. It happens so frequently and for so many pages that it takes you out of the story. The guards are just smokey arms that show up randomly to take an animal away. They keep talking about escaping, but there's no narrative here. The animals are just running around until they eventually get out. It was a great premise that ,handled correctly, could have been fantastic.

DNF – too druggy, too musical, too weird. Some good images but too bonkers for me.

I loved Ferrier's D4ve and thus I was excited to get my hands on Kennel Block Blues. The comic is about animals getting sentenced to a kennel and mostly on Death Row too. Oliver and his new friends need to get out, since of course none of them wants to die. Oliver is the main character, a dog, who's stress makes him see everything in a musical form and lets face it, the whole thing is psychedelic and made on acid. The prison break is interesting as well as the power play between the animals. I wished we had learnt why the animals were in the kennel though, since we only know Oliver's story. This bugged me a lot, since it's hard to feel anything for the others and we do see death, so. What was the point of the musical thing and why did Cosmo haunt Oliver? So many things were left unsaid and it's a shame, since the plot and all are very interesting.

I liked the art a lot. The reality of the comic is dark, thick and husky as opposed to the musical scenes that were colorful and fluffy with lots of yellow. The contrast is perfect, really. The facial expressions were great and the anthropomorphic animals are ugly and awesome at the same time. Kennel Block Blues reminded me of Oz and Prison Break. It's not a humorous comic, but quite dark and depressing and the hippie colors are a weird add-on. I liked this, but more pages would've made it better, since this needed more room to develop.

'Kennel Block Blues' by Ryan Ferrier with art by Daniel Bayliss is the kind of graphic novel I had to think about before reviewing. It's that strange and unusual.

Oliver is a dog sent up to Jackson State Kennel. He sometimes bends reality, so when things around him get stressful, he sees everything as a cartoon musical. He's certain he's not supposed to be in this grim world where the cats seem to run the place and the guards are nothing but shadowy arms.

He makes some friends, like Cosmo, a bulldog, who tries to show Oliver around, or his hardened cellmate Sugar, a chihuahua, who just wants to escape. An escape attempt is made and that's when the reality of what happens to these unwanted animals is revealed.

There is so much being said in this comic. It deals with abused and unwanted animals, mental illness, incarceration, race relations and probably a bunch of other things I missed. Yet it does it in such an unusual way. It's still ultimately a depressing comic, but it's just so darn strange that I couldn't help but really like it. The art by Daniel Bayliss was good. Grim when it needed to be and overly colorful and sappy when Oliver goes around the bend. I'm really glad I had the chance to read this graphic novel.

I received a review copy of this graphic novel from Boom! Studios and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Thank you for allowing me to review this graphic novel.

A hard-bitten prison drama with anthropomorphic animals, because why not? But even to characterise this as Oz meets The Unfunnies (the Mark Millar comic that isn't soon to be a major motion picture, ever) doesn't quite capture the strangeness. Everything we see or hear about life before prison suggests the animals were formerly just animals in a human-run world like this one; the prison guards are disembodied arms of darkness; and the lead is not right in the head, so keeps overlaying his grim surroundings with something closer to a saccharine Disney musical, until even his fantasy world curdles. On one level, none of this makes a lick of sense, yet somehow it has an intuitive, emotional coherence that holds everything together. I don't know why this comic exists, but I'm glad it does.