The latest comic written by Rebecca Immelmann of Concession fame, The Black Dogs
is a Cosmic Horror Furry comic that takes place in an alternate version of Pharonic Egypt with mid-21st century technology.
Contains examples of:
- Chekhov's Gun: Julia's camera phone, or rather its automatic upload to her home computer.
- Combat Tentacles: The Black Idol has a blob-like form that sprouts tentacles with fangs.
- Eldritch Abomination: The Black Idol, which forms tentacles, eyes, or teeth seemingly at will. He could be Nyarlathotep.
- Expy: Subverted, Julia and Melissa resemble the female alter-egos of Joel and Matt from Concession superficially. But their personalities have little resemblance.
- First Contact: With the Martians in 2006.
- Held Back in School: Julia was in high school for five years, though the cast page suggests it was solely due to her problems with authority.
- Humanoid Abomination: Mal-Fa'asha the vermin lord, when he's not appearing as a swarm of moths. And [[spoiler: that black cat in the black suit and hat who was asking about Rhoda's art.
- Interspecies Romance: Melissa’s parents were an African sand cat and an Indian tiger. As of Issue 15 she’s dating Julia, a wolf.
- Laser-Guided Amnesia: Julia is given drugged coffee to make her forget the events of that night in Issue 2. But a copy of the video she took survived, and helps her recover her memories.
- Lovecraft Lite: They seem to have beaten the creatures, at least temporarily, with only a couple faceless guards lost.
- The Men in Black: There is a government agency dedicated to covering up supernatural events, and who erase Julia and Mel's memories at the end of issue 2. They seem to have grown out of the original Order of the Black Dog, and Julia and Mel's reformed order is technically part of the agency but with limited clearance.
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Moment of Awesome:Julia wills herself to reform from the cells of an eldritch beast by ripping up its mindscape until it explodes. - Orifice Invasion: The artifact entities take over hosts by shoving themselves in the victim's mouth.
- Puppeteer Parasite: The idols jump into people and control them, with long enough exposure they begin assimilating and converting the host's flesh into more of itself. However, it's eventually revealed that it's more complicated than it seems: they're not being transformed, their black idol forms are their natural forms, while their default forms are sustained by Earth's artificial background radiation.
- Recruiting the Criminal: The eponymous Black Dog is a serial-killing dog spirit whose murder of two detectives influenced the other two to form the Order of the Black Dog to fight against supernatural threats. Ironically, another supernatural entity convinces her to start hunting EldritchAbominations for better sport, and then joins the order. So now the criminal whose killing spree started the Black Dog organization is working under them.note
- Sealed Evil in a Can: The creature of the first two issues was dormant until Julia moved a stone knife thing embedded in one piece. Putting it back in ossified the thing. Now it's stored in an old bomb shelter.
- Soul Eating:
- In Issue 3 it was suggested that the gods, or at least the primary god of the mainstream Egyptian religion, eat the souls of their deceased worshipers. Since the Black Idol is a Physical God this means that the people it bodily assimilates have their souls absorbed as well, though Julia manages to retain her individuality with Rhoda's help and break herself and Sedjet free.
- In Issue 8 Rhoda appears to eat the ghosts haunting the manor.
- In Issue 27 the Smiling Cat reveals that he's the god of Cairo, and all the ancient cities that have predated it, and the souls of its residents are drawn into him like rivers into an ocean. And he has all their memories.
The Smiling Cat: All I do, and all I allow, is born from the swallowed experiences of a hundred billion souls. My expertise outweighs all the sand in all the world’s deserts. You and your race are but motes of dust flickering in the light, a momentary flash. I am like the sun Herself, vast and everlasting. I am Cairo. Its buildings are my limbs and its streets my veins. I was the walled City of Elders before Cairo rose, and before that, I was the towering city of Y’thek with its obsidian spires. I am Zalef-Labev, as I was Labev-Ra, as I was Nibabu, as I was countless other names from races that crawled upon this Earth before your kind was given its shape. All who die with my name on their lips are drawn to me like rivers into the ocean. I hold the memories of nations, of kings and peasants, of saints and murderers, of dullards and magi. Know your place and judge me not, for the soil is stained by your hands, not mine. - Title Drop: "...and you're going to help me restart The Order of The Black Dog."
- Tomato in the Mirror: The people of this alternate Earth are what happens when an advanced precursor race captures an eldritch abomination and uses its cells to create designer babies. They used a special background radiation field to keep the cells from reverting to their natural eldritch goop, and all the 'mutations' that have occurred in the series are actually metamorphoses back to their natural Black Idol species.
- 20 Minutes into the Future: There's lunar bases and cutting-edge smartphones are headsets with 128 GB of memory. This page indicates 2037.
- Was Once a Man: Inverted: the eldritch horrors are their true forms.
- Wham Episode: Compared to the other issues, The Gambit (Issue 15) and The Gulf of Sorrow (Issue 16) certainly qualify. An alien impersonating Kas takes control of the portal, and dials it to an abandoned moonbase. The resulting vacuum sucks in some of the facility staff, including Julia, Mel, and a few other named supporting characters, stranding them there. If that weren't enough, things start to get messy when the Black Idol shows up. It quickly shows the full extent of its potential as Nighmare Fuel and Body Horror, easily picking off most of the cast. While the ending of issue 16 ends on a silver lining with the survivors coming home in time, Julia isn't so lucky, seemingly ending up getting stranded on the moon with the abomination.
- And then Issue 17, The Cosmonaut, Julia is stranded on a deserted alien planet, trying to reactivate the portal and get home. After drinking the water she starts to feel ill and is coughing blood by the time she makes progress on the portal. The last page shows that she made it home, but is infested, possibly irreversibly, by the Black Idol.
- Issue 19, Coalescence, finally reveals why the Black Idol is so attracted to Earth and why the characters fluctuate between clean and infected: Earthlings are the same species as the Black Idol. An artificial background radiation field, created by the precursors, suppresses the metaphysical functions of their cells and keeps them from mutating into eldritch goop, but when this field is inhibited or countered, they metamorphose into what they would have been if they were born without the radiation. The Black Idol is one of the few beings immune to the field and is trying to 'liberate' the rest of the world from their artificial anthropomorphic forms.
- The Unintelligible: "Alexander Avery", the bluejay MIB, speaks in a series of musical tones, his partner Dominic (the raccoon) understands him though.note
