What the cat dragged in
Not to sound catty, but this simplistic graphic novel by an acclaimed author is for the birds.
IT is rare indeed for a grizzled comics reviewer to come across a book that defies description. Rarer still, for him to even be unsure about how exactly to feel about it.
But Angel Catbird, by the much-honoured author Margaret Atwood ( The Handmaid’s Tale, Blind Assassin and many other acclaimed works), is exactly that. Though not for very good reasons.
In her introduction to this graphic novel – the first of a two-part tale – the 77-year-old Atwood says she was a big comics fan in her childhood, and loved the pulp adventures of Batman, Wonder Woman et al. The fascination continued over the decades, encompassing acclaimed graphic fiction like Maus and Persepolis, and – thanks to her pet cats and her bird conservation efforts – eventually led to the idea of Angel Catbird.
Part human, part cat, part bird, this unusual hero has a somewhat retro (read: don’t think too hard about it) origin, involving an accident, a secret formula, and some other odd coincidences.
The story is set in a world where “half ” beings – cat people, rat people and bird people – walk around in human form (mostly), shapeshift to their normal selves when they want, but cavort around in between the two forms.
The hero, Strig Feleedus (obviously after “Felidae”, the scientific classification for the cat family), is a researcher working on a “super-splicer formula” – I figure that has some bearing on gene splicing, or maybe it’s just the splicing together of odds and ends from various superhero origins.
Anyway: his boss, Dr Muroid (yep, as in “Muroidae”, for the rat family), wants to transform normal rats into people, for some rather depraved and disturbing reasons. Then again, he is a half-rat after all.
After the abovementioned accident, Strig becomes a curious hybrid of man, bird and cat – hence the combo name, of course. He is quickly inducted into the world of half-cats and half-birds, and if this story is sounding rather flighty to you so far, you’re not alone.
I had a lot of trouble wrapping my head around the storytelling approach here, mainly because Angel Catbird does not so much resemble a homage to the pulps as it does a relic. It seems to be catering to an audience that’s still willing to swallow any old yarn fed to it, while seemingly unaware that the whole world has moved on from the 1940s.
So in this time-lost tale, we soon learn that Muroid has big plans to upset the balance of power in the half-realms, to tip it in the rats’ favour, of course. And opposing him are not just Strig, but Cate Leone (another feline-inspired name) and her fellow half-cats (including the vampire, Count Catula. Stop Writer: Artist: sniggering!) and even a half-bird or two.
All well and good in a children’s story, maybe, but Angel Catbird is clearly aimed at older audiences. Which makes it kind of presumptious of the writer, for venturing into a field as rich and diverse as this, and presenting something so, well ... out of touch.
Characterisation is minimal, though individual “character moments” abound, even among the supporting cast of incidental characters, and there’s some humour to be had from those at least.
Johnnie Christmas’ art, nicely complemented by Tamra Bonvillain’s well-chosen colour palette, serves up some suitably expressive characters while his panels are nicely framed and there’s a smooth continuity to their flow.
If anything, the art far outpaces the writing and helps the reader over the rough spots in the script, especially the rather direct (and disturbing) thought bubbles which – oh, I get it. They’re supposed to be “representative” of how cats, or half-cats in this case, think, to put us in the feline frame of mind and get us to empathise a little more with cats. Uh-huh, right.
Every few pages, we get some scattered factoids about cat care and bird statistics (from a Canadian perspective, catsandbirds. ca), and public service messages like how letting cats roam free to stalk birds actually harms both species.
Character sketches and Angel Catbird interpretations by other artists (including David Mack) round out the book, taking up almost a fifth of its pages. Still, a graphic novel needs a lot more than nice art and supplementary material to work. Most of all, it needs to build a world that’s fascinating enough – no matter how far-fetched the premise – to make us want to stick around. I couldn’t find anything like this in Angel Catbird, but then I’m old-fashioned like that.
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