Atwood brings back ‘Angel Catbird’
Literary icon has long fascination with comics
From her perch in Toronto, author Margaret Atwood has been watching the American political landscape with a cat’s watchful eye. Along with George Orwell’s “1984,” Atwood’s 1985 dystopian novel, “The Handmaid’s Tale,” recently returned to the Amazon bestseller lists. The Hulu TV version of the novel, premiering April 26, has no doubt spurred interest, but it’s also a response to Donald Trump’s America, where Gilead, Atwood’s imagined theocracy in which women are forced into bearing children, seems more possible than ever.
We’re talking today about her graphic novel series, “Angel Catbird,” which debuted in 2016 to sparkling acclaim. “Volume 2” arrived on Valentine’s Day, and “Volume 3” comes out in July. Since she’s cranking out sequels, it’s too tempting to ask: Is she thinking of a follow-up to “The Handmaid’s Tale”?
“To tell you the truth, yes. But I don’t know whether that will happen or not. I’ve certainly been thinking about it,” she says, declining to reveal more. The political climate, Atwood wryly notes, “changes day by day — you never know what wondrous surprise will be sprung on you.”
For today though, she has set herself a far more enjoyable task: To figure out what kind of sound Angel Catbird, the hybrid cat-owlhuman at the center of her graphic novels, would make for an upcoming audiobook that will be performed like a ’40s radio play. “Would he make a whoo-meow or a meow-whoo?” she asks, trying out each with her soft voice before breaking into raspy laughter.
For all her reputation as a serious author of dystopian drama, Atwood is quick to laugh. She also occasionally imitates a know-it-all elderly type in a high voice so jarring that I thought another person had broken into our phone line. The voice — “excuse me, dear, I’m old enough to remember all this” — mostly comes out when we’re talking about political history. At 77, Atwood has witnessed many iterations, and they have always banged around in her imagination. When she was a little girl, Atwood drew cat-people holding balloons, which she’d only seen in books because balloons weren’t available in Canada during World War II. Those same dream animals and their forbidden worlds show up in “Angel Catbird.”
Illustrated by artist Johnnie Christmas and colorist Tamra Bonvillain, “Angel Catbird” is a fantasia firmly rooted in Atwood’s playful side, though not without its bleak undertones. “Volume 2” follows the same cast of shapeshifting characters, including Strig Feleedus, a genetic engineer hybridized with his pet cat and a preying owl in a chemical spillcum-car accident. He’s battling his villainous lab boss, a rat-human hell-bent on wiping out all other species, especially the cathumans whom Angel Catbird aligns with, mostly to spend time with sexy fellow scientist Cate Leone.
Not all of Cate’s friends welcome him with open paws — put off by his owlish tendencies, some call him a freak. In our era of transphobia and white nationalism, “Angel Catbird” is a clever metaphor for people’s discomfort with those who don’t fit into the accepted binaries. You haven’t seen identity struggles until you’ve seen a man with talons, cat eyes and a set of humongous wings convince himself not to eat a fellow bird for supper.
Atwood didn’t purposely write characters who could be read as transgender or biracial, but she sees them as being part of a long legacy of transformation. “People in comics have always been pretty malleable,” she says. “We’re in the land of saints and gods here, and the saints and gods, particularly the gods, have always been notorious shapeshifters.” She brings up Captain Marvel, who transforms from little boy Billy Batson with the call of Shazam, derived from the mythical figures Solomon, Hercules, Atlas, Zeus, Achilles and Mercury.
Comics may seem like a 20th century invention, but “stories beget other stories,” says Atwood. “Mine is an homage to the comics of the late ’40s — but where did that style come from itself? The roots of these stories go very deep.”
Though Atwood acknowledges that recent graphic novels like “Maus” and “Persepolis” made it “safe” for novelists to “act out their sacred fantasies,” Atwood’s interest in comics isn’t a passing fancy. She’s as fluent in Wonder Woman’s original mission (fighting Nazis) and the Comics Code Authority, a self-regulating body established by the comic book publishers in 1954, as any fairy tale from Brothers Grimm or Hans Christian Andersen, to name two wells she’s drawn from in her fiction.
She doesn’t, however, let the weight of history keep her away from a tasty cat or rat pun, of which there are many in “Angel Catbird.” The rat-army is called the Murines (rats are part of the superfamily Muroidea), there’s a Queen Neferkitti, and Atwood’s particularly proud of the vampiric Count Catula, an undead cat with bat and human attributes and several cat-wives.