Here's a graphic novel I picked up at a thrift store recently, rather surprised at the name on the front. Margaret Atwood is a highly renowned author, in fiction both general and speculative. It isn't necessarily surprising to find her name on a graphic novel but one called 'Angel Catbird'? I needed to investigate. Fortunately, she expected that people would need to investigate so put an introduction together to explain her background with both comic books and cats. It's a good thing she did because it brings a particular perspective to this publication, without which it has a very different impact.

That's because we can't just read it from the angle of story. The story, Atwood's contribution to this volume, is goofy at best and outrageously juvenile at worst. It's blissfully simple, along the caricaturish good against evil lines of comic books you might expect a six-year-old to read. Sure, it's a superhero story, but the characters are anthropormophised into predictable animals and they mostly get precious little setup and even less motivation. We're clearly supposed to take it as read that cats are good and rats are bad and half-cats and half-rats are that squared. Maybe having a cat in every panel on the first page is telegraphing.

The hero of the story is Strig Feleedus—what a name!—who's just been headhunted for Muroid Inc. to handle a top secret project. How do we know? That's his cat Ding on the first page and he tells him. Okay, I'm okay with the realism so far. I've always talked to my cats too, albeit maybe not a heck of a lot about what I do for a living. Anyway, Muroid Inc. is run by an overtly mad scientist, Dr. A. Muroid—"hemorrhoid", geddit?—who walks around with a rat on his lab coat shoulder, a rat with a videocamera strapped to its head.

As far as we can tell, there are only two employees at Muroid Inc. otherwise: Ray, who works in Sales, and Kate, who works in Marketing. How do we know? They walk up to Strig's desk and tell him. Given that we never see anybody else, maybe they are Sales and Marketing. Or maybe the rest of the company is shy. Anyway, the secret project is gene therapy using super-splicer serum, which seems to be missing some code. We soon learn that Strig's predecessor, who never gains a name, didn't steal that code; he merely kept it safe from hackers. And then he was murdered by automobile. Someone ran over him and it wasn't an accident.

It doesn't take much guesswork to figure out whodunit, partly because Dr. Muroid turned to his rats the moment Strig left his office and told them how much he wants to use the super-splicer serum on them to turn them into rat-women for his harem and partly because he's literally the only overtly villainous character in the book. Then again, if we discount Ding the cat, he's one of only four characters. Atwood clearly wasn't interested in building a backdrop. You'll notice that Muroid actually looks like a rat, too, just in case you're feeling extra-dense this morning.

After a few days, Strig's reverse engineered the formula and says so to Muroid when he calls for an update, which prompts similar action. Suddenly, Ding chases a remote controlled rat across the street, only to be hit by a car. Strig chases after him and gets there just before a swooping owl, to be promptly hit by another car, one driven by—dan dan dah!—Dr. A. Muroid of Muroid Inc. Who'da thunk it? Anyway, Muroid leaves the scene of the crime immediately, thinking Strig dead, so doesn't notice his body, covered in the serum he's just finalised, transform into what we can only describe as part man, part cat and part owl. Well, Cate soon describes him as Angel Catbird, hence the title, so we'll go with that.

If you haven't guessed by now, this world—or at least all of it that we notice—is made up of half-cats and half-rats, who are exactly what they sound like. The half-cats are good guys, led by Cate Leone, while the half-rats are bad guys, led by Dr. Muroid. The half-cats hang out at a club called Catastrophe, while the half-rats hang out in Muroid's office. The half-cats just want to live their lives in peace, man, while the half-rats, we assume given that they do his every bidding, want to please their master by taking over the world. Muhahahahaha!

And that's as deep as this gets. Well, story-wise, that is. There are details here to counter such a cartoonishly simple way to look at the world, but I'll get to them soon enough. Atwood obviously didn't care about such typical concerns for writers as characterisation or motivation, let alone a semblance of worldbuilding. If you read this for the story and you're older than six-years-old, it's going to seem cheesy, clichéd and, well, crap, not only to keep things alliterative. Fortunately, she gave us that introduction to explain why.

For one thing, she has a long history with comic books, going back to her childhood. She was born in November 1939, only two months after Germany invaded Poland, so all she knew for the first few years of her life was war. When it ended and she turned six, colour comic books were about to enter their heyday and she read some of them, but she read many of the same characters in the comic strips in weekend newspapers as well and that's what this feels like.

Sure, this is sequential art that's presented in the form of a hardback graphic novel, it feels like it's really a collection of comic strips, published maybe three panels at a time, and that required a certain economy of storytelling that didn't allow for real nuance. There simply wasn't room in three panels for characterisation, motivation or worldbuilding. Maybe that would show up over years, but mostly it wouldn't. It was always about the moment and there was only enough time to show us the crucial information we needed to understand those three panels.

For another, the point here isn't really to tell a story. The story is here only to help us grasp the key messages Atwood wants to convey, which are outlined in footnotes at the bottom of a host of pages, provided by Nature Canada. As the nature of her title character suggests, she's a cat person and a bird person who cares deeply about cats and birds and wants us to know particular things about both so that we can be better cat people and bird people ourselves.

For instance, cats who are allowed outdoors die much more often than we might think, whether hit by cars (insert statistic), killed and eaten by predators (insert statistic) or infected by some  disease that wouldn't otherwise reach past our doors (insert statistic). What's more, cats that do go outdoors hunt, because that's their nature, and they hunt birds, which adversely affects our ecosystems. As she points out, it's in the nature of dogs to hunt cats, but we don't let them do that. We shouldn't let cats hunt birds either. We should keep them indoors and feed them. A good replacement for hunting is play (insert informational observation). And so on.

And it's here that Atwood actually starts thinking about things and focusing on detail. It merely isn't story detail, because that continues onwards in overly-simplistic cartoon fashion. Instead, she thinks about how a part-human/part-cat might act, one neat touch being that some of them lean towards human and some towards cat. Therefore, at the end of a night at Catastrophe, the half-cats don't all turn back into human form; some turn back into cat form instead. To take that a set further, she thinks about how a part-human/part-cat/part-owl might act, because the latter two aspects contradict. It's what prompts Strig to rescue a bird from some alley cats and return it to its nest, even though the cat in him wants to eat it raw.

That's as far as that goes, because she isn't a rat person so couldn't care less how a part-human/part-rat might act. If she goes any further than cats and birds, it's Count Catula—I kid you not—who's part human, part cat and part bat. Why Angel Catbird's flying antics are so revolutionary to the half-cats, I have no idea, given that Count Catula can change into a bat any time he likes and flitter away into the night. But, like I said, Atwood wasn't digging that deep here. This is a public service announcement more than a comic book, merely framed like a comic book to reach a particular audience that's young enough for her to plant seeds.

And that's fine. I enjoyed this, because it's clean and quick and nostalgic, and because the art is able to carry the story without ever getting too complex. Strig is suitably heroic and his wings are majestically drawn by Johnnie Christmas; Cate is suitably cute as a human being and cuter as a half-cat with a big fluffy tail; and Dr. Muroid is suitably megalomaniacal, not needing much of a transformation from human to half-rat. Christmas knows just how simplistic/ludicrous this story is and brings it to life with an appropriate sense of childish nostalgia.

I should add that, while this is presented as simply 'Angel Catbird' on the cover, the "Vol. 1" on the spine appropriately hints at a continuation, which is good because the end is absolutely not an end. This is a third of a story and it's continued in 'To Castle Catula' and 'The Catbird Roars'. Both are available to borrow from the Internet Archive, so I may follow up with those, being an inveterate completist. I would like to see if this ever gains any substance beyond its message.~~ Hal C F Astell

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