MARGARET ATWOOD and JOHNNIE CHRISTMAS at Fan Expo Canada, Metro
Toronto Convention Centre (255 Front West), September 3 at 4 pm. $60 all-day pass. fanexpocanada.com. See listing.
He’s young, she’s not. She’s a cat lover, he’s a dog lover. He’s a modest, relatively unknown graphic novelist, she’s one of the world’s best-known writers and a Canadian icon.
The collaboration between Johnnie Christmas and Margaret Atwood is one of the least likely you could imagine. Yet they’ve produced a small marvel of a comic book project, the first installment of Angel Catbird ($14.45, Dark Horse), about a gene-splicing experiment gone wrong and the superhero who emerges from the accident to fight the evil half-rat Dr. Muroid.
It’s the first time Atwood’s been involved with a graphic novel, but she’s the one who dreamed it up, sending the idea to comic book historian Hope Nicholson, who connected her to Christmas and then to publisher Dark Horse Comics. In certain ways it’s vintage Atwood, full of clever wordplay (“catastrophe,” for instance, and “ratify”), all with an eco-positive edge.
But how does a self-described megalomaniac control freak, someone usually involved in the most solitary of creative processes – writing novels, poetry and more – adjust to having to lose some personal power over the creative process?
“You mean I didn’t have total control?” Atwood asks slyly while smiling at Christmas, who’s in his Vancouver apartment and with whom we’re Skyping in the Penguin/Random House offices.
“It’s like writing for films and television – only better, because in film and television you have producers with a lot of money who want to put their oar in. This is more like working with a director and going back and forth with ideas and exchanging pictures, which we could do thanks to the technology.”
Christmas, whose popular Sheltered series has movie producers sniffing around it, says he was never intimidated by the literary legend.
“I just didn’t know what to expect. And originally we communicated only through email, and email has no tone. I only knew her by her work, so in the end I was surprised by how funny she was.”
Atwood readily admits she’s always been an inveterate comic book reader. That may sound counter-intuitive, at first – brainy writer reading Superman? But she says comics were a fundamental part of the culture she grew up in. The dailies were rammed with comic strips (they were called the funnies then), and enjoying them wasn’t as nerdy a pastime as it became later.
Now comics, via graphic novels, have come back into the mainstream, and artists like Alison Bechdel in the U.S. and Seth here in Canada- are almost household names. Christmas agrees that a new wave is washing in, some of it not funny at all. Remember – Maus, the Pulitzer-winning serialized graphic novel by Art Spiegelman that pioneered the form in the 1980s, took as its subject the Holocaust.
Christmas reminds me that it’s only in North America that superheroes and sci-fi have dominated the comic book landscape. He says Superman spawned a raft of cookie-cutter character, the way westerns took over American cinema for a period of time. But that changed.
“After the 80s, there was a boom of black-and-white comics that were very serious, and it took some time for that wave to catch up with pop culture,” says the amiable Christmas. “New creators were saying, ‘Hey, I don’t have to do superheroes. I don’t have to do that any more. I can do that quirky story that’s been in the back of my mind for year.’”
He’s very aware of storytelling craft. His deepest influences – Jaime Hernandez, Katsuhiro Otomo and Mike Mignola – are all unique talents.
“Hernandez tells stories about 80s punkers, Otomo has post-apocalyptic stories, and Mignola does simple graphic folk tales.”
Atwood, of course, has done all of the above except 80s punk characters, and could do that, too, if she wanted to. But here she mines her love of the superhero, one-third cat, one-third bird, one-third human.
She gives credit to Christmas for solving an essential narrative problem. It’s all about Angel Catbird’s pants, carefully selected from six design options.
“We needed an origin story for the pants,” says Atwood. “Otherwise, we would have had the problem of the Superman clothes. What happens to Superman’s clothes when he goes into the phone booth? It always bothered me and I don’t think it was ever resolved satisfactorily. People who get into these comics are sticklers for details. If there’s a gap that isn’t filled, you have to fill it in. Like, when Superman eats the kryptonite sandwich, why doesn’t his head explode?”
There’s something gobsmacking about a Booker Prize-winning author pondering these things, but Angel Catbird sticks to Atwood’s better- known sweet spot – her environmental concerns. The book has an activist bent, positing a way to save cats and birds at the same time.
She’s partnered with Nature Canada, which supplied statistics tied to key tidbits of dialogue. So when love interest Cate Leone says she has trouble with monogamy, there’s data at the bottom of the page pertaining to cat population growth.
The storyline makes allies of birds and cats, which are natural antagonists (cats snack on birds, after all) for good reason.
“How do you deal with the large numbers of migratory neo-tropical birds being eaten by cats,” asks Atwood, who’s acutely aware that making cats the villains would be a problem for fans of the feline. “Then there’s the fact that people are passionately devoted to cats – you can’t say, ‘Cat monster flushed down toilet.’ What better way to blend cat interests and bird interests than in a cat-person?”
On the other hand, rat as villain makes perfect sense.
“Rats, particularly on islands like New Zealand, are very destructive of bird life, so if you were going to have a super-villain, it would be a rat, is the enemy of both cats and birds.”
Christmas and Atwood have just started out on the interview circuit. They’re appearing at Fan Expo Cana-da on September 3 and have just returned from ComicCon in San Diego, where Christmas learned to appreciate Atwood’s deftness at dealing with interviews.
“A lot of times you get questions and they’re kind of duds. Margaret has this way of elevating them in her answers, tying them to something bigger and then figuring out a way to bring things back to the original question.”
Atwood just smiles and says, “There’s no such thing as a bad question – only bad answers.”
susanc@nowtoronto.com | @susangcole
