We wanted to give her two badass broads to be her guardian angels.Ītwood: Wow.

The resulting conversation, while rarely touching on Angel Catbird directly, is a fascinating fly-on-the-wall look at two of the smartest-and funniest-minds in comics today.Ītwood: Henry Leo? Does he get called that?ĭeConnick: He does, because as it happens, there are like 19 Henrys in his school, so any distinction helps.Ītwood: Okay, so does he only get called that when he’s bad, or all the time?ĭeConnick: Nope, that’s his all-the-time name.Ītwood: Did you name him-no, you didn’t, because you’re too young-you didn’t name him after the old radio program Henry Aldrich?ĭeConnick: No, no-my daughter is named for Tallulah Bankhead.ĭeConnick: She’s named for Tallulah Bankhead and Louise Brooks. Thanks to a fortuitous Twitter interaction, Atwood happens to be a Bitch Planet reader. DeConnick is an unabashed fan of Atwood’s, and boasts a first-edition copy of Atwood’s landmark novel, The Handmaid’s Tale. To (theoretically) talk about this momentous release, Paste jumped on the phone with Atwood and Kelly Sue DeConnick, the critically acclaimed writer of Bitch Planet, Pretty Deadly and the upcoming Parisian White. Both a slyly goofy anthropomorphic ode to the pulpy series of old and an act of animal advocacy in conjunction with the Canadian charity Keep Cats Safe & Save Bird Lives, Angel Catbird’s first volume introduces readers to Strig Feleedus, a genetic engineer who finds himself mutated into a cat/owl/human hybrid and thrust into a hidden world of feline shape-shifters. Drawn by Johnnie Christmas and colored by Tamra Bonvillain, Angel Catbird presents Atwood’s first foray into sequential storytelling, although she’s been reading comics (and drawing her own) since childhood. Literary icon Margaret Atwood is the Booker Prize-winning author of more than 40 volumes of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, children’s literature and-as of this week-an original graphic novel series from Dark Horse Comics.

Bitch Planet #1 by Kelly Sue DeConnick