This fall sees the publication of not one but two works by the redoubtable Margaret Atwood: a fictional adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest and a graphic novel, her first. Hag-Seed is the fourth book in the Hogarth Shakespeare Project in which contemporary authors, including (so far) Jeannette Winterson and Howard Jacobson, reimagine their favourite plays by the Bard. As for the comic book, the fantastically titled Angel Catbird is an apt rebuke to anyone who expected a graphic novel of the restrained Marjane Satrapi or Seth variety: an unabashed homage to classic Marvel comics, it is centred on a human-feline-avian hybrid who is all sculpted pectorals, and wrestles with an intriguing romantic dilemma.
Critic, editor, journalist and comics authority, Jeet Heer is the author of Sweet Lechery: Essays, Profiles and Reviews and In Love with Art...
Jeet Heer, a Regina-based cultural journalist is co-editor, with Kent Worcester, of Arguing Comics: Literary Masters on a Popular Medium (University of Mississippi Press, 2004) and A Comics Studies Reader (University Press of Mississippi, 2008). With Chris Ware and Chris Oliveros, he is editing a series of volumes reprinting Frank King’s Gasoline Alley, three volumes of which have been published by Drawn and Quarterly under the umbrella title Walt and Skeezix.
Margaret Atwood is the author of many novels, poetry collections, children’s books, graphic novels, and works of non-fiction.
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