A Man With An Agenda

Some years ago, young women started turning into cats. Big cats. It took awhile for the authorities to figure it out and a lot of people were killed. but now we know. Due to a mutation of toxoplasmosis - one of the most common diseases and carried by housecats - menstruating women, particularly adolescents and twenty-somethings, are at risk of spontaneously transforming into giant, man-eating cats. Hormones have been put into the drinking water to stop menstruation and aggressive measures are in place to identify women who still menstruate and protect men and boys from them.

'Man-Eaters' is set in that world. These issues follow 12-year-old pussy-hat-wearing Maude living with her detective father. Her parents have split up but still socialize to keep her from getting screwed up, something she is very aware of. Her father works in homicide and her mother is a part of one of the highly funded task forces that hunt down the killer cats. At the end of the first issue we see that things are going to get pretty complicated for Maude.

This book is laugh-out-loud funny and inappropriate and in any other political climate over-the-top dystopian. The level of misogyny that is normalized in this world is stunning, but in the four issues collected here its easy to see how it happened and why it was embraced. There are posters listing the signs of an impending cat attack that include a woman being moody or pushy, there's a scene of a sex-ed class where boys are given a pamphlet on what to expect and girls are given a book about how their bodies are going to betray them and "can I stop it?". It's funny. It's ridiculous. It's also the world we live in.