Two years ago, Mockingbird writer and longtime Portland mystery writer Chelsea Cain deleted her Twitter account. She’d faced a cycle of internet outrage that had nothing to do with alleged social justice warriors and everything to do with reactionary intolerance toward women makers and thinkers. (Just ask Anita Sarkeesian and Zoë Quinn.) The misogyny trash fire descended in reaction to the release of an issue of Mockingbird that featured the heroine in a T-shirt that read “ASK ME ABOUT MY FEMINIST AGENDA.” It was a really good T-shirt.
So Cain left Twitter and, it seemed, comics. But with this fall’s debut of Man-Eaters, which will be drawn by Mockingbird artist Kate Niemczyk, she’s proven her trolls wrong. Cain’s propensity for darkness will be on full display in Man-Eaters, in which a collision between toxoplasmosis (yes, the cat poop parasite) and menstruation transforms women into “ferocious killer wildcats.” It promises to be an essential series for those of us who read Naomi Alderman’s The Power with carnivorous, misandrist delight. On a recent weekday, Cain took questions from the Mercury ahead of watching a Marlene Dietrich movie with her family. Here’s what she told us about the catharsis of Man-Eaters, Portland’s literati, and self-defense against trolls—because she’s back on Twitter too.