ECCC Spotlight 2019: Interview with Magdalene Vissaggio & Corin Howell on Calamity Kate

At Emerald City Comic Con, Black Nerd Problems talked to writer Magdalene Vissagio (Kim & Kim, Eternity Girl), and Corin Howell (IDWs Ghostbusters, X-Files) about their new book Calamity Kate from Dark Horse Comics. The story follows Kate Strand, a woman whose divorce sparked her to uproot her life and move to LA where she can follow her dream of becoming a monster killer. Calamity Kate’s got leather jackets, samurai swords, and giant decapitated scaly heads. Black Nerd Problems: How would you describe Calamity Kate to a fan of comics that’s never read anything other than Marvel or DC before? Like someone who hasn’t ventured outside of mainstream superhero comics. Magdalene Visaggio: It’s about a woman—who after a very nasty divorce—decides to burn her life to the ground and reinvent herself so she gets a bunch of tattoos, changes her style, hops into a 1979 Lincoln Continental with a Samurai sword driving across the country and cutting off the heads of goblins. She becomes the monster hunter she always wanted to be to sort of deal with the trauma of her divorce.

BNP: It kind of reminded me of a superhero book in the sense where it seems like monster hunters kind of take the place of what superheroes would be in this world. MV: Yeah, to a degree. I was treating them more as celebrities. But with superheroes, there’s definitely a lot of crossover there too. And it’s definitely like tonally—it feels to me a lot like a Marvel book. It’s got that kind of mixture of humor and…