Man-Eaters is an Eisner-nominated comic series by Chelsea Cain and Kate Niemczyk, the team behind Mockingbird (2015), and is published by Image Comics.
Described as part Cat People, part The Handmaid's Tale, in the near-future, a mutation in Toxoplasmosis puts menstruating women at risk of becoming violent and easily provoked wildcats. As a result, men and women have been segregated. Twelve-year-old Maude has to rescue her father, all while being thrown into the chaos.
Tropes in this series include:
- Animal Motifs: Cats.
- Artistic License – Biology: Obviously, animorphism isn't possible. And as far as we know, toxoplasmosis has nothing to do with menstruation or being specifically in women other than it can be passed down from a pregnant mother to her carrying baby.
- Does This Remind You of Anything?: Man-Eaters does not go unsubtle about the similarities of its discrimination towards women who can still menstruate, clearly inspired by historical discrimination of minorities.
- The cover of the first issue is a cat's paw version of the Black Power symbol.
- Young girls who have started their puberty are thrown in guarded concentration camps.
- The water is supposedly being poisoned by estrogen, which makes women more likely to transform.
- Women have to drink from separate water fountains than men.
- Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: A bizarre meta-play ending. In-universe, either it was all real and everyone stopped worrying about it -or- a single guy in Portland poisoned the global water supply and seeded the idea of werepanthers and their explicit cause worldwide. Out of universe, it's brushed off as a metaphor.
- Was Once a Man: Menstruating women have a chance of transforming into violent wildcats.
