Margaret Atwood can, in fact, unclench. Just not for long.

"Oh, there’s Gandalf!” Margaret Atwood says in the closest her soft alto voice gets to a shout, pointing at a costumed nerd with a staff and a wizard’s hat. She’s on the floor of the annual Day-Glo carnival–slash–trade show that is Comic-Con International: San Diego, and the 76-year-old author is surprisingly calm among the hordes. “You’re a big Lord of the Rings fan, right?” I ask her. She turns, gives a quarter-smile, lightly punches me on the shoulder, and says, “Ask me anything.” Before I can, she launches into a miniature lecture on the 19th-century literary roots of Tolkien’s epic. “I’m the person who’s seen all the movies and can tell you, in one scene, one of the characters has a wristwatch on.”

In other words, it turns out that Atwood — one of the most esteemed writers of literary fiction of her generation — is a geek, even if she hates that word. When I describe her that way, she stops me mid-sentence with a stare. “I beg your pardon?” she says. “Do you not identify as a geek?” I ask. “I’m too old,” she replies. “You know, this split into ‘geekdom’ and ‘other people’ — that happened fairly late in the game.”

Still, Atwood is in San Diego in order to reach out to those who would identify as geeks: She’s promoting an upcoming work, out in September, the first volume of a planned graphic-novel trilogy called Angel Catbird, illustrated by Johnnie Christmas and colored by Tamra Bonvillain. Given her pedigree, one might expect it to be a high-minded piece in the vein of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis or Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. In fact, it’s a pulpy superhero comic, complete with genre tropes: a sullen loner granted tremendous powers (in this case, the abilities and physical attributes of both a bird and a cat), a sneering and hideous supervillain, and an extremely hot woman who’s inexplicably attracted to the protagonist.