![]() While showing the realities of life working at Fort McMurray with unflinching honesty, Beaton‘s goal is for readers to “get a sense of the humanity in a place like the oil sands,” she tells me in a phone call from the farmhouse in Cape Breton she shares with her husband, novelist Morgan Murray, and their two small children.īeaton’s life story started in Cape Breton, a fishing town in eastern Canada. It’s about real people-well-meaning but crude bosses, small town young adults who fall into a trap of drugs and alcohol while trying to make a living-who are caught in a economic game that they can’t win. But it’s not a story that settles scores or merely recounts one young woman’s journey. That it came from neighbors and friends-men from her own province working at the camps-is one of the most painful messages of Ducks. One of the few women working in the camp, Beaton was subjected to constant sexual harassment and worse. Her bio included the fact that she’d worked at the Fort McMurray mining camps for two years-a fact placed on a jacket flap that seemed like a quintessential “cool girl” job, full of adventure-but also something that wasn’t addressed in her work, or in conversation.ĭucks makes it clear why. I first met Beaton in the early 2000s at various cartooning functions-she was a comics star who not only made hilarious comics but also had killer comedic timing as revealed at various live comics readings. It’s a book she made to process her own memories-and to tell the real story of a place few understand. A 400-page graphic memoir of her time working in Alberta’s remote oil camps, Ducks is a complex, heartbreaking narrative that paints a devastating portrait of how systemic economic oppression warps human relations. Her humorous comics now extend into animation: Pinecone and Pony, an animated series based on her 2015 children’s book, The Princess and the Pony, the story of a would-be warrior princess and her flatulent pony, is currently streaming on Apple+.īut her new book Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands, published this month by Drawn & Quarterly, is anything but lighthearted comedy. As part of the famed Brooklyn all-female Pizza Island studio, Beaton paved the way for a generation of Instagram cartoonists. Science Fiction: The Heart Goes Last by Margaret A.Cartoonist Kate Beaton made a name for herself with laughter-droll comics that eviscerated historical figures and such literary icons as Edgar Allen Poe and Nancy Drew comics that originally ran on LiveJournal and led to two bestselling book collections, Hark! a Vagrant (2011) and Step Aside, Pops (2015).Young Adult Fiction: The Thing About Jellyfish by.Contemporary Fiction: The Tsar of Love and Techno.Classic Fiction: The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemi.Graphic Novel: Hark! A Vagrant by Kate Beaton.And of course, as a Canadian, Beaton pokes plenty of fun at her home country, which anyone from the U.S. Even the modern day hipster doesn't escape Beaton's pen. In other words, it seems no one is safe from Beaton, whether they be from history or popular culture. And I suppose it would not be a proper collection of comics without a few depicting Batman, Aquaman, Wonder Woman, and a few Marvel characters such as Wolverine and Storm. Wells, Bram Stokes, Victor Hugo, and even William Shakespeare. And much to my delight, Beaton chose to draw comics lightly mocking the Bronte sisters, Jane Austen, Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, H.G. Some historical figures that managed to make it into the book include Andrew Jackson, Benjamin Franklin, and John Adams. And when Beaton isn't poking fun at some historical figure or event, she is poking fun at a great work of literature and the author. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker and The Best American Comics anthology, and always seems to attempt to educate while bringing a smile to the reader's face. The Canadian-born Beaton earned a bachelor's degree in both history and anthropology, and eventually left her job at a museum to pursue drawing comics full-time. ![]() Genre, Themes, History: While I have placed this book under graphic novel, it really isn't a novel as it is a collection of Beaton's comics, most of which place a humorous spin on either historical events and figures, or classic literature and their authors.
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