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Kate Beaton’s “Ducks”
A memoir of oil, misogyny and economic precarity.
It’s been more than a decade since I began thrilling to Kate Beaton’s spectacular, hilarious snark-history webcomic “Hark! A Vagrant,” pioneering work that mixed deceptively simple lines, superb facial expressions, and devastating historical humor:
https://memex.craphound.com/2012/03/23/hark-a-vagrant-the-book/
Beaton developed Hark! into a more explicit political allegory, managing the near-impossible trick of being trenchant and topical while still being explosively funny. Her second Hark! collection, Step Aside, Pops, remains essential reading, if only for her brilliant “straw feminists”:
Beaton is nothing if not versatile. In 2015, she published The Princess and the Pony, a picture book that I read to my own daughter — and which inspired me to write my own first picture book, Poesy the Monster-Slayer:
https://memex.craphound.com/2015/08/07/the-princess-and-the-pony-from-kate-hark-a-vagrant-beaton/
Beaton, then, has a long history of crossing genres in her graphic novels, so the fact that she published a memoir in graphic novel form is no surprise. But that…
