![]() “Storytelling is a big part of the culture. “I grew up listening to songs about leaving home, going to work, missing home,” Beaton says. “There is no knowing Cape Breton without knowing how deeply ingrained two diametrically opposed experiences are: a deep love for home, and the knowledge of how frequently we have to leave it to find work somewhere else.” On that same page, there’s a panel with an illustration of Cape Breton schoolchildren singing a song about how painful it is to work in steel plants or coal mines far from home. “I need to tell you this,” says Beaton’s 21-year-old self in the opening pages of Ducks. Over a Zoom call, as Barry grows more and more animated in her praise of the book, she eventually throws up her hands, overcome. “That book is a masterwork,” cartoonist Lynda Barry tells me. But Ducks weaves Beaton’s own experiences with warm, humane portraits of the many people she met on the oil sands, revealing a more personal, deliberative side of her storytelling. Her style is there too: distinctive rounded lines and her knack for choosing one moment - one expression or emotion - to elegantly condense complicated moods. ![]() The webcomic’s sense of humor is still there, as is Beaton’s fascination with reframing the past for a broad audience. Where “Hark!” was all humor and history and sideways glances at the idea of authoritative truth, Ducks is a monumental synthesis of Beaton herself, incorporating her personal history, her sense of regional and national scope, and her insight into how people get caught inside massive systems. “A lot of people mimic the way she draws faces.”ĭucks is a fuller expression of who Beaton is and has always been. When I ask her to clarify, Hanawalt laughs. “You can see her imprint on a lot of work in animation and in comics,” her friend, the cartoonist Lisa Hanawalt, says. ![]() Today, her early preoccupations - feminist and postcolonialist retellings, queering and reconsidering the literary canon - feel like prophecies, and her style is widely imitated. One of her most popular characters, a round, splay-legged, wordless pony, would eventually spawn a children’s book, The Princess and the Pony, and the Apple TV+ series Pinecone & Pony. Her work - clean, expressive, hand-drawn black-and-white comics - was reblogged and reposted endlessly. Its look and sense of humor became a defining aesthetic for a newly social, giddily exuberant online moment, as internet speeds increased, load times improved, and LiveJournal, Tumblr, and other blogging platforms turned into identity-defining scrapbooks, proudly curatorial and full of found images.Īt its height in the early 2010s, Beaton’s homepage for “Hark! A Vagrant” was getting half a million visitors a month. Francis, Robinson Crusoe, and the American Founding Fathers, its sharp, daffy feminism reframed familiar figures and stories in order to dwell on absurdities, hypocrisies, and endearing, irreducible human quirks. The online comic “Hark! A Vagrant” established Beaton as a defining voice of online humor in the late aughts. Later this year, it will almost certainly be joined by Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands, Beaton’s new graphic memoir. I spot Beaton’s first book on a shelf downstairs: Hark! A Vagrant, a collection of her strange, charming webcomics. There are antique farm tools and jugs salvaged from century-old stills, which remind Beaton of the time her grandfather gathered enough moonshine for a party of farmers from 40 miles around only to find it all poured out after his son tasted it and assumed it was poison. Upstairs there are generations of school projects, including her own. There is a cane, the oldest thing in the museum, that belonged to a many-greats-grandfather. She spent a lot of hours alone here amid artifacts, much of them her family’s. ![]() ![]() Beaton worked in this museum when she was in high school, fielding questions from tourists and helping people sort through genealogies. In the second-floor room of a small local-history museum in Mabou, a very small village on the western coast of Canada’s already quite remote island of Cape Breton, cartoonist Kate Beaton tells me dozens of little stories. ![]()
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