A Hark! A Vagrant Collection

Step Aside, Pops

A hilarious new collection of cartoons from the hugely popular online comic artist Kate Beaton, creator of www.harkavagrant.com

Tremendous fun, eccentric and warm and funny.

Witty and erudite… An excellent book.

Step Aside, Pops is going to be a smash hit in the bookstores.

A genius wit railing against the tropes of literature, a brilliantly skewed look at history, or even a sharply funny feminist comic strip; no matter how you come to this, you’ll fall a little bit in love with it.

[Beaton’s] jousting with history’s all-too-human figures makes for delicious jests.

Kate Beaton was born in Nova Scotia, took a history degree in New Brunswick, paid it off in Alberta, worked in a museum in British Columbia, then came to Ontario for a while to draw pictures, then Halifax, and now New York. Maybe the moon next time, who knows.

Wonder Woman! Hunks! Great men and women of history! Step aside – Kate Beaton is coming for you. 
 
The author of the smash hit Hark! A Vagrant returns with all-new sidesplitting comics that showcase her irreverent love of history, pop culture and literature. Collected from her wildly popular website, readers will guffaw over 'Strong Female Characters', the wicked yet chivalrous Black Prince, 'Straw Feminists in the Closet' and a disgruntled Heathcliff. Delight in what the internet has long known - Beaton's humour is as sharp and dangerous as a velocipedestrienne, so watch out!

Hark! A Vagrant

A compendium of cartoons from the hugely popular online comic artist Kate Beaton.

Kate Beaton has become a Web comic superstar with her hilarious look at historical and pop culture tropes from Julius Caesar to Gatsby. Hark! A Vagrant is a newly expanded collection of her witty, literate comics.

[Beaton's comics] are witty reinventions of literary and historical figures navigating modern times . . . A high-minded version of The Far Side that is at once of-the-moment and timeless.

Simply put, this is the most well-drawn, funniest comic that I've read in a while.

[Beaton's] neat linework and terrific grasp of simple caricature and facial expression sells a lot of the best strips, including Sasaki Kojiro meeting an undignified end, Jane Austen and Nikola Tesla being pestered by their fans, and Lord Byron muttering 'Bitches, man' to a grieving Percy Bysshe Shelley.

This is that rarest combination of literate irony and devastatingly funny humor.

[F]unny, clever, and sneakily instructive along the way.

Kate Beaton was born in Nova Scotia, took a history degree in New Brunswick, paid it off in Alberta, worked in a museum in British Columbia, then came to Ontario for a while to draw pictures, then Halifax, and now New York. Maybe the moon next time, who knows.

Since Kate Beaton appeared on the comics scene in 2007 her cartoons have become fan favourites and gathered an enormous following, appearing in the New Yorker, Harper and the LA Times, to name but a few. Her website, Hark! A Vagrant, receives an average of 1.2 million hits a month, 500 thousand of them unique. Why? Because she's not just making silly jokes. She's making jokes about everything we learned in school, and more. 
 
Praised for their expression, intelligence and comic timing, her cartoons are best known for their wonderfully light touch on historical and literary topics. The jokes are a knowing look at history through a very modern perspective, written for every reader, and are a crusade against anyone with the idea that history is boring. It's pretty hard to argue with that when you're laughing your head off at a comic about Thucydides. They also cover whatever's on her mind that week - be it the perils of city living or the pop-cultural infiltration of Sex and the City, featuring an array of characters, from a mischievous pony, to reinvented superheroes, to a surly teen duo who could be the anti-Hardy-Boys. 
 
Perceptive, sharp and wonderfully irreverent, Hark! A Vagrant is as informative as it is hilarious, and a comic collection to treasure.

Kate Beaton

What a difficult, gorgeous and abidingly humane book. It really does deserve to win all the prizes.

A magnificent piece of work.... Ducks feels like a book that holds its own alongside the likes of both Guy Delisle (for the travelogue-y aspects of the book) and Joe Sacco (for the more political aspects of the book) whilst, crucially, carving out something of its very own... One of (if not the) standout graphic novels of 2022.

Beaton delivers a masterpiece graphic memoir

A masterpiece, a heartbreak, a nightlight shining in the dark.

Patricia Lockwood, author of No One Is Talking About This

Devastating. Despite the brutal toll Beaton suffered personally, she has woven from her experience a vast and complex tapestry that captures the humanity of people doing a kind of "dirty work" in which we are all complicit, and it shimmers with grace.

An exceptionally beautiful book about loneliness, labor, and survival. Beaton is a thoughtful guide through a complex landscape of class and gender, and these pages ache with grief and grace.

Carmen Maria Machado, author of In the Dream House

Kate Beaton's comics are rich with quiet revelations, intimate details, and a deadpan, devastating sense of humor. A generous and illuminating book; I suspect it will stay on my mind for a very long time.

Ducks is an unforgettable, riveting work. Kate Beaton opens the mind's eye, allowing us to inhabit landscapes and experiences crucial to our time, yet largely unseen. Artful, considered and courageous, Ducks is a landmark work.

Madeleine Thien, author of Do Not Say We Have Nothing

Ducks delivers an immersive, harrowing journey through an industry where the lure of fast money belies darker realities of casual brutality, profound loneliness and soul-cracking isolation. The uneasy echoes of Beaton's story ring well past the the final page. Shattering.

Jessica Bruder, author of Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century

Honest, compassionate, and clear-eyed, Ducks is a stunning achievement in storytelling that I will be thinking about for a long time.

Ducks moves into dark territory - including sexual assault - but Beaton... balances light and shade. No place or person is wholly good or bad, not even the oil sands with their dark satanic drills.

Two Years in the Oil Sands: One of Barack Obama’s Favourite Books of 2022

*WINNER OF THE EISNER AWARDS FOR BEST MEMOIR AND BEST WRITER/ARTIST* 
 
'A vast and complex tapestry that captures the humanity of people... it shimmers with grace' 
ALISON BECHDEL, author of FUN HOME 
 
Before there was Kate Beaton, New York Times bestselling cartoonist of Hark A Vagrant, there was Katie Beaton of the Cape Breton Beatons, a tight-knit seaside community. After university, Katie heads out west to take advantage of Alberta's oil rush, part of the long tradition of East Coast Canadians who seek gainful employment elsewhere when they can't find it in the homeland they love so much. With the singular goal of paying off her student loans, what the journey will actually cost Katie will be far more than she anticipates. 
 
Arriving in Fort McMurray, Katie finds work in the lucrative camps owned and operated by the world's largest oil companies. As one of the few women among thousands of men, the culture shock is palpable. It does not hit home until she moves to a spartan, isolated worksite for higher pay. Katie encounters the harsh reality of life in the oil sands where trauma is an everyday occurrence yet never discussed. For young Katie, her wounds may never heal. 
 
Beaton's natural cartooning prowess is on full display as she draws colossal machinery and mammoth vehicles set against a sublime Albertan backdrop of wildlife, Northern Lights, and Rocky Mountains. Her first full length graphic narrative, Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands is an untold story of Canada: a country that prides itself on its egalitarian ethos and natural beauty while simultaneously exploiting both the riches of its land and the humanity of its people.

Kate Beaton

Praise for Ducks

What a difficult, gorgeous and abidingly humane book. It really does deserve to win all the prizes.

A magnificent piece of work.... Ducks feels like a book that holds its own alongside the likes of both Guy Delisle (for the travelogue-y aspects of the book) and Joe Sacco (for the more political aspec ...

Beaton delivers a masterpiece graphic memoir

What a difficult, gorgeous and abidingly humane book. It really does deserve to win all the prizes.

A magnificent piece of work.... Ducks feels like a book that holds its own alongside the likes of both Guy Delisle (for the travelogue-y aspects of the book) and Joe Sacco (for the more political aspec ...

Beaton delivers a masterpiece graphic memoir

What a difficult, gorgeous and abidingly humane book. It really does deserve to win all the prizes.

A magnificent piece of work.... Ducks feels like a book that holds its own alongside the likes of both Guy Delisle (for the travelogue-y aspects of the book) and Joe Sacco (for the more political aspec ...

Beaton delivers a masterpiece graphic memoir

Books by Kate Beaton

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