Kate Beaton's "Ducks"
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”:
https://memex.craphound.com/2015/09/15/step-aside-pops-a-new-hark-a-vagrant-collection-that-delights-and-dazzles/
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 memoir, Ducks: Two Years In the Oil Sands, still marks a departure for her, trading explosive laughs for subtle, keen observations about labor, climate and gender:
https://drawnandquarterly.com/books/ducks/
In 2005, Beaton was a newly minted art-school grad facing a crushing load of student debt, a debt she would never be able to manage in the crumbling, post-boom economy of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. Like so many Maritimers, she left the home that meant everything for her to travel to Alberta, where the tar sands oil boom promised unmatched riches for anyone willing to take them.
Beaton’s memoir describes the following four years, as she works her way into a series of oil industry jobs in isolated company towns where men outnumber women 50:1 and where whole communities marinate in a literally toxic brew of carcinogens, misogyny, economic desperation and environmental degradation.
The story that follows is — naturally — wrenching, but it is also subtle and ambivalent. Beaton finds camaraderie with — and empathy for — the people she works alongside, even amidst unimaginable, grinding workplace harassment that manifests in both obvious and glancing ways.
Early reviews of Ducks rightly praised it for this subtlety and ambivalence. This is a book that makes no easy characterizations, and while it has villains — a content warning, the book depicts multiple sexual assaults — it carefully apportions blame in the mix of individual failings and a brutal system.
This is as true for the environmental tale as it is for the labor story: the tar sands are the world’s filthiest oil, an energy source that is only viable when oil prices peak, because extracting and refining that oil is so energy-intensive. The slow, implacable, irreversible impact that burning Canadian oil has on our shared planet is diffuse and takes place over long timescales, making it hard to measure and attribute.
But the impact of the tar sands on the bodies and minds of the workers in the oil patch, on the First Nations whose land is stolen and despoiled in service to oil, and on the politics of Canada are far more immediate. Beaton paints all this in with the subtlest of brushstrokes, a thousand delicate cuts that leave the reader bleeding in sympathy by the time the tale is told.
Beaton’s memoir is a political and social triumph, a subtle knife that cuts at our carefully cultivated blind-spots about industry, labor, energy, gender, and the climate. But it’s also — and not incidentally — a narrative and artistic triumph.
In other words, Beaton’s not just telling an important story, she’s also telling a fantastically engrossing story — a page-turner, filled with human drama, delicious tension, likable and complex characters, all the elements of a first-rate tale.
Likewise, Beaton’s art is perfectly on point. Hark!’s secret weapon was always Beaton’s gift for drawing deceptively simple human faces whose facial expressions were indescribably, superbly perfect, conveying irreducible mixtures of emotion and sentiment. If anything, Ducks does this even better. I think you could remix this book so that it’s just a series of facial expressions and you’d still convey all the major emotional beats of the story.
Graphic memoirs have emerged as a potent and important genre in this century. And women have led that genre, starting with books like Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (2006):
https://cbldf.org/banned-challenged-comics/case-study-fun-home/
But also the increasingly autobiographical work of Lynda Barry, culminating in her 2008 One! Hundred! Demons!:
https://drawnandquarterly.com/books/one-hundred-demons/
(which should really be read alongside her masterwork on creativity, 2019’s Making Comics):
https://memex.craphound.com/2019/11/05/lynda-barrys-making-comics-is-one-of-the-best-most-practical-books-ever-written-about-creativity/
In 2014, we got Cece Bell’s wonderful El Deafo:
https://memex.craphound.com/2014/11/25/el-deafo-moving-fresh-ya-comic-book-memoir-about-growing-up-deaf/
Which was part of the lineage that includes the work of Lucy Knisley, especially later volumes like 2020’s Stepping Stones:
https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/09/enhanced-rock-weathering/#knisley
Along with Jen Wang’s 2019 Stargazing:
https://memex.craphound.com/2019/09/25/stargazing-jen-wangs-semi-autobiographical-graphic-novel-for-young-readers-is-a-complex-tale-of-identity-talent-and-loyalty/
2019 was actually a bumper-crop year for stupendous graphic memoirs by women, rounded out by Ebony Flowers’s Hot Comb:
https://drawnandquarterly.com/books/hot-comb/
And don’t forget 2017’s dazzling My Favorite Thing is Monsters, by Emil Ferris:
https://memex.craphound.com/2017/06/20/my-favorite-thing-is-monsters-a-haunting-diary-of-a-young-girl-as-a-dazzling-graphic-novel/
This rapidly expanding, enthralling canon is one of the most exciting literary trends of this century, and Ducks stands with the best of it.
[Image ID: The cover of the Drawn & Quarterly edition of Kate Beaton's 'Ducks.']
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Underwater #3 (1995)
Underwater is one of the few unfinished Chester Brown's works, hence it has never been compiled in graphic novel format. The only phisical evidence for its existence is the original comic book series where it was periodically published by chapters.
Neither plot nor author's aims are easy to understand starting with chapter three. Underwater is deliberately surrealist, its dialogue is written in a bizarrely distorted version of English, and a single chapter is too few pages long to draw any kind of conclusion.
In fact, the Underwarter episode is so short because it only fills half of the book. The second half belongs to another legendary unfinished work by Brown, nothing less than the Christian Gospels comic adaptation!. Particularly, these 13 pages adapt the "fedding the multitude" miracle according Gospel of Matthew.
It's known that Brown's graphic translation of Jesus' life has a very special feature among others in any medium: The mood and look of Jesus changes depending on the particular gospel writer he is adapting. Clearly, the chosen depiction for Matthew's part is quite uncommon: semi-bald, older than usual, serious (almost angry) face... I am tremendously curious about the other alternative versions and the autor's reasons to choose those characterizations. I'll look for more chapters of Underwater and Yummy Fur on the Internet, hoping that Chester Brown take the decision to finish any of those works in order to see it reprinted .
Purchased at Gosh! (Soho, London) for £3.50
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