![]() 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. I seriously want ALL of the Kate Beaton comics now.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. My husband shook his head at my hearty chuckling, but enjoyed the humor, too. Seriously, though, if you find yourself a lover of literary and historical jokes, you should definitely check out this collection. I totally get why Marilla was huffy and indignant about them. As a kid, I read Anne of Green Gables to pieces, and I wondered how gorgeous her dress would be, based on Anne’s ravings. Beaton’s humorous take-down really tickled me.īut nothing, and I repeat, nothing, tops “Anne of Sleeves” for me. I love, love, love the Nancy Drew cover histories that she draws-as a reader of the series growing up, I sometimes found the covers silly and over-the-top, and so, Ms. ![]() ![]() The “Nemesis” series are some of my favorites. ![]() There are abundant panels about the Brontes and their work (never amiss), revolutionaries, suffragettes, and medieval culture. She makes bountiful history jokes, literary panels, and jabs at Canadian culture (she herself is from Nova Scotia). It’s clear that Beaton put her history degree and art/museum acumen to good use in her comics, and we are all the better for it.īeaton gets me. On my library display, someone had emblazoned Hark! A Vagrant and Step Aside, Pops, so I thought I could use a little literary nerdy fun in my life. I’ve seen Kate Beaton comics throughout the internet before, and I’ve greatly enjoyed them.
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