HARK! A VAGRANT by Kate Beaton (Drawn & Quarterly), 160 pages, $19.95 paper. Beaton is interviewed alongside Patricia Marx on October 29 and reads with Joshua Knelman, Rodge Glass and Ken Babstock on October 30. See listing. Rating: NNNN
What if Anne Of Green Gables had never got the puffed-sleeve dress she so desperately wanted?
What did Canada really think of Lester B. Pearson?
Welcome to Kate Beaton’s world, distilled in comics compilation Hark! A Vagrant, which shares the name of her popular website.
Born in Nova Scotia and living in New York, Beaton remixes history to give a fresh take on familiar characters, all in a sparse drawing style emphasizing the joke, not the art.
The dialogue can get manic and also include long pauses, especially at the end of a three-panel joke. Not every strip is ha-ha funny instead, Beaton prefers to shine a light on what we’ve overlooked, whether in Canadian history or in “real life.”
She has a sharp eye for human foibles. Her 1980s Businesswoman Comics have an enjoyably hysterical pace, and a peek into apathetic Mystery-Solving Teens sums up young narcissism.
If you’re well read, you’ll be all over Hark. Beaton loves to imagine new destinies for Great Gatsby heroes or Odysseus sidekicks. She references the Brontës on one page and Robinson Crusoe on the next. You might need to remember your high school English class assignments to get some of her one-liners. If you know your Shakespeare, you’ll have fun with the book’s latter half.
Chalk it up to preference, but I think a few colour panels would’ve been a nice surprise for Beaton fans. We’re used to seeing her online posts as black-and-white renderings, so her first book could have sweetened the deal. Remember how cool it was the first time you saw a full-colour Far Side page in an anthology?
Even if you don’t like comics or Canadian history, Hark will turn you on to both.
