As she mentions in her introduction, Kate Beaton would often put off writing essays to do comics for the student paper. She would eventually start putting them online as she continued working on her degree in history. It would turn out that she was able to meld both of these worlds into something truly fantastic.
Published by Drawn & Quarterly in 2011, Hark A Vagrant collects Kate’s radical take on human history. The simplistic black and white style helps bring focus to the characters. Often the backgrounds are blank and the comics exist in a sometimes three, sometimes six, sometimes twelve-panel format. This all but misses the point of what makes these comics great, her humor and her knowledge.
Whether she is lampooning the forefathers or comparing Susan B. Anthony to the characters in Sex and the City, I am on board. Beaton introduces you to the “hipsters” of eighteenth-century France and even plays with the characters from popular fiction, including Batman and Sherlock Holmes. Beaton can be apologetic, but only because she is Canadian.