I mean, personally, the main thought it provokes for me is “Thank God we don’t have time machines so I can’t go back in time and slap myself up the head so hard I never have to go to the chiropractor again”, but still, thought-provoking.Īnother great strength of the comics focused on in Hark! A Vagrant is how Beaton marries the aforementioned respected material of history and literature with mundanity. Watching Beaton deal with her younger self and finding comedy in the gentle disconnect between child self and adult self is quite thought-provoking. Not collected in Hark! A Vagrant are her comics about her encountering her childhood self, since they don’t relate to the general theme of skewered history and literature. Beaton, with her, let’s say, innate Canadian kindness (Beaton talks a bit about how she likes the idea that her country’s stereotype is niceness, of all things), manages to riot with these juxtapositions and not offend anyone. I’ve always delighted in the juxtaposition of respected material and disrespected material, be something as simple as Victorian ladies cursing or something as complex as people not realizing that, yes, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (one of my favorite plays, incidentally) is fanfiction. Everyone finds the same things sad, as the old saw goes, but not everyone finds the same things funny. You cannot deny the value of having a similar sense of humor to someone. As a Canadian herself, she also has special interest in playing with and mocking her own country’s stereotypes and history. In it, Beaton skewers history, stereotypes, and literature as lightly and cleverly as she pleases, pointing out the origins of hipsters, the insanity of Nancy Drew and Edward Gorey covers, and the competitive stupidity of war. Hark, A Vagrant! collects most of Beaton’s output on her website-along with several comics exclusive to the book. Aw yis, to quote one of her most famous comics.
While I knew her big-girl book (Beaton self-published a book before this through her website) was out, I didn’t dream for a second that my library would have it, but there it was, sitting on the shelf, telling me that I could now review her for the blog.
Every fandom I stumble across has their very own “Oooh, Mr. She’s a Canadian cartoonist who merges her deep interest and knowledge about history with often clever and occasionally delightfully juvenile jokes and has become quite a bit of a sensation. If you have somehow managed to connect to the Internet and somehow find this review without knowing who La Beatonne is (gosh, I hope I have jurisdiction for that by virtue of being French), go.
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