Canadian cartoonist Kate Beaton made her name with Hark! A Vagrant, a series of joyously satirical strips crammed with irreverent feminist skits on everything from Jane Austen to Caesar’s pyjamas and ghost-eating ponies. They ended up filling two award-winning books, but they began as webcomics, and Ducks is an account of where Beaton started publishing them from: the oil sands of north-eastern Alberta, where mines cluster atop the largest known reservoir of crude bitumen in the world and you can “see the frozen ground ripple when the haulers go by”.
Ducks, her first full-length graphic novel, feels a long way from the quirky, quickfire comedy of Hark! A Vagrant. Instead, this observant, angry and compelling memoir tells of a vast, callous industry and its effect on the people who keep it running.
