Career
After graduating from Mount Allison in 2005 Beaton worked at an oil sands mining project in Fort McMurray to pay off her student loans. [6] [7] In 2007, while still working at the Maritime Museum of BC, Beaton decided to publish some of her history-inspired comics on the Web. [2] She posted comics to a new website, katebeaton.com, and to a LiveJournal blog. In December of that year, she published the first of two popular batches of history-themed comic strips, whose subjects were ones suggested by at least twenty of her readers. [8]
Beaton published her webcomic, Hark! A Vagrant , from 2007 to 2018. [4] She moved her work from LiveJournal to her new website, also titled Hark! A Vagrant, in May 2008. [9] Its subjects included historical figures, such as James Joyce [10] and Ada Lovelace, [11] or fictional characters from Western literature. In several comics, Beaton caricatured herself, past and present. Beaton has a simple artistic style, with particular attention to detail paid to her characters' facial expressions; her skill at comic pacing has also been noted. [12] Hark! A Vagrant won the 2011 Ignatz Award for Outstanding Online Comic. [13]
Beaton's work has been profiled in Wired , [5] Maclean's , [14] and Comic Book Resources. [15] "The Origin of Man", her comic celebrating Charles Darwin's 200th birthday, was showcased by MySpace Dark Horse Presents in March 2009. [15] In June 2009, she released a book titled Never Learn Anything from History. [16] Several of her cartoons have been published in The New Yorker . [17] [18] [19] [20] Drawn & Quarterly released her second book, also titled Hark! A Vagrant, in September 2011. [21] [22] Time magazine named it one of the top ten fiction books of the year, with Lev Grossman calling it "the wittiest book of the year." [23]
Beaton's self-published Never Learn Anything from History won the 2009 Doug Wright Award for Best Emerging Talent. [24] Hark! A Vagrant won the 2011 Harvey Award for Best Online Comics Work, having been nominated the previous year, [25] and was also nominated for Joe Shuster Awards in 2009 and 2010. [26] [27] Beaton followed up her 2011 Harvey win by taking home three Harveys in 2012, for Humor, Online Work, and Best Cartoonist.
She is a former member of Pizza Island, a cartoonist's studio in Greenpoint, Brooklyn which was formed by herself and cartoonists Lisa Hanawalt, Domitille Collardey, Sarah Glidden, Meredith Gran, and Julia Wertz. [28]
Beaton has contributed to Marvel Comics' Strange Tales anthology. [29] In 2014, Beaton uploaded the five-part webcomic Ducks, which presents a more serious and complex story based on Beaton's experiences working at a remote mining site in Canada. [30]
Step Aside, Pops, a collection of her Hark! A Vagrant comics, topped The New York Times graphic novel bestseller list in October 2015. [31] In a 2015 poll, Beaton ranked fourteenth among the top all-time female comics artists. [32]
Beaton's first children's book, The Princess and the Pony , was released in 2015. [33] In 2016, she published the picture book King Baby.
In October 2018, Beaton ended the ongoing serialization of her webcomic, saying, "I feel like this is a project that has run its course." [34]
In 2022, an animated TV series based on Kate Beaton's The Princess and the Pony, called Pinecone & Pony , was released on the streaming service Apple TV+, with Beaton serving as executive producer. [35]
In September 2022, Beaton released a memoir in graphic novel form called Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands , which documented her experience working in the energy extraction industry for Alberta oil sands before she became a cartoonist. It expanded on her earlier 2014 webcomic Ducks. [36] The book won the 2023 edition of Canada Reads , where it was championed by Mattea Roach. [37] [38]
The American Library Association listed Ducks among their top ten in the 2022 Best Graphic Novels for Adults list. [39]
