There’s even an index in case you need to find the section on King Lear quickly next time you need to brush up on your Shakespeare. The comments and art combined make this book feel like a goofy bull session with a very creative friend. I had just about given up on ideas for Wuthering Heights until the other day when I stumbled upon a beautifully illustrated version of the book by Fritz Eichenberg. Beaton’s style is rough and immediate, the kind where you think, “oh, I could do that” until you actually sit down and try, then you recognize how much imagination and practice it takes. When they’re not telling us more about the comic’s inspirations, they’re making more jokes. There’s also an angry Wonder Woman and a crazy Aquaman and a sexy Batman and an insane Nancy Drew, in case you want some more recent allusions and re-interpretations.īest of all are the author’s comments under many of the comics. Beaton’s modern perspective puts Macbeth and Edgar Allan Poe and Andrew Jackson and Jane Eyre and romance in general in fresh new light that also makes many of these well-known elements more memorable. The website for a society that studies the work of the Brontë sisters and preserves Emily and her sisters childhood home, Haworth, as a museum of their work. After all, this is a book where the Bronte sisters scope out brooding jerk dudes and suffragettes are re-envisioned through the lens of Sex and the City and Watson complains about being treated as comic relief to Holmes. Perhaps that’s a bit much to put on a volume of hilarious popular culture and history mashups. Not only is Hark! A Vagrant an entertaining read, it’s also an excellent example of how much the comic industry has changed and how varied the paths to success are these days. But it is, and congratulations to Beaton for so wonderfully doing her own thing. The comics are populated with both literary and historical figures, including the likes of Sherlock Holmes and the Bronte Sisters. Little is spared her lively pen and waggish, incisive wit. Artist Kate Beaton began this project while drawing comics for a student newspaper in college, where she was studying History and Anthropology. Kate Beaton makes comics about the Bröntes, Canadians, fat ponies, the X-Men, Hamlet, the American founding fathers, Raskolnikov, gay Batman, Nikola Tesla, Les Misérables, Nancy Drew, Greek myths, and hipsters throughout history. If you’d told me that a collection of comic strips based on literature and history, drawn in a pen-and-ink style more reminiscent of mid-last-century editorial cartooning than other popular webcomics, would be one of the hottest books of the year, both popularly and critically, I never would have believed you. A Vagrant revisits historical events and characters from a feminist light. I am impressed, though, that something so distinctively unique has caught on so widely. I wasn’t going to bother reviewing Hark! A Vagrant, because really, how many people do you need to tell you that Kate Beaton’s comics are hilarious as well as informative? A Vagrant Collection back Kate Beaton Price: £12.99 Review by Stephen Inspired, iconoclastic and infused with a lot of lateral thinking, I rate Kate Beaton right up there with Tom Gauld (YOURE ALL JUST JEALOUS OF MY JETPACK) for culturally informed comedy.
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