Thread by @doctorow

It's been more than a decade since I began thrilling to @beatonna's spectacular, hilarious snark-history webcomic "Hark! A Vagrant," pioneering work that mixed deceptively simple lines, superb facial expressions, and devastating historical humor:

memex.craphound.com/2012/03/23/har… 1/

Beaton developed Hark! into a more explicit political allegory, managing the near-impossible trick of being trenchant and topical while still being explosively funny. 2/

Her second Hark! collection, *Step Aside, Pops*, remains essential reading, if only for her brilliant #StrawFeminists:

memex.craphound.com/2015/09/15/ste… 3/

Beaton is nothing if not versatile. In 2015, she published *The Princess and the Pony*, a picture book that I read to my own daughter - and which inspired me to write my own first picture book, *Poesy the Monster-Slayer*:

memex.craphound.com/2015/08/07/the… 4/

Beaton, then, has a long history of crossing genres in her graphic novels, so the fact that she published a memoir in graphic novel form is no surprise. 5/

But that memoir, *Ducks: Two Years In the Oil Sands*, still marks a departure for her, trading explosive laughs for subtle, keen observations about labor, climate and gender:

drawnandquarterly.com/books/ducks/ 6/

In 2005, Beaton was a newly minted art-school grad facing a crushing load of student debt, a debt she would never be able to manage in the crumbling, post-boom economy of #CapeBreton, Nova Scotia. 7/

Like so many Maritimers, she left the home that meant everything for her to travel to #Alberta, where the #TarSands oil boom promised unmatched riches for anyone willing to take them. 8/

Beaton's memoir describes the next four years, as she works a series of oil industry jobs in isolated company towns where men outnumber women 50:1 where communities marinate in a literally toxic brew of carcinogens, misogyny, economic desperation and environmental abuse. 9/

The story that follows is - naturally - wrenching, but it is also subtle and ambivalent. Beaton finds camaraderie with - and empathy for - the people she works alongside, even amidst unimaginable, grinding workplace harassment that manifests in both obvious and glancing ways. 10/

Reviews of *Ducks* praise it for this subtlety and ambivalence. *Ducks* has no easy characterizations, and while it has villains - #ContentWarning, the book depicts multiple sexual assaults - it carefully apportions blame in the mix of individual failings and a brutal system. 11/

This is as true for the environmental tale as it is for the labor story: the tar sands are the world's filthiest oil, an energy source that is only viable when oil prices peak, because extracting and refining that oil is so energy-intensive. 12/

The slow, implacable, irreversible impact that burning Canadian oil has on our shared planet is diffuse and takes place over long timescales, making it hard to measure and attribute. 13/

But the impact of the tar sands on the bodies and minds of the workers in the oil patch, on the First Nations whose land is stolen and despoiled in service to oil, and on the politics of Canada are far more immediate. 14/

Beaton paints all this in with the subtlest of brushstrokes, a thousand delicate cuts that leave the reader bleeding in sympathy by the time the tale is told. 15/

Beaton's memoir is a political and social triumph, a subtle knife that cuts at our carefully cultivated blind-spots about industry, labor, energy, gender, and the climate. But it's also - and not incidentally - a *narrative and artistic* triumph. 16/

In other words, Beaton's not just telling an important story, she's also telling a fantastically engrossing story - a page-turner, filled with human drama, delicious tension, likable and complex characters, all the elements of a first-rate tale. 17/

Likewise, Beaton's art is *perfectly* on point. Hark!'s secret weapon was always Beaton's gift for drawing deceptively simple human faces whose facial expressions were indescribably, superbly *perfect*, conveying irreducible mixtures of emotion and sentiment. 18/

If anything, *Ducks* does this even *better*. I think you could remix this book so that it's just a series of facial expressions and you'd still convey all the major emotional beats of the story. 19/

Graphic memoirs have emerged as a potent and important genre in this century. And women have led that genre, starting with books like @AlisonBechdel's *Fun Home* (2006):

cbldf.org/banned-challen… 20/

But also the increasingly autobiographical work of @NearSitedMonkey, culminating in her 2008 *One! Hundred! Demons!*:

drawnandquarterly.com/books/one-hund…

(which should really be read alongside her masterwork on creativity, 2019's *Making Comics*):

memex.craphound.com/2019/11/05/lyn… 21/

In 2014, we got Cece Bell's wonderful *El Deafo*:

memex.craphound.com/2014/11/25/el-…

Which was part of the lineage that includes the work of @LucyKnisley, especially later volumes like 2020's *Stepping Stones*:

pluralistic.net/2020/07/09/enh… 22/

Along with @alooghobi's 2019 *Stargazing*:

memex.craphound.com/2019/09/25/sta…

2019 was actually a bumper-crop year for stupendous graphic memoirs by women, rounded out by @ebonydraws's *Hot Comb*:

drawnandquarterly.com/books/hot-comb/ 23/

And don't forget 2017's dazzling *My Favorite Thing is Monsters*, by @Emilferrisdraws:

memex.craphound.com/2017/06/20/my-…

This rapidly expanding, enthralling canon is one of the most exciting literary trends of this century, and *Ducks* stands with the best of it. 24/

ETA - If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

pluralistic.net/2023/01/14/har…