Kate Beaton is the kind of artist that makes my job difficult. You see — she's awesome. So much so that it's difficult to write anything at all about her work without merely waxing poetical about said awesomeness ad nauseum. That is, without descending into a fangirlish quagmire so thick with praise and adoration that maybe I should just cut the pretence and write her a love letter. But in the interests of not creeping anybody out, I'll cut the excess hosannahs, and suffice it to say: Kate Beaton— I think your work is just swell!

Beaton came onto the webcomic scene in 2007, when her friends pushed her to start publishing her growing stack of very silly comics online. Smart friends, I say with a tip of the hat. Thus was Hark, A Vagrant launched, and in the subsequent three years, this semi-weekly webcomic has garnered tens of thousands of regular readers and fans, while Beaton has been repeatedly nominated for a Joe Schuster Award, lauded in Wired and Macleans, published in The National Post, and has had illustrations accepted by The New Yorker. There's no doubt that Beaton has become something of a heavy-hitter in the eclectic world of webcomics.

Raised in Mabou, Nova Scotia (on Cape Breton Island), this self-proclaimed Maritimer began her comics career in grade 6, collaborating with a friend on a series of cutting and juvenile cartoons that made their teacher (the comics' subject-matter) cry¹. Since then, it is safe to say that she has honed her wit and craft while still keeping alive that kind of intensely energetic, grade-school glee that goes with singing "Joy to the world, the teacher's dead...." Not that she's out to make anybody cry these days — after all, the vast majority of her Hark, A Vagrant subjects have been mouldering in their graves for a minimum of several decades. Hark A Vagrant, though in no way exclusively concerned with historical material, has gained a reputation for comic strips on history — even one of the site's first major surges in popularity can be traced to a certain comic about Tesla and the ladies, and it is these history comics on which I'll be focusing.

Beaton's educational background (a degree in History and Anthropology from New Brunswick's Mount Allison University) and her employment at museums in several Canadian provinces all certainly provide a foundation for Hark, A Vagrant's material. This webcomic is a gem for history buffs — but the real story is in its appeal to a much wider audience. Beaton's success is one of those myriad ripple-effects out of the invention and growth of the internet. Twenty years ago, the kind of information that is required to appreciate Beaton's more historically-rooted jokes just wasn't ubiquitous or accessible enough for Hark, A Vagrant to have gained a following outside of history departments and anthropological societies — may not have even been accessible enough for Beaton to build these jokes in the first place. I for one, though I've long had an appetite for nifty tidbits from times past, freely admit to having needed to put on my figurative research cap to properly get several Hark, A Vagrant jokes but (and here's the key) in each instance I needed only don it but briefly. Anything you need to know to make a Beaton joke click, you can find within five to ten minutes of an internet search. That's little enough time to make the payoff worthwhile, and oftentimes an obscure lead from Hark, A Vagrant plays the white rabbit, with its fluffy white tail of a joke luring the curious down curiouser research bunny-holes that ultimately provide entertainments all their own. It may very well be this sort of Wikipedia-effect that has helped Hark, A Vagrant to gain such a following down in the States whilst Beaton's Can-con proportions have remained at levels that could make even the CBC proud.

When it comes to craft, she's no slouch. Her style is deceptively simple, almost lackadaisical and doodle-like, yet her lines are spot-on where it matters most. Scribbling is not difficult per se, but to make that scribble express and emote like a Beaton character takes some true-blue talent. More importantly, this doodle-like aspect functions as more than just an aesthetic mode; there is a self-deprecatory factor in Beaton's loose, hurried style that reinforces her flavour of humour. Her flavour is, in many ways, distinctly Canadian: her self-deprecation is wry in tone, and cheekily self-aware (as in comic strip 81: "Kate Beaton Stop Being So Hard On Yourself") and makes a delightful and volatile concoction when twinned with the pomp and bombast of, say, King Henry VIII, Hatshepsut or a vengeful pirate captain. Hark, A Vagrant plays with a silly, self-lampooning grandiosity that somehow — with all its flagrant anachronism, self-reflexive ridicule and nonsense — makes the cast of history lectures seem more people-like than ever.

All that said, I'm stuck wondering, where were you Kate Beaton, where were you when I was suffering Canadian History in school? I remember the mood in that class, like an hour-long yawn, and I recall those hardcover text books, filled with literary stick-figures and slightly patronizing question-bubbles (and that heavy magazine paper, I swear the makers of Clue could have added that text book in betwixt the Wrench and Revolver), but I don't recall much of what I was supposed to have learned. Sure, we covered John A. and all the rest, but the material was such a fine-ground dust of refined information that it sieved its way out through pores and hair follicles once the unit test was done with.

My strongest memory from any history class was in grade seven, when my teacher wandered off on a tangent about Louis Riel's messiah complex. It was a flash of eccentric nonsense throwing a wrench in the otherwise well-oiled narrative of historical cause and effect which (given its intense distillation for grade school lessons) is frankly inhuman. My teacher gave us a flash of character in the drear wasteland of overly simplified plot. Beaton's history comics remind me of that unusual lesson, only funnier.

In the traditional bifurcation between character and plot-driven narratives, grade and high-school textbooks dig trenches through the chalk landscapes of Plot, whereas Beaton has built herself a carnival driven by Character, and it makes all the difference. Stuff like Beaton's work can whet the intellectual appetite, pique interest and build a memorable foundation for the drier details. Any high-school textbook writers out there? Call Kate Beaton. Seriously. History is bursting at the seams with character, wit, and incongruity, so what's with the curriculum guys? Everybody knows it's easier to eat celery with a little peanut-butter on top³, and, socially speaking, a solid education in History is as necessary as your daily quantity of dietary fibre.

Beaton has a book titled Never Learn Anything From History, available through Beaton's TopatoCo store. For anyone in or heading out to L.A., she'll be participating in her first art show down at Galley Meltdown, These are Their Stories, in which each piece is an artist's take on a one-line episode summary from "Law & Order". You can see a few at the show's website.

Hark, A Vagrant resides here and updates weekly, sort of.

¹ http://thefablerblog.com/kevins-column/creator-interview-kate-beaton-of-hark-a-vagrant

² Assuming no peanut allergies of course. I just couldn't bring myself to say Cheese Whiz; seriously, what is that stuff? It looks like some kind of goo that serves as blood for the villainous extraterrestrial from a 1950s monster movie that never was....