Like everyone in the oil fields, Katie-not Kate, yet-is there by necessity-she has to pay back her student loans. The camps where the oil workers live are cut off from the outside world their inhabitants are a shadow population, at home neither in the barracks where they sleep nor among the families they have left behind. (She has also written and drawn two children’s picture books.) The book chronicles the two years she spent working at three different mines in the Athabasca oil sands, in northeastern Alberta-another liminal space. “ Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands,” is Beaton’s first stand-alone book for adults. Among a certain type of quiet person who valued a good joke about the Brontës, she became a minor celebrity. Even in her most elaborate sequences, she managed to give the deceptive impression that she had happened purely by accident upon precisely the right line to communicate a haughty glare or an embarrassed slouch. Beaton riffed on eighteenth-century French paintings scattered anachronisms with gleeful abandon and called attention to people, often women, unfairly minimized in historical narrative. The drawings in “Hark!”-funny, feminist, fond of erudite slapstick-married a deep knowledge of visual art to an engaging lightness of touch. She honed her wit to an exquisite sharpness in her Web comic “Hark! A Vagrant,” a perpetually delightful trove of goofy humor, often about historical obscura, that ran from 2007 to 2018. Beaton’s arrangement of space-the cartoonist’s equivalent of timing-is exceptionally skillful she seems to know just what to show and what to leave out, when to draw out a scene to absurdist and excruciating length and when to compress a joke to a single frame. These narrow white strips are known as gutters, and their skillful placement is what makes one isolated image seem to suggest the next.
Her drawings are accomplished and often beautiful, but her work is distinguished above all by the quality of attention she brings to the areas between the panels of her comics.
The Canadian cartoonist Kate Beaton is a master of liminal spaces.
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