You need to do that to get the impression of the scale of the thing because if you look at a cartoon landscape, you might not be wowed by it in the same way that I was in person.
I’m looking at the thing and I’m like, pretty much copying it, exactly.
I didn’t want to misrepresent what it was and it’s also very intricate. They’re too precise, you know, what a Syncrude site is. I had to use so much photo reference to get it right. Before we get into the content, let’s talk about the art! The section-opener scenes of the various sites, that’s not cartoon to me, that’s fine art illustration. The Narwhal caught up with her to talk about the book, being released on Sept. It’s also about power, capitalism, the land and labour, and what Beaton learned about Canada as she came of age. as well as the intimate emotions of workers separated from loved ones for weeks at a time.ĭucks: Two Years in the Oil Sands is about Beaton, her debt and the effects of isolation and family separation, particularly on men. Her precise lines convey the enormity of oilsands landscapes - “it looked like the moon,” she says of her first day pulling into a Syncrude mine site in Mildred Lake, Alta. Fans of her signature so-bad-it’s-good illustration need to be prepared: turns out Beaton can actually draw really well. Now it’s a full memoir, and it’s spectacular. In 2014, Beaton released a five-part comic as a first go at telling her oilsands story.
“Ducks are migratory animals that get stuck when they land in the oil - the metaphor is easy,” says cartoonist Kate Beaton about the title of her new graphic novel memoir. Hark! A Vagrant eventually became two bestselling collections. Scribbling about the sex life of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert was a way for her to remember who she was, or at least who she wanted to be. Born and raised on Cape Breton Island, Beaton honed her joke-telling skills under serious circumstances: in her early 20s, she joined generations of Maritimers and left home to pay the bills, in her case student loans.īeaton spent two years in worker camps in the Alberta oilsands, which she experienced as lonely places where everyone is homesick and women are seriously outnumbered. Kate Beaton hit the comic scene with Hark! A Vagrant, a mid-aughts web strip that combined a love of history with an absurdist sense of humour.
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