She recreates life in an oil sands mining operation in granular detail and allows us to make the connections ourselves–as she had to when she showed up to work there at age twenty-one. “In Ducks, Kate Beaton doesn’t tell us how capitalism extracts, exploits, commodifies, and alienates.You can preorder the book via Bookshop, and the blurbs for the book are impressive. It is a funny place, with the book off to the printers now after so long, to be here in the empty room, waiting to find out.”

I wanted to bear witness to what has stayed with me so indelibly, I wanted to get to the heart of it, I hope I have. But now on the eve of a wider audience reading the thing that I have held on so tightly to for so many years, I find myself nervously pacing the rooms I’ve emptied out from my memory into the book. In short, this was a book I had to make-was always going to make. Of course, it is my own memories, so it has lived with me since they have existed, but my time in Fort McMurray had such an impact on me that I think I have been subconsciously been sorting those memories into panels before I even knew I was doing it as a way of catharsis or release-it is the comic artists’ natural exercise.

“It has lived in my mind for a long time. “‘I had this book in mind for many years before I brought it to Drawn and Quarterly, and it took me that many more to create it,” Beaton told Lit Hub. Since then she’s worked on kids books like King Baby…but the story she tells in Ducks was never far from her mind, she told Lithub:

For young Katie, her wounds may never heal.īeaton gained famed for her hilarious Hark! A Vagrant webcomic, a frothy romp through literature and family relations that hit the bestseller lists and earned her a Beat Comics Industry Person of Year nod in 2011. Katie encounters the harsh reality of life in the oil sands where trauma is an everyday occurrence yet never discussed. It does not hit home until she moves to a spartan, isolated worksite for higher pay. Being one of the few women among thousands of men, the culture shock is palpable. Arriving in Fort McMurray, Katie finds work in the lucrative camps owned and operated by the world’s largest oil companies.

Beaton ducks