![]() ![]() They always leave me wanting to know more about these people and their lives. She is a master when it comes to making the minutiae of life into the most interesting stories I’ve ever read. Part five continues with even more stories about the hardships of working out there, but it also ties everything up wonderfully.īeaton really may be my favorite writer when it comes to telling this kind of story. ![]() Then, it takes a quick turn when Beaton is asked to help calm down a woman who is thought to be high and is refusing to leave the women’s restroom. Part four starts out feeling a lot better than some of the other stories, with nice moments shared between coworkers. We see their struggles, we see how hard it is leaving their families, and we see their relationships with each other and with the oil sands themselves. Instead of just being random characters who sad and tragic things keep happening to, we get to see them as hard workers who really care for each other and each have their own little quirks and eccentricities.īeaton wraps up the story with two more comics, again letting us get to know the people who worked there better. These moments of levity really help to make you get to know and care deeply about these people. We get to know the characters a little bit by seeing little slices of their lives. Even though the theme might be sad events that stick out in Beaton’s memory, there are also little funny and heartwarming moments, like the lunch conversation in this story. Here, the emotions are more melancholy and subdued. We don’t even directly witness the wreck or it’s aftermath, but it still hits like a ton of bricks. Beaton is so talented at using small stories that take place over such a short amount of time and involving only a few people and making them seem giant and monumental. The bad news piles on when she finds out that there was a horrible head-on collision involving “a couple of young fellas from out way.” She scrambles to find out where exactly they were from and if they were people she knew. They run into one of the older workers who’s just standing in the middle of the road. The second comic is a story that starts out with Beaton and a coworker just chatting about things like fishing and work conditions. I could honestly read this kind of story all day long as long as they were being told by Kate Beaton. Even though there’s not really a lot of excitement or thrilling plot points and there are even a lot of panels where no one talks at all, it remains completely compelling. Beaton is so good at this kind of storytelling. Later, an announcement is made that one of the other workers passed away on-site. Only a handful of the ducks survived, and so the area she worked at took precautions to avoid the same thing happening to them. In it, Beaton remembers a time when 500 ducks landed in pond filled with waste from the oil sands. The first part is where the entire story gets it’s name. Ducks is about a lot of things, and among these, it is about environmental destruction in an environment that includes humans. ![]() It is not a place I could describe in one or two stories. A larger work gets talked about from time to time. It is a sketch because I want to test how I would tell these stories, and how I feel about sharing them. It is a complicated place, it is not the same for all, and these are only my own experiences there. These comics deal with Beaton’s memories of her time there and how she’s still trying to work out her feelings about it.ĭucks is about part of my time working at a mining site in Fort McMurray, the events are from 2008. Beaton worked there for a while to pay off her college debt. If you’re unfamiliar with the Athabasca Oil Sands, they’re the largest known deposit of bitumen in the world, in the form of semi-solid crude bitumen, sand, clay and water. These vignettes tell about tragedies, loss, daily interactions and the lasting effect that working there had on her. Kate Beaton, the writer and illustrator of one of the best webcomics of all time, Hark! A Vagrant, recently released in five parts a long form comic about her time spent working on the oil sands of Alberta. The 200 Best Lesbian, Bisexual & Queer Movies Of All Time.LGBTQ Television Guide: What To Watch Now. ![]()
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