Hark! A Vagrant
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
Since Kate Beaton appeared on the comics scene in 2007 her cartoons have become fan favourites and gathered an enormous following, appearing in the New Yorker, Harper and the LA Times, to name but a few. Her website, Hark! A Vagrant, receives an average of 1.2 million hits a month, 500 thousand of them unique. Why? Because she's not just making silly jokes. She's making jokes about everything we learned in school, and more.
Praised for their expression, intelligence and comic timing, her cartoons are best known for their wonderfully light touch on historical and literary topics. The jokes are a knowing look at history through a very modern perspective, written for every reader, and are a crusade against anyone with the idea that history is boring. It's pretty hard to argue with that when you're laughing your head off at a comic about Thucydides. They also cover whatever's on her mind that week - be it the perils of city living or the pop-cultural infiltration of Sex and the City, featuring an array of characters, from a mischievous pony, to reinvented superheroes, to a surly teen duo who could be the anti-Hardy-Boys.
Perceptive, sharp and wonderfully irreverent, Hark! A Vagrant is as informative as it is hilarious, and a comic collection to treasure.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Recent comics sensation Beaton probably, definitely, knows more about history and literature than the average reader, and this collection of her webcomic mostly collections of three-panel gag shows it. But while her comics are pungent with the aroma of authentic knowledge, they wear it lightly, with a jittery humor that's surprisingly effective given the lashings of irony that Beaton layers on top. While she's perfectly content to base her cartoon strips around lesser-known figures (criminal "masterminds" Burke and Hare, anyone?), most of her cartoons put people like the Bront sisters or Jules Verne out there and wryly undercut them with mock pulp headlines and dishy asides. While the focus in Beaton's rip-quick and squiggly drawings is getting a good joke out of, say, the death of French general Montcalm or playing to the world's ignorance of even the most basic facets of Canadian history and culture, she also drops in some sharp literary criticism. If she had pushed her faux na f outrageousness any further, Beaton might have ventured too far into Sarah Vowellesque flipness. But this is that rarest combination of literate irony and devastatingly funny humor when was the last time you read a comic strip collection that not only has but needs an index?
