Kate Beacon: Dude Watchin' With the Brontes

Book review: Hark! A Vagrant

Kate Beacon: Hark! A VagrantKate Beaton: Hark! A Vagrant (Drawn and Quarterly, 9/27/11)

Even if you’ve never heard of Kate Beaton, you’ve probably seen her work. Beaton, a Nova Scotian cartoonist and webmistress of harkavagrant.com, has quickly become a mainstay of Internet and blog culture, with her comics being re-posted around the Web and shared widely between bloggers, history buffs, and readers. Her sharp and somewhat absurd humor and casual riffing on history are instantly recognizable, and have earned Beaton a number of fans and accolades in the six years that harkavagrant.com has been online.

Zine Scene: Shortcomings

When I first read Adrian Tomine’s graphic novel Shortcomings more than a year ago, I was struck by two things: the comic’s sensitive and honest portrayal of modern race relations, and the wonderfully clean art style. The former proceeds mostly from Tomine himself, a fourth generation Japanese American. The latter is strongly inspired by modern masters of the medium like Daniel Clowes and the Hernandez brothers, and it results in evocative illustration that recalls classic comic art of the 1950s and even Roy Lichtenstein.