Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands
By Kate Beaton
Tumblr in the mid-2000’s was a unique place to grow up and discover who you were as a person. If you were as online as my friends and I, there’s a fairly good chance you’ve read at least one, if not many, of Kate Beaton’s Hark a Vagrant webcomics. When she published physical volumes of her comics under the same name, it was like seeing a classmate get a publishing deal. It felt good.
Ducks is a very different book from her other work. It retains the same artstyle, though doesn’t dip into the silly, floppy look that some of Hark a Vagrant does. It never strays too far from the reality of the story she is trying to tell. Coming back to Beaton’s identifiable style helps soften the harsh world, while the grayscale palette keeps the story rooted to that grim reality she can never escape. I was worried the watercolor bleakness would overwhelm me, but by the time it gets to the Oil Sands, the dark hues feel a more natural sky than color would. Beaton intersperses expressive characters in her traditional style with setting panels, full of a more detailed reality. There’s never a moment where it feels like she’s dipping into a cartoonish rut, even when the faces she draws are more than a little silly.
If you’ve read most of the Hark a Vagrant comics, you may even recognize a couple panels in this book. Every once and a while Beaton would post a comic that had nothing to do with satirizing some historical figure, but was just a glimpse into her life. My memory is only of winter scenes. Sad memories of being alone and away from family during the holidays, in a small room handing out items to men in hard hats, that I now know to be her time spent in the tool crib. I found those sections extremely satisfying because those comics were always something I wanted to know more about when she first posted them.
More than a memoir by a much loved cartoonist, Ducks is a story about the people working in the Oil Sands of Alberta Canada. Those trying to dig out of their income bracket through terrible, exacting work. And the added consequences of working as a woman, miles away from any town, surrounded by desperate and lonely men. The book is full of bleak, staggering moments that take both the reader and participants time to return from. Even while Beaton is being harassed by a constant stream of male coworkers, with no help from her superiors, she writes many of those men she meets with empathy. She grapples with this concept from time to time while talking to other women working in the Oil Sands, giving context to the complicated life everyone is living in the camps, without ever excusing the usually nameless men who sexually assault or harass the women working alongside them.
The clear-sighted retelling of Beaton’s complicated relationship to those grueling jobs and the people she worked with, alongside her cartoonish style set in that grim reality, make this book an immediate classic for Graphic Memoirs. Anyone needing examples of this genre can add this book to the short list, and they should put it near the top.