One of her most popular characters, a round, splay-legged, wordless pony, would eventually spawn a children’s book, The Princess and the Pony, and the Apple TV+ series Pinecone & Pony. Her work - clean, expressive, hand-drawn black-and-white comics - was reblogged and reposted endlessly. Its look and sense of humor became a defining aesthetic for a newly social, giddily exuberant online moment, as internet speeds increased, load times improved, and LiveJournal, Tumblr, and other blogging platforms turned into identity-defining scrapbooks, proudly curatorial and full of found images.Īt its height in the early 2010s, Beaton’s homepage for “Hark! A Vagrant” was getting half a million visitors a month. Francis, Robinson Crusoe, and the American Founding Fathers, its sharp, daffy feminism reframed familiar figures and stories in order to dwell on absurdities, hypocrisies, and endearing, irreducible human quirks. The online comic “Hark! A Vagrant” established Beaton as a defining voice of online humor in the late aughts.
Later this year, it will almost certainly be joined by Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands, Beaton’s new graphic memoir. I spot Beaton’s first book on a shelf downstairs: Hark! A Vagrant, a collection of her strange, charming webcomics. There are antique farm tools and jugs salvaged from century-old stills, which remind Beaton of the time her grandfather gathered enough moonshine for a party of farmers from 40 miles around only to find it all poured out after his son tasted it and assumed it was poison. Upstairs there are generations of school projects, including her own. There is a cane, the oldest thing in the museum, that belonged to a many-greats-grandfather. She spent a lot of hours alone here amid artifacts, much of them her family’s.
Beaton worked in this museum when she was in high school, fielding questions from tourists and helping people sort through genealogies. In the second-floor room of a small local-history museum in Mabou, a very small village on the western coast of Canada’s already quite remote island of Cape Breton, cartoonist Kate Beaton tells me dozens of little stories.
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