Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands

Kathryn “Kate/Katie” Beaton is part of a large family from Mabou, Cape Breton, in Nova Scotia, Canada, a province influenced by Gaelic-speaking settlers. Cape Breton, once a producer of coal, steel, and fish, is now a deindustrialized city where there are fewer opportunities. Beaton’s grandmother’s generation left to work as maids in Boston, while her mother’s generation went to Windsor, Ontario, to find work in the auto industry. This generational distancing of families and destruction of local communities is interwoven into the region’s folk songs (as depicted in Ducks on page 11).

After Beaton graduated from Mount Allison University with degrees in history and anthropology, she left for the Alberta oil sands, which later inspired Ducks. While she always loved art, she didn’t start making comics until she worked at a museum in Victoria, British Columbia. Her comics, posted online in the early 2000s, eventually became a webcomic called Hark! A Vagrant, which ran from 2007 to 2018. This comic won the 2011 Ignatz Award for Outstanding Online Comic and many others. Because Beaton grew up in a town with a bookmobile instead of a library, Beaton was unfamiliar with many contemporary comic artists, and her art and