Hark! Kate Beaton’s back with her first non-kiddles comic in seven years, and her first feature-length narrative - a memoir called Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands. It’s about her time working for various oil companies in rural Canadia between 2005 and 2008 and her observations on what that business does to the people who work in it, the surrounding environment, and, of course, her.
I’m somewhere in the middle on this one - I liked parts of it, others not so much. It’s a very thorough look at the day-to-day business of working as a tool crib (someone who gets the required tools out of storage for the engineers) and later on as an administrator in the office area. And there’s the rub: if you’re gonna do a realistic comic depicting tedious jobs, it’s gonna be tedious to read at times, even in the hands of a cartoonist as talented as Kate Beaton.
Her central thesis is that the oil business is damaging to almost everyone involved. Particularly the workers who travel from all over Canada (and the world) to work in these remote locations in harsh conditions, all because the pay’s so good and there aren’t any lucrative jobs anywhere else. What’s not considered is the psychological impact of being separated from civilisation and loved ones, leading to extensive substance abuse, loneliness, mental health problems, and broken homes.
And that’s not to mention the damage to the environment (a number of ducks die from oil poisoning, hence the title - it’s also symbolic of the rot of the business) and First Nation peoples who live nearby and get sick. And then there’s the damage Beaton herself endured as she reveals just how bad things can get in places where men outnumber women 50-1: she was raped twice.
She quickly establishes from the start the constant casual misogyny of working in these locations and unwanted attention she receives on a daily basis. Even so, it’s still jarring to see how extreme things got and it’s immensely brave of her to tell her story like this. Those sequences in particular are creatively portrayed so that they drift into the abstract rather than graphic and more accurately give the reader an idea of how she got through those traumatic experiences mentally.
There are glimpses of Beaton’s future cartooning success as she begins posting her strips online (these will go on to become the Hark! A Vagrant books) and she sketches a weird looking horse in what will become her children’s book The Princess and the Pony. Towards the end, her familiar humour becomes more noticeable too, possibly as she becomes more comfortable working in the environment, which reminded me of how funny she can be in her comics.
This is also the first Beaton comic I’ve seen that really showcases her artistic talents. Most of the comic is drawn in the familiar Hark! A Vagrant style but there are many splash pages showcasing both Beaton’s skill and Canada’s natural beauty that are quite something.
It’s quite a hefty book - 430 pages - and, as much a fan as I am of Beaton’s, reading about the dull jobs and constantly repulsive behaviour of her co-workers got really repetitive after a while and I found the book easy to put down.
It’s often an illuminating read as there aren’t any mainstream books, let alone comics, on this subject, and Beaton does present as balanced a view of life working in the oil sands as she can, given her experiences. She meets plenty of decent men and is able to achieve her goal of paying off her student loan from the money she makes working here, and acknowledges how life-changing the money can be for so many families whose (usually) husbands/fathers come to work here.
Similarly, she makes a convincing case for the damaging nature of the business. Hopefully things are different today with the proliferation of smartphones/wifi making boredom less of an issue, as well as the openness of talking about mental health possibly cutting down on the destructive behaviour of men who bottled it up until it exploded out of them.
This book shows that Beaton’s more than the creator of gag strips and is capable of producing full-length narrative comics that deal with complex and difficult topics. Ducks definitely isn’t as much fun as the Hark! A Vagrant stuff but then it’s not trying to be - still, there’s a lot of plodding, uninteresting sequences and scenes that keep cropping up. I get why she’s done that - to highlight the drudgery and consistent fear of what it’s like to be a young woman in these places - but they still weigh down the more thoughtful, impressive sequences.
Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands is a mixed bag for me but I’m glad Kate Beaton’s back and any new comic from her is better than none at all. Fans should expect a very different Beaton comic this time around but not an unwelcome one at that.
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