One day before Christmas Eve 2022, Kate Beaton’s (39) smartphone suddenly started ringing and buzzing almost non-stop. “At first I thought my phone was broken,” the Canadian comic book author recently told public radio station CBC. “But it was a million people who sent messages to me.”
A few minutes earlier, former US President Barack Obama had sent a message to the more than 200 million followers on his social media channels: a list entitled “Barack Obama’s Favorite Books of 2020”.
That was a surreal experience.
Kate Beaton on Obama’s recommendation and the aftermath
Ninth place: Kate Beaton’s autobiographical graphic novel Ducks -Two Years in the Oil Sands. “I couldn’t believe it at first,” says Beaton in a radio interview. “It was a surreal experience.”
In North America, “Ducks” is not only a bestseller because of Barack Obama’s recommendation. Numerous critics were just as enthusiastic as the ex-president: Kate Beaton’s book can be found on the 2022 book lists of the New York Times, the New Yorker and Time Magazine.
As a result, it has held a stable top spot in the US comic sales lists for months. And in Canada it has been at the top of the non-fiction bestseller list for a few weeks.
Now the almost 450-page story about Kate Beaton’s experiences in the oil fields of the western Canadian province of Alberta is also to be published in German: publish it on June 13th the Stuttgart Zwerchfell publishing house and the Berlin publishing house Reprodukt together.
Beaton is expected to visit Germany for the occasion, where she intends to present her work at public events in Berlin, Hamburg, Stuttgart, Frankfurt and at the Munich Comic Festival (June 8-11). According to her publisher, she will be accompanied by the poet Lindsay Bird, who plays a role in “Ducks” because, like Beaton, she worked in the oil fields.
The book provides a rare glimpse into the largely off-limits world of northern Alberta’s remote oil fields. Kate Beaton, who comes from Cape Breton Island on Canada’s east coast, worked there for two years in materials distribution and office jobs to pay off the loan for her studies.
Her report about that time documents mercilessly the hard everyday life of the people who work in oil and gas production, their often brutal treatment of each other and especially towards women, as well as the overexploitation of nature.
In doing so, Beaton describes with great empathy for the people around her and a fine sense of humour, the great mental and physical stresses associated with life in this extreme situation for herself and some of her colleagues.
Her series of images are reduced to the essentials, her line is clearer and more concentrated than in earlier works, which often looked sketchy and fluffed. The consistent coloring with graded gray and blue tones also makes her sequences of images appear more mature than anything that has been known of her before.
What connects “Ducks” and Beaton’s previous comics is an outstanding sense of timing and punchlines. That makes the graphic novel an accessible, entertaining read, despite its heavy subject matter and some shocking passages.
The book strikes many chords in perfect balance.
Publisher Peggy Burns, Drawn & Quarterly
“The book strikes many chords in perfect balance,” says Kate Beaton’s publisher Peggy Burns of Montréal publisher Drawn & Quarterly in an interview with the Tagesspiegel. “It’s a personal story, but it’s also a universal one.” While Beaton works through an explicitly Canadian experience, it addresses many universal issues, including the relationship between rural and urban populations and between blue-collar and white-collar workers.
Beaton conveys her experiences with empathy and anger without being undifferentiated, Peggy Burns emphasizes: “It could easily have been a more didactic story: men are bad! Oil is bad! But Kate went to great lengths to capture the nuance.”
“Ducks” is the fastest bestseller in the publishing company’s history to date in the program of the publishing house, which was founded in 1990 and specializes in sophisticated comic stories and avant-garde illustration art.
A working-class story like this has never before been told in comic book form.
Peggy Burns
“Obama’s recommendation then helped sales a lot,” says Burns. “Typically, sales stop in stores around Christmas, but we continued to ship the book over the holidays and into January.”
Kate Beaton was a popular author before Ducks. For almost ten years she has been writing her award-winning webcomic Hark! A Vagrant” satirizes literary classics and other cultural works, cheerfully rewriting the history of the world and her native Canada.
The strips were also published as books in a condensed form and topped the New York Times Comics Best Seller list for several months. 2021 is according to the book “Ocht! Lumpenpack” a second anthology of the series, which ended in 2018, was published in German by Zwerchfell-Verlag in Stuttgart: “To the side, guy!”
Through this series, Beaton already had a large following, especially in Canada and the United States. However, “a working-class story like this has never been told in comic form before,” says Burns, making the new book’s success difficult to predict.
“I think, ducks shows that society is capable of having nuanced conversations about difficult issues,” says Burns. “Kate makes it clear that things aren’t always good or bad.”
To home page
