Strip Search: Hark! A Vagrant
In Strip Search, Jennifer M. Babcock reviews and recommends comic strips available in print and on the web.
I’m not sure how well known Kate Beaton’s work on her webcomic Hark! A Vagrant is, but I don’t think its is as well known as it should be — which is saying a lot since Beaton has recently been setting the internet on fire with her talent. Anyway, if you’re not familiar with her work, check it out and you’ll see that a lot of the themes cover literature and history, so it’s a little geeky but not in the same vein as a lot of gaming/techy comics like PVP, Penny Arcade, or xkcd.
Miss Beaton, you see, has a background in history and anthropology from Mount Allison University in New Brunswick, Canada- whoever said history was a useless degree is obviously wrong, since she’s obviously made it big with her “history” comics! And while I don’t think that you can really appreciate this comic without knowing an inkling of western culture, it’s become clear that this comic isn’t beyond reach for most people. In fact, I’d say that the only pre-requisite for this comic is an appreciation for the absurd.
EXAMPLES!!!
One of Beaton’s history comics:
So, that comic was apparently about Marie Antoinette, who was the Queen of France during the French Revolution(ed: Happy Bastille Day, tout le monde) – you know, she told people to go eat cake and then got beheaded? Well, even if you didn’t know that you were probably still able to appreciate this comic.
One of Beaton’s lit comics:
This is one of my favorite comics… and I’m not even that familiar with Yeats’s work to be honest. In fact, have I ever even read anything by him? Maybe once, when I was looking up quotes about heartbreak on google… anyway, one could say that at the very least I knew of Yeats.
And really, all one needs to know is that Yeats was a famous poet, which you can get from the context of the comic. Beaton takes Yeats off his literary pedestal and reminds us that he may have had normal problems that dudes face today: women always go for the jerks.
This is what makes Beaton’s comics so great: they have an intellectual appeal but they’re not so intellectual that it leaves people scratching their heads. As a perfect mixture of absurdity and academia, these comics are like a cross between Jeffrey Brown and the New Yorker.
And I have to say, it’s a nice and refreshing change to see a geeky webcomic about the humanities for a change!
Jennifer M. Babcock holds her MA in art history and is currently pursuing her doctorate in Egyptology from NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts, where she is also known as a comics scholar. A creator herself, she is the artist and writer behind C’est La Vie, which is syndicated by Universal Press Syndicate and available at http://www.gocomics.com/cestlavie.
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