It could hardly be more different in tone from [Beaton's] popular larky strip Hark! A Vagrant ... Yes, it’s funny at moments; Beaton’s low-key wryness is present and correct, and her drawings of people are as charming and as expressive as ever. But its mood overall is deeply melancholic. Her story, which runs to more than 400 pages, encompasses not only such thorny matters as social class and environmental destruction; it may be the best book I have ever read about sexual harassment ... There are some gorgeous drawings in Ducks of the snow and the starry sky at night. But the human terrain, in her hands, is never only black and white ... And it’s this that gives her story not only its richness and depth, but also its astonishing grace. Life is complex, she tell us, quietly, and we are all in it together; each one of us is only trying to survive. What a difficult, gorgeous and abidingly humane book. It really does deserve to win all the prizes.
... powerful ... Beaton’s soulful masterwork ... Eschewing the distancing irony that characterized many of her Vagrant comics, it is the most gripping graphic memoir of 2022, offering an unblinking tale of personal trial set against a nation in economic flux ... Beaton expertly depicts the complexities of operating in misogynistic spaces, where sexual harassment is common ... Beyond her own difficulties, Beaton provides a wider lens on a brutal makeshift culture that leaves some workers stressed, depressed and lonely. In the afterword to Ducks — which she began creating in 2016 — Beaton considers camp life with profound empathy, weighing how the individual can get ground down by the methods and machinery of Big Energy ... Mining ever deeper into her own experiences, Beaton poignantly captures how she and her colleagues shouldered the burdens of work in the oil sands ... Throughout “Ducks,” Beaton’s pen conveys a sense of moody displacement. Camp life can feel as bleak as the book’s monochromatic grays, and we encounter so many stoic faces that we begin to question what lurks behind the sudden smile of a co-worker. She also occasionally pulls back, drawing sweeping panoramas of the landscape that remind us of the natural beauty (ah, the northern lights) amid the towering cranes and smokestacks — an aesthetic tug of war over what will survive ... provides a complex picture from a specific era, not a simple critique.
Ducks is anchored by Katie’s time in the mines, but it seeks to show her experiences as typical of a much larger swath of workers who are lured to the oil sands at the cost of their health, their dignity, and sometimes their lives. The Katie of Ducks is the author’s younger self, but she is also the reader’s guide to the intricacies of an all-too-usual life ... As if to underscore the book’s distance from her old lighthearted work, Beaton has filled several of the interstices between chapters and scenes with staggering, gigantic drawings of mining equipment and aerial views of the mines themselves; the images aren’t beautiful, exactly, but they are excellent, and they suggest the scale and seriousness of Beaton’s ambition ... a work of more than four hundred pages, but Beaton has compressed its narrative in ways that make it as fluidly readable as a Hark! strip. She has also put her skill at omission to new uses. Many of the book’s important events are cropped out, into the invisible areas between pages and chapters, to be revisited later ... a rebuttal to hierarchies of silence, an attempt to draw attention to forms of suffering that are easier to ignore. The punishing and lonely experiences of the people who perform the actual labor of the petroleum industry are often withheld and concealed—they are inconvenient for employers, shameful for the workers themselves, and difficult for outsiders to grasp. They are perhaps most readily available in metaphor. Under the dust jacket of her book, Beaton has hidden the silhouette of a duck, embossed into the cover with a pretty rainbow-wrapping-paper foil that shimmers like an oil slick.
Beaton has created not a precise, chronological chain of events but a carefully curated collage of her experiences over those two years, showing us more feelings than she does incidents. The sardonic humor of her earlier comics is still present, but the story relies more on nuances of dialogue and metaphor. Everything is there for a reason and everything means something ... Full of the insight of hindsight and the sorrowful anger of the young working class, Ducks triumphs in its honesty.
... this observant, angry and compelling memoir tells of a vast, callous industry and its effect on the people who keep it running ... Ducks builds its world with unhurried, immersive naturalism ... These scenes hum with life, and many would make a fine evocation of any workplace. But danger and darkness loom ... also a critique of a wider world that’s eager for cheap energy and careless of the way it is made ... That hopeful emblem points to a happy ending of sorts. Beaton paid off her loan and returned to her beloved Cape Breton. Her impressive career will be propelled still further by this engrossing and powerful memoir. Another author might have made their creative journey a bigger part of this story, but Beaton uses her considerable skills to focus on the wider picture: big oil, and the community that makes a living from it. Her exposé is damning, but full of humanity.
Bleak, lonely, and with a boldly graphic line ... Beaton’s figures are rendered in scrunchy, expressive lines...vividly expressive ... The imagery here is richer and more cutting than the imagery of Hark! A Vagrant, more suited to this lengthy, ambitious memoir ... Devastating.
Beaton draws on those crucial experiences to create an impassioned, astonishing memoir ... In immersive black, white, gray and blue-tinted panels, Beaton bears powerful witness to desperate adversity and redeeming goodness with sharp candor and unexpected humor. Her panels are strikingly emotive: furrowed eyebrows demanding attention, an undecorated artificial Christmas tree on its side, clenched fingers during a difficult conversation. As if to remind readers of what's happening beyond, Beaton regularly inserts zoomed-out landscapes underscoring the devastating cost of such lucrative opportunities beyond the human toll. Beaton's memoir, despite an almost 450-page count, is a mesmerizing story that readers will want to devour in a single sitting.
... a serious, ambitious work ... a compassionate account of the degradation—personal, spiritual, environmental—of life in an industrial camp far removed from the comforts of home ... With patience, empathy, a journalist’s eye for detail and a novelist’s ear for dialogue, Ms. Beaton recreates her time in a place where the rules of civilized society didn’t apply ... Ms. Beaton recounts her own encounters with harassment and assault, but she treats these stories with sympathy. She implies that nearly everyone in the oil sands is a victim of an economy that dehumanizes those who can’t afford to take other work ... Visually, Ms. Beaton’s figures are fairly simple and her layout rarely breaks from the grid. This, together with the book’s gray-scale palette, suggests the grim monotony of life in the oil sands, but it is a shame she doesn’t take more advantage of the freedoms afforded by pictorial storytelling. Her strongest images are her detailed landscapes, which capture the massive, apocalyptic feel of a place in which the race for oil reduces the natural world to rubble and toxic sludge. On these wordless pages, Ms. Beaton efficiently conveys what it was like to be in a part of the world that often felt unfit for life of any kind.
It may come as a shock to find that there's so much darkness lurking within the mind that gave us those perky revolutionaries, feisty peasants and a roly-poly Napoleon. It's only now that Beaton has seen fit to tell the other side of her life story: how terribly she suffered during the two years she worked in Alberta's oil fields ... isn't drawn as engagingly as Hark! A Vagrant. That's understandable considering it's a journalistic undertaking, not a high-spirited, episodic strip. It's surprising to learn that it was during this period that Beaton began drawing and publishing Hark! It may be time to revisit the strip — is there a dark underbelly there? One thing's for sure, we can't take Beaton's unique humor for granted anymore.
... [a] shattering tour-de-force ... To call it a departure from her usual style is an understatement: It’s as if the Marx Brothers suddenly changed course and produced Citizen Kane ... Beaton’s skills as a storyteller and cartoonist keep the pages turning as the reader becomes more deeply invested in her quest to muddle through to a zero balance, while dealing with physical and emotional extremes. We’re introduced to a cavalcade of believable characters rendered, like the book’s artwork, in a few meaningful strokes and shades of grey ... What elevates Ducks beyond simple mastery of craft are the social overtones. Though the book takes place in the mid-aughts, it documents tensions that define our current moment. Ducks is a coming-of-age story but the motivating driver behind the hero’s journey is the cold logic of capitalism ... Beaton may have strong opinions but she allows her characters to speak for themselves, often eloquently, despite having some alarming things to say. She is also remarkably observant of sociological nuance ... Beaton is skilled enough to let all this subtext soak so naturally into the sediment that you don’t even know it’s there until you put the book down. Ducks foregrounds the humanity of its characters and the complicated emotions of its protagonist. It sustains that energy over thousands of drawings that retain her light touch despite the weight of the subject. And if getting all this out on paper can’t make right all that Beaton saw and experienced in her early 20s, it has at least transformed those struggles into something profound and universal. That’s all one can hope for in a masterpiece.
A remarkable glimpse into the fraught and under-explored daily lives of the people who work in one of Canada’s most contentious industries ... Her deft oscillations between the absurdity and the ordinary human reality of her stint working in and around Fort McMurray can be clearly traced back to her formative years as a humorist ... What Beaton has assembled is a collection of personal moments...that show how the grander political, environmental, cultural, and economic questions posed by Canada’s love–hate relationship with its oil industry play out in the lives of individuals. Myriad small moments and details coalesce into a broad and surprisingly empathetic portrait of the Alberta oil sands ... Beaton lays bare the unique social and personal destructiveness of these liminal communities and asks if anyone emerges from them without being changed, often for the worse ... Ducks is political, personal, monumental, intimate, generous, upsetting, surreal, and disarmingly human: Kate Beaton has produced a work that will resonate with readers for a long time.
An autobiographical and sociological masterpiece ... There are a lot of extraordinary things about Ducks. Beaton manages to deftly juggle huge amounts of information ... The book is about big, complicated issues....but Beaton touches on these myriad complex subjects gently ... Beaton is smart and careful, with an unmatched skill at her craft ... But the real reason Ducks is extraordinary is because Beaton herself is extraordinary. Few people in the same situation would have listened as closely, asked as many questions, and thought as deeply about what they had seen and heard as Kate did.
Beaton’s art style is a typical comic strip type that reads well enough, but isn’t really innovative — it’s more focused on solid storytelling ... Beaton never preaches to the choir though, she allows her experiences to speak for themselves.
Beaton...demonstrates her remarkable range and storytelling prowess with her debut graphic memoir, Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands. With strong prose and striking art, she captures the complexities of a place often defined by stark binaries: the Alberta oil sands ... Beaton honors the humanity of the oil workers. She illuminates the larger contexts of work camps ... She puts everything, good and bad, into the book ... Her talent for drawing people, and especially facial expressions, adds layers of emotional depth to every scene ... A powerful account of the ongoing harm of patriarchal violence, and an equally powerful testament to what is possible when we pay attention, seek out each other’s humanity and honor the hard truths alongside the beautiful.
The Beaton you know and love is undoubtedly here, from wry moments of comedy to her deceptively simple line work ... This lucid, vulnerable, and perfectly balanced graphic memoir weaves sharp moments of humor with a masterfully captured feeling of homesickness, illuminating the generational trauma of economic disinvestment as well as the cost—both human and environmental—of the fossil fuel industry. This is graphic memoir at its finest.
At times, it’s a pretty unrelenting tour of the infinite petty humiliations of being one of the few women in a cold, barren, remote, and homosocial place. In spite of the damage they sometimes cause, though, these men aren’t really the targets of Beaton’s ire. She’s showing us how their non-stop casual sexism has been honed by loneliness, sharpened and made dangerous by months isolated from their family, friends, and other tethers to the outside world ... She draws out these themes with a light touch, sure that her readers will see the connections themselves ... Beaton’s commanding black and white graphics effectively convey the dishwater-grey dullness of survival with little by way of warmth ... Even in Ducks’ darkest moments, Beaton’s wry humour gives her story some levity ... while a quiet bleakness pervades the work, she also spotlights how the kindness of near-strangers, driven by the still-strong bonds of a faraway home, can offer some sense of belonging anywhere.
Ambitiously complex ... Beaton captures much more than her personal story. She delves deep into the milieu of Fort McMurray, highlighting the complex relationships among the work camps, the oil companies, and the people living and working there ... Beaton captures numerous poignant, sometimes heartbreaking moments throughout the book, but the cumulative effect of her many stories is even more impressive. She creates an indelible portrait of environmental degradation, fraught interpersonal relationships among a workforce largely disconnected from home, and greedy corporations that seem only vaguely aware of the difficult work’s effect on their employees. A fascinating, harrowing, unforgettable book about a place few outsiders can comprehend.
A masterpiece ... An immersive, devastating portrait ... The homespun drawings and intuitive pacing capture both the dreariness and occasional splendor of this frozen world, with flashes of the author’s trademark humor in the banter between her crusty coworkers. Beaton makes a shattering statement on the costs of ignorance and neglect endemic in the fuel industry, in both powerful discussions of its sociopolitical ramifications and her own keenly observed personal story.
