Hark! A Vagrant

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By Kate Beaton FEATURED ON MORE THAN TWENTY BEST-OF LISTS, INCLUDING TIME, AMAZON, E!, AND PUBLISHERS WEEKLY! Hark! A Vagrant is an uproarious romp through history and literature s een through the sharp, contemporary lens of New Yorker cartoonist and comics sensation Kate Beaton. No era or tome emerges unscathed as Beaton rightly skewers the Western world's revolutionaries, leaders, sycophants, and suffragists while equally honing her wit on the hapless heroes, heroines, and villains of the best-loved fiction. She deftly points out what really happened when Brahms fell asleep listening to Liszt, that the world's first hipsters were obviously the Incroyables and the Merveilleuses from eighteenth-century France, that Susan B. Anthony is, of course, a "Samantha," and that the polite banality of Canadian culture never gets old. Hark! A Vagrant features sexy Batman, the true stories behind classic Nancy Drew covers, and Queen Elizabeth doing the albatross. As the 500,000 unique monthly visitors to harkavagrant.com already know, no one turns the ironic absurdities of history and literature into comedic fodder as hilariously as Beaton. Praise for Hark! A Vagrant Beaton’s determined absurdities are, ironically enough, much-needed cerebral antidotes to the common-denominator comedy and drama now dominating mature comics and animation. Wired Hark! A Vagrant is the wittiest book of the year. Time, Top 10 Fiction Books of 2011 Kate Beaton [is] a Canadian history graduate who has turned her hand to drawing hilarious comic strips about history and literature [...] funny, clever, and sneakily instructive along the way. The Times UK Kate Beaton makes comics about the Bröntes, Canadians, fat ponies, the X-Men, Hamlet, the American founding fathers, Raskolnikov, gay Batman, Nikola Tesla, Les Misérables, Nancy Drew, Greek myths, and hipsters throughout history. Little is spared her lively pen and waggish, incisive wit. The Paris Review Beaton’s artwork is deceptively simple. Backgrounds are often very lightly sketched in, while the focus is on the main characters. And she’s adroit at creating character through expression [...] Witty, occasionally wise, sometimes surreal, at other times silly, mocking of past, present and pretense, Hark! A Vagrant is one of the most innovative and delightful collections I’ve come across. Globe and Mail Show more