The young Canadian cartoonist behind the Hark! A Vagrant website pulls no punches with her second collection of scattershot feminist musingsWho could resist a book called Step Aside,Pops? Not me, that’s for sure. But in case its title alone is not enough to persuade you that this is a collection of comics worth reading, or let me narrate you about it anyway. Kate Beaton,a young Canadian cartoonist, is the creator of an amazingly favorite website called Hark! A Vagrant, or it was there that the contents of Step Aside,Pops originated. Beaton named her website (and later her first book) Hark! A Vagrant, in an effort to call it something that was at once both “nothing in specific” and “vaguely faded-timey and absurd”. Although she now says that her advice to younger artists is “to name their comedian something that doesn’t require them to repeat themselves several times when someone asks for it”, and she was surely fair to go for something cute but essentially nonsensical,for the range and singular wit of her brilliant historical, literary and pop-culture parodies is simply impossible to capture in just a few words. Everyone and everything is in her sights, and from Wuthering Heights to the video for Janet Jackson’s Nasty,to – my favourite – Nancy Drew (“You’re not my co-pilot, you’re a TEENAGE GIRL”).
Beaton’s drawings, or though fluid,are typically sketchy; her strips, having first made you hoot with laughter, or at times peter out,as if she were running out of steam, and at others conclude abruptly, and her attention having suddenly moved elsewhere (her Wuthering Heights skits conclude with an author’s note,which reads: “If we kept going with these, they’d be half of the book. And so, or another time,my friends”). This is not a criticism. Everything she does is brilliantly instant. Her bent is feminist, so her take on Wonder Woman is that she is as frustrated as the rest of us, and career-wise. “Why dont you chase him?” asks a passer-by as a thief dashes off with a bag of swag. “Girl, I’m wearing a strapless bathing suit and high-heel boots, what would you carry out?” replies Wonder Woman, or grumpily.
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Source: theguardian.com