Kate Beaton is a Canadian webcomic

Webcomic

Webcomics, online comics, or Internet comics are comics published on a website. While many are published exclusively on the web, others are also published in magazines, newspapers or often in self-published books....

 artist. Originally from Mabou, Cape Breton

Cape Breton Island

Cape Breton Island is an island on the Atlantic coast of North America. It likely corresponds to the word Breton, the French demonym for Brittany....

, she has a degree in history and anthropology from Mount Allison University

Mount Allison University

Mount Allison University is a primarily undergraduate Canadian liberal arts and science university situated in Sackville, New Brunswick. It is located about a half hour from the regional city of Moncton and 20 minutes from the Greater Moncton International Airport...

. She began drawing comics for the university newspaper, the Argosy, during her third and fourth years at school. Previously she worked in the maritime museum

Maritime museum

A maritime museum is a museum specializing in the display of objects relating to ships and travel on large bodies of water...

 in Victoria. In 2007, after her friends persuaded her to post her increasing stack of comics online, she began uploading them through katebeaton.com and her LiveJournal

LiveJournal

LiveJournal is a virtual community where Internet users can keep a blog, journal or diary. LiveJournal is also the name of the free and open source server software that was designed to run the LiveJournal virtual community....

. In December of that year she made the first of two popular batches of history comics, each based on twenty requests she accepted from her readers. She moved to her current website, Hark! A Vagrant, in May 2008.

Career

Beaton publishes her webcomic, Hark! A Vagrant, about once a week. Its subjects are usually historical or literary figures. There are also a number of comics where Beaton interacts with her younger self, and ones that were drawn by Beaton using MS Paint during her breaks at work. Beaton's art style is simple, with great importance given to characters' facial expressions; her skill at comic pacing has also been noted.

Beaton's self-published History Comics won the 2009 Doug Wright Award for Best Emerging Talent. Hark! A Vagrant won the 2011 Harvey Award

Harvey Award

The Harvey Awards, named for writer-artist Harvey Kurtzman and founded by Gary Groth, President of the publisher Fantagraphics, are given for achievement in comic books. The Harveys were created as part of a successor to the Kirby Awards which were discontinued after 1987.The Harvey Awards are...

 for Best Online Comics Work, having been nominated the previous year, and was also nominated for Joe Shuster Awards in 2009 and 2010. Her work has been profiled in Wired

Wired (magazine)

Wired is a full-color monthly American magazine and on-line periodical, published since January 1993, that reports on how new and developing technology affects culture, the economy, and politics...

, Macleans, and Comic Book Resources

Comic Book Resources

Comic Book Resources, also known as CBR is a website dedicated to the coverage of comic book-related news and discussion.-History:Comic Book Resources was founded by Jonah Weiland in 1996 as a development of the Kingdom Come Message Board, a message forum that Weiland had created to discuss DC...

. "The Origin of Man", a comic strip by Beaton celebrating Charles Darwin

Charles Darwin

Charles Robert Darwin FRS was an English naturalist. He established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestry, and proposed the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection.He published his theory...

's 200th birthday, was showcased by MySpace Dark Horse Presents in March 2009. In June 2009 she released a book titled Never Learn Anything From History. Two of Beaton's cartoons have been published in The New Yorker

The New Yorker

The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...

. She will be releasing her newest book, also titled Hark! A Vagrant, in Fall 2011; it will be published by Drawn and Quarterly

Drawn and Quarterly

Drawn and Quarterly is a Canadian comic book publishing company, headed by Chris Oliveros, and based in Montreal, Quebec. Its focus is on graphic novels and underground or alternative comics. Drawn and Quarterly was also the title of the company's flagship quarterly anthology during the 1990s...

.
Kate has also contributed to Marvel Comics

Marvel Comics

Marvel Worldwide, Inc., commonly referred to as Marvel Comics and formerly Marvel Publishing, Inc. and Marvel Comics Group, is an American company that publishes comic books and related media...

's Strange Tales

Strange Tales

Strange Tales is the name of several comic book anthology series published by Marvel Comics. It introduced the features "Doctor Strange" and "Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.", and was a showcase for the science fiction/suspense stories of artists Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, and for the...

 anthology.

External links

• Hark! A Vagrant Comics by K. Beaton
• "The Origin of Man" at MySpace Dark Horse Presents