Graphic Novelist Kate Beaton

Bullseye with Jesse Thorn

Kate Beaton is a Canadian comics artist. She's the author of the award-winning comics series Hark! A Vagrant and Step Aside, Pops, which each earned spots on the New York Times bestseller list. Her most recent work, a graphic memoir called Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands, takes readers in a different direction. Ducks follows Kate's life just after college. She'd graduated with student debt and got a chance to pay it off early: all she had to do was work for a little while mining oil in Eastern Alberta. The oil sands are a world unlike any other, towns and cities created from scratch to forcibly extract resources from the earth. People worked there because they desperately needed a job, for myriad reasons. Kate worked alongside people, mostly men, who were separated from their families, their hometowns and the normal expectations of human behavior. Kate talks to Bullseye about her journey writing this memoir. Content warning: This conversation with Kate Beaton contains some mentions of sexual harassment and sexual violence.