'synopsis' may belong to another edition of this title. Perceptive, sharp and wonderfully irreverent, Hark! A Vagrant is as informative as it is hilarious, and a comic collection to treasure. They also cover whatever's on her mind that week - be it the perils of city living or the pop-cultural infiltration of Sex and the City, featuring an array of characters, from a mischievous pony, to reinvented superheroes, to a surly teen duo who could be the anti-Hardy-Boys. It's pretty hard to argue with that when you're laughing your head off at a comic about Thucydides. The jokes are a knowing look at history through a very modern perspective, written for every reader, and are a crusade against anyone with the idea that history is boring. Praised for their expression, intelligence and comic timing, her cartoons are best known for their wonderfully light touch on historical and literary topics. She's making jokes about everything we learned in school, and more. Why? Because she's not just making silly jokes. Her website, Hark! A Vagrant, receives an average of 1.2 million hits a month, 500 thousand of them unique. I’m looking forward to giving this book as a gift to others and to reading it again.Since Kate Beaton appeared on the comics scene in 2007 her cartoons have become fan favourites and gathered an enormous following, appearing in the New Yorker, Harper and the LA Times, to name but a few. I love this idea of Wonder Woman having some meta knowledge about how creators and DC fans have treated her over the years, and that she would be extremely unhappy with it.

She can just write Wonder Woman all the time. Engagements with history is only bound to rise with humor. Sometimes history, especially the kind taught in primary schools, can be a little dull and dry. I imagine that Beaton’s drawings could be used in an education setting to liven up ideas about famous historical people. I love exploring parts of history and making them humorous. Darcy seduces Elizabeth from Hark! A Vagrant by Kate Beaton Seriously, all those guys were a bunch of jerks and those heroines could’ve done better. Mostly, because I’ve always been in agreement with Beaton’s assertion that their romantic heroes were not as romantic as they were played to be.

My favorite jokes are probably the ones about Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters and their books. (Jason, who a scientist, was not so entertained by these jokes mostly because he didn’t get a lot of them, and he doesn’t like when that happens. Anyone who enjoys a literary, historical, or Canadian joke will appreciate this collection. I’ve been reading her web comic for a while, and it was great to re-read some of my favorite ones and to discover new-to-me ones. Hark! A Vagrant is a brilliant collection of Beaton’s web comics.

Hark a vagrant comic