Hark! Vagrant, A

Description: 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. Her website, "Hark! A Vagrant", receives an average of 1.2 million hits a month, 500 thousand of them unique. Why? Because she's not just making silly jokes. She's making jokes about everything we learned in school, and more. Praised for their expression, intelligence and comic timing, her cartoons are best known for their wonderfully light touch on historical and literary topics. 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. It's pretty hard to argue with that when you're laughing your head off at a comic about Thucydides. 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. Perceptive, sharp and wonderfully irreverent, "Hark! A Vagrant" is as informative as it is hilarious, and a comic collection to treasure.

Review: "Kate Beaton has become a Web comic superstar with her hilarious look at historical and pop culture tropes from Julius Caesar to Gatsby. Hark! A Vagrant is a newly expanded collection of her witty, literate comics." Publishers Weekly "[Beaton's comics] are witty reinventions of literary and historical figures navigating modern times ... A high-minded version of The Far Side that is at once of-the-moment and timeless. " -- Deborah Vankin Los Angeles Times "Simply put, this is the most well-drawn, funniest comic that I've read in a while." -- Adrienne So Wired "[Beaton's] neat linework and terrific grasp of simple caricature and facial expression sells a lot of the best strips, including Sasaki Kojiro meeting an undignified end, Jane Austen and Nikola Tesla being pestered by their fans, and Lord Byron muttering 'Bitches, man' to a grieving Percy Bysshe Shelley." The Onion "This is that rarest combination of literate irony and devastatingly funny humor." Publishers Weekly

Author Biography: Kate Beaton was born in Nova Scotia, took a history degree in New Brunswick, paid it off in Alberta, worked in a museum in British Columbia, then came to Ontario for a while to draw pictures, then Halifax, and now New York. Maybe the moon next time, who knows.

A compendium of cartoons from the hugely popular online comic artist Kate Beaton.