Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands
by Kate Beaton
Drawn & Quarterly, 2022. $39.95
Reviewed by Rebecca Fish Ewan
When I discovered Hark a Vagrant (2011), the printed book, having missed the early web comic postings of Kate Beaton, I laughed with utter delight from start to finish as she made history both hilarious and current. It’s no surprise, given this book’s genius, that Kate Beaton has become a New York Times #1 Best-selling author. The loose lines and facial expressions so full of comedic voice. Those huge eyes! Step Aside, Pops (2015), the follow up to Hark a Vagrant offered the same wonderful view into human history that is uniquely Beaton’s, drawn with similar spare lines. I loved both books and was eager for whatever came next.
Ducks came next.
At first glance, everything about this new title indicated it promised to be a completely new kind of book: the somber cover art, the heft of it at 432 pages, and, most importantly the fact that it is a graphic memoir rather than a collection of comic strips. Reading her other books, by comparison, is like snacking at an hors d’oeuvre table, perhaps at a clown conference, while devouring Ducks is a full multicourse dining experience, the long French kind that last for hours. If a reader opens Ducks expecting historically quirky canapès, they won’t find them. But to expect them is a reader’s mistake, not any fault of the author.
I had no idea what the oil sands were and what ducks had to do with them when I started reading Ducks. I just knew I loved Kate Beaton’s comics and am a fan of origin stories. Entering into the world of this book that Beaton created reveals both the beginnings of her comics artist life and her expansive grasp of the graphic memoir genre. To accomplish this with a story set in massive petroleum extraction plants is fascinating. The fact that she could pay off her student loans by working only two years in a tool crib is reason enough to want to read on, but that’s just the why and where of the story. The what and the how is what carried me through to the end.
What’s most compelling for me is the parallels of degradation of the environment and women in the book. The book is not about ducks, but they represent a manifestation of the damage to the environment in Alberta, Canada, where Beaton was living and working. The ducks make a cameo but are significant. Maybe it’s just the alliteration, but being a dead duck feels more ominous than having your goose cooked. The thread of ecological degradation from petroleum extraction is woven together with a rich cast of characters, some villains, many not, so the complexity of the tension between what’s good for the earth and what’s necessary for human livelihood is balanced. Ducks is not a preachy book. Beaton leaves it to the reader to sort out their feelings about oil fields.
This is true, sort of, for the way women are treated in a place where men outnumber women 50 to one. There were times that I had to remind myself that the story begins in 2005 and not 1975, back when second wave feminism had yet to rout out blatant misogyny. Like the scene in the tool crib when men lined up out the door and around the building to ogle twenty-two-year-old Beaton. The thread of systemic workplace sexual harassment is thicker than that for ecological abuse, but the way they exist in tandem is compelling.
What Beaton does so deftly is keep the point of view to that of a young person. One of the challenges of memoir is being able to reveal a life as it was rather than as you wish it had been. Memoirs I don’t finish are those where I feel like the author is giving me a polished version of who they were. This never happened for me in reading Ducks. Sometimes I wish it did. Like the same scene in the tool crib when Beaton’s response to hearing that the men lined up to gaze at her was: “I’m not much to look at,” and then “I didn’t know why there were so many. I’m so stupid.”
There are events in the book more disturbing than the male gaze, which are treated off the page and through scenes of the afterlife of sexual trauma. How female characters in Ducks shoulder the burden of the shitty way men can behave is hard to witness, but Beaton weaves it into the fabric of everyday life, a choice that for me, as a reader, had the effect of making it seem both horrifying and familiar.
Visually, Ducks has a quieter, more densely crafted sense than Beaton’s other comics art. This makes the pace and the content of the story more digestible. To return to the food analogy, hors d’oeuvres are tiny contained bites, so they can pack a punch, but a long multi-course meal of intense punches would be unbearable, no matter how tasty each little nibble is on its own. Ducks has so many characters and several geographic relocations, that the carefully choreographed structure Beaton creates works really well to situate the scenes. I especially love how, with each move to a new camp or facility, sections begin with a birds-eye panoramic spread of the new location along with a page of profile sketches for each character in the new section (except for the interlude when she spends a year in Victoria). Another visual design decision that adds to the quietness of Ducks is the color palette. Ducks has far more tonal work in black and gray than Hark a Vagrant. The grays are cool-toned and also venture into the blue-grey color used for divider pages. This gives the whole book a feeling of an overcast day, gloomy but strangely comforting, which also describes the story.
Take-aways from reading Ducks are a clearer picture of the realities of working in the petroleum extraction industry from a laborers perspective and a sad reminder that systemic work-place misogyny is alive and well (though I knew this from being a working woman since the early 1980s. I just like to believe it’s different for millennial and Gen-Z women and am saddened when reminded that it’s not). A reader will also receive the gift of experiencing a new Kate Beaton voice. I love following artists and authors through their careers and seeing how their voices emerge and evolve. I will always enjoy the silly hilarious snack-worthiness of Hark a Vagrant. It’s been a new kind of joy to feast on Ducks.
Poet/cartoonist, Rebecca Fish Ewan's passion is mingling text with visual art, primarily in ink and watercolor, to tell stories of place and memory. Her hybrid-form work has appeared in After the Art, Brevity, Crab Fat, Survivor Zine, Hip Mama, Mutha, TNB, Punctuate and Under the Gum Tree. Her illustrations and essay, “The Deepest Place on Earth,” were published in the Literary Kitchen anthology, Places Like Home. Rebecca has an MFA in creative writing from ASU, where she has been a landscape design professor for 25+ years. Rebecca grew up in Berkeley, California, and lives with her family in Arizona. Books/chapbook: A Land Between, By the Forces of Gravity, Water Marks, and her newest book, Doodling for Writers, which released October 2020.