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Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands
Goodreads Choice Award
Nominee for Best Graphic Novels & Comics (2022)Celebrated cartoonist Kate Beaton vividly presents the untold story of Canada.
Before there was Kate Beaton, New York Times bestselling cartoonist of Hark A Vagrant fame, there was Katie Beaton of the Cape Breton Beatons, specifically Mabou, a tight-knit seaside community where the lobster is as abundant as beaches, fiddles, and Gaelic folk songs. After university, Beaton heads out west to take advantage of Alberta’s oil rush, part of the long tradition of East Coasters who seek gainful employment elsewhere when they can't find it in the homeland they love so much. With the singular goal of paying off her student loans, what the journey will actually cost Beaton will be far more than she anticipates.
Arriving in Fort McMurray, Beaton finds work in the lucrative camps owned and operated by the world’s largest oil companies. Being one of the few women among thousands of men, the culture shock is palpable. It does not hit home until she moves to a spartan, isolated worksite for higher pay. She encounters the harsh reality of life in the oil sands where trauma is an everyday occurrence yet never discussed. Her wounds may never heal.
Beaton’s natural cartooning prowess is on full display as she draws colossal machinery and mammoth vehicles set against a sublime Albertan backdrop of wildlife, Northern Lights, and Rocky Mountains. Her first full-length graphic narrative, Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands is an untold story of Canada: a country that prides itself on its egalitarian ethos and natural beauty while simultaneously exploiting both the riches of its land and the humanity of its people.
Before there was Kate Beaton, New York Times bestselling cartoonist of Hark A Vagrant fame, there was Katie Beaton of the Cape Breton Beatons, specifically Mabou, a tight-knit seaside community where the lobster is as abundant as beaches, fiddles, and Gaelic folk songs. After university, Beaton heads out west to take advantage of Alberta’s oil rush, part of the long tradition of East Coasters who seek gainful employment elsewhere when they can't find it in the homeland they love so much. With the singular goal of paying off her student loans, what the journey will actually cost Beaton will be far more than she anticipates.
Arriving in Fort McMurray, Beaton finds work in the lucrative camps owned and operated by the world’s largest oil companies. Being one of the few women among thousands of men, the culture shock is palpable. It does not hit home until she moves to a spartan, isolated worksite for higher pay. She encounters the harsh reality of life in the oil sands where trauma is an everyday occurrence yet never discussed. Her wounds may never heal.
Beaton’s natural cartooning prowess is on full display as she draws colossal machinery and mammoth vehicles set against a sublime Albertan backdrop of wildlife, Northern Lights, and Rocky Mountains. Her first full-length graphic narrative, Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands is an untold story of Canada: a country that prides itself on its egalitarian ethos and natural beauty while simultaneously exploiting both the riches of its land and the humanity of its people.
430 pages, Hardcover
First published September 13, 2022
About the author
Kate Beaton
24 books1,547 followersKate 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 then New York, and then back to Toronto.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 4,091 reviews
December 8, 2022
I knew absolutely nothing about Canada's oil sands before reading this graphic memoir. Truth be told, I know very little about Canada in general and hadn't even heard of the oil sands. Beaton paints a very bleak picture.
Cut off from the rest of civilisation, oil sands workers are portrayed as an insular community, lonely, a misogynistic old boys' club, often depressed but unable to talk about mental health. Beaton creates a world apart from ours in which the loneliness drives many men to behaviours they wouldn't even consider in their "real lives". Harassment is considered normal; sexual assault all too common.
Beaton worked there two years in the freezing cold loneliness and it left the kind of scars that cannot be seen. Others were even less lucky-- killed in fatal accidents brushed under the carpet by the bosses. The artwork is all in shades of grey, which adds to the dreary effect.
The author touches a bit upon the environmental impact of the oil sands, but her focus is predominantly on the human impact of living in isolation and being expendable... all to make a decent wage. While I hadn't heard of this before, I doubt I'll be forgetting about it.
My only complaint is that the story jumps a lot without any kind of break or just, you know, a couple asterisks to indicate that we're moving onto a new scene. This is quite confusing at times and had me flipping back a page to check I wasn't losing it.
Cut off from the rest of civilisation, oil sands workers are portrayed as an insular community, lonely, a misogynistic old boys' club, often depressed but unable to talk about mental health. Beaton creates a world apart from ours in which the loneliness drives many men to behaviours they wouldn't even consider in their "real lives". Harassment is considered normal; sexual assault all too common.
Beaton worked there two years in the freezing cold loneliness and it left the kind of scars that cannot be seen. Others were even less lucky-- killed in fatal accidents brushed under the carpet by the bosses. The artwork is all in shades of grey, which adds to the dreary effect.
The author touches a bit upon the environmental impact of the oil sands, but her focus is predominantly on the human impact of living in isolation and being expendable... all to make a decent wage. While I hadn't heard of this before, I doubt I'll be forgetting about it.
My only complaint is that the story jumps a lot without any kind of break or just, you know, a couple asterisks to indicate that we're moving onto a new scene. This is quite confusing at times and had me flipping back a page to check I wasn't losing it.
September 8, 2022
If I tell you this book ripped my heart out of my chest, would that make you want to read it?
I was already a big fan of Kate Beaton’s Hark! A Vagrant! collections, but Ducks, a memoir in comics, was a different experience entirely. Having graduated from college with an arts degree, and motivated by student loan debt and a lack of opportunities in her native Cape Breton, Beaton takes a job in the oil sands of Alberta. The oil sands are probably familiar to most Canadians, but for the rest of us: they’re deposits of heavy crude oil that needs extracting. They’re pretty isolated, you often have to live on-site, and there are 50 male workers for every female worker.
Fifty men for every one woman, in an isolated setting. When we hear that, we know what it means. And Beaton does not skimp on any of the dark, ugly details and the toll they took.
But there’s more to this story. I’m also someone who grew up in an area that you pretty much had to leave in order to get anywhere in life. For the people who stay, men are still overwhelmingly viewed as the breadwinners, but what do they do when the coal mines empty out and the factories move to other countries? In the world of Ducks, where do they go when they’ve got an eighth-grade education and the fish are gone and the coal is too? They move to the oil sands, far from their families and communities, surrounded by other men. And a few women.
Beaton does not sugarcoat or excuse any of the many harrowing experiences she had in the oil sands, but at the same time she musters far more compassion and tenderness than I could have in a similar situation. These two elements coexisted in her life, and their coexistence in Ducks is what pushes the book to another level. The PR materials I got with this book likened it to Maus, Persepolis, and Fun Home—three classics of the form. I was skeptical of this comparison going in, but not anymore. All this book needs is the audience. Please read it.
And don’t skip the acknowledgments at the end—there’s a little more to the story.
Thank you to Drawn & Quarterly for the review copy of this beautiful book that’s destined to be one of my favorites of the year, and probably of all time.
I was already a big fan of Kate Beaton’s Hark! A Vagrant! collections, but Ducks, a memoir in comics, was a different experience entirely. Having graduated from college with an arts degree, and motivated by student loan debt and a lack of opportunities in her native Cape Breton, Beaton takes a job in the oil sands of Alberta. The oil sands are probably familiar to most Canadians, but for the rest of us: they’re deposits of heavy crude oil that needs extracting. They’re pretty isolated, you often have to live on-site, and there are 50 male workers for every female worker.
Fifty men for every one woman, in an isolated setting. When we hear that, we know what it means. And Beaton does not skimp on any of the dark, ugly details and the toll they took.
But there’s more to this story. I’m also someone who grew up in an area that you pretty much had to leave in order to get anywhere in life. For the people who stay, men are still overwhelmingly viewed as the breadwinners, but what do they do when the coal mines empty out and the factories move to other countries? In the world of Ducks, where do they go when they’ve got an eighth-grade education and the fish are gone and the coal is too? They move to the oil sands, far from their families and communities, surrounded by other men. And a few women.
Beaton does not sugarcoat or excuse any of the many harrowing experiences she had in the oil sands, but at the same time she musters far more compassion and tenderness than I could have in a similar situation. These two elements coexisted in her life, and their coexistence in Ducks is what pushes the book to another level. The PR materials I got with this book likened it to Maus, Persepolis, and Fun Home—three classics of the form. I was skeptical of this comparison going in, but not anymore. All this book needs is the audience. Please read it.
And don’t skip the acknowledgments at the end—there’s a little more to the story.
Thank you to Drawn & Quarterly for the review copy of this beautiful book that’s destined to be one of my favorites of the year, and probably of all time.
May 2, 2024
‘The worst part for me about being harassed here isn’t that people say shitty things…The worst thing is that your heart breaks.’
Some jobs break more than just your back. Deeply necessary and often devastating, Kate Beaton’s harrowing graphic memoir Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands takes a brutal and bluntly honest look at the labor force from the safety risks, harassment to sexual assaults that occurred and puts a spotlight on how the workers are just as exploited as the land. Fresh out of college but also fresh out of money to pay off her loans, Beaton leaves home to take part in the Alberta oil boom becoming yet another in the lineage of those who must leave Nova Scotia to go where the money and jobs are. But in an isolated place where men outnumber the women 50 to 1, she finds this places a target on her for unwanted advances and harassment and all the while the destruction of the land by the oil industry, the unsafe conditions and the deaths of coworkers start assailing her mind as well. She shows how these conditions make sexual assault a near inevitability. Beaton takes a very empathetic look at those caught in this sort of life, and for many readers this might often leave you feeling rather empty inside at points, as if inside you was also a vast frozen land with icy wind being mined like the stolen lands in her narrative. There is a lot to process here and, truthful, this dredged up a lot of complicated emotions and memories of my own past working factories and other male dominated, physical labor jobs that also often took an existential toll on me. Yet there is still beauty within this story of Beaton’s struggles—as well as a rather lovely art style that helps propel the story told in a long series of anecdotes along a 2 year arc—and this is an important plea to understand the toll misogyny, harassment and assault takes on women as well as the mental and physical tolls this line of work can bring. Brilliantly layered themes addressed with plenty of empathy, nuances and addressing many issues as systemic instead of isolated, Ducks is an essential read.
This was a really important read done with such heartbreaking honesty and heartfelt integrity. The story really moves along and covers a lot of ground, and while it can seem a bit repetitive it doesn’t bog it down and instead seems a rather authentic representation of just how repetitive the days in this type of work can be. But also really effectively shows how the minor harassments or general creepiness from men start to become an unbearable weight under the constant repetition of examples. This can be a rather difficult read emotionally and also a touchy subject, as one character learns when she tries to write an article about the horrible conditions faced by women there and is told she is trying to vilify honest labor and make all men seem like monsters. Beaton addresses this more head-on in her afterword:
The horrible part is how most of the men don’t see their actions as anything other than “how guys are” and find her frustration to be playful instead of actual disgust. Yet it is damaging and takes a huge toll. As Beaton writes in the afterword about the sexual assault that occurs ‘I was nothing in his life but a short release from the boredom and loneliness endemic in camp life, but he was a major trauma in mine.’
I found it rather effective the way she shows that, even if it isn’t everyone who is harassing (she makes a point several times to talk about how there are plenty of men there who leave her alone) the sheer quantity of it happening is unnerving and how it is practically inevitable that her safety will be violated. Especially in the camps where she keeps her door locked and hears men try to open it in the middle of the night (another woman says one time a man hid in her closet and jumped out at her), and how being taken advantage of while drunk is viewed as being her own fault—even her own friend accuses her of trying to make regrettable sex seem like an assault instead of owning her own decisions. But it is important to remember that there is no such thing as consent in a situation where you cannot say “no”. This includes situations where you feel saying no is a threat to your personal safety. It is addressed multiple times how speaking out even on everyday harassment is almost impossible, from being ignored or told to just take a joke, and if someone is fired over a complaint the woman is viewed by everyone as the villain, a troublemaker just trying to get attention. She constantly hears men saying the women at the camp only work there to get sex in a place with less competition and women who are assaulted are always blamed for it. It’s very distressing.
Much of Ducks focuses not only on how these men could be anyone but also on how the conditions of the camps enables it. Of those outside the situation her character says ‘they don't think that the loneliness and homesickness and boredom and lack of women around would affect their brother or dad or husband the same way.’ Which is just tragic and as much an indictment on the management as the men behaving this way. When one is not given a safe space to speak out, these acts become enabled through the culture of silence enforced around them.
I used to work in a factory, and later doing a uniform and floor mat delivery at factories and a lot of the depictions of labor hit very close to home. I would go to a good 30some factories a week, some that I knew every time I left I’d have weird allergies or feel ill from physically (I think of Beaton saying there ‘just shit’ in the air and when she asks ‘Do I even want to know what kind of cancer will have in 20 years?’ I think of all the glues and sprays we used in the sign-making factory I once worked at with no ventilation), and the thing that bothered me the most was the odd comments people would make to me during my stops. I think a big part was wondering what made them think I was a person they could say that too, and if they’d say that to a stranger what sort of terrible comments do they make around people they feel comfortable with. And what am I going to do, complain? I’ll just be replaced on that stop on the route. All the homophobic comments when I worked in the factory sure hurt but what was I going to do, out myself as pansexual by complaining? How’s that going to go for me after that? I mean, I can’t possibly truly understand what Beaton went through but I did have a lot of difficult memories about working in physical labor jobs while reading this. It happens everywhere, and part of the problem is that this sort of behavior is almost coded into the image of “tough labor guy.”
Though another aspect of this, which Beaton effectively demonstrates, is this is damaging to the men as well. The character Ryan, for example, is going through a difficult period of mental health and suicide ideation but doesn’t feel he can talk about it (it’ll just make him the butt of jokes if he does), and that gets into how toxic masculinity can become a sort of shame chamber where men feel they can’t express any emotion that isn’t anger.
The ducks are shown to not only be the literal ducks that die due to environmental destruction from the company, but also to metaphorically be the workers as well, led to what they think is a safe place to land and find themselves exploited. Most of the workers have traveled far to be there where the money is, many from Nova Scotia like Beaton herself. For many, this is all they have, and where will they have to go once the work dries up?
But there is also the element of the fact that literal ducks die from landing in the water there and the company’s solutions to environmental protection are about the same as their safety policy: lip service and half-assed attempts and looking like you are trying without caring either way. There are endless meetings about safety nobody pays attention to and it is noted how celebrating X amount of hours since a “lost time accident” is a way to gloss over the many injuries that actually are taking place. But then there is the environment being polluted and the indigenous activists speaking out only to be a blip on the media and then never given a voice again.
‘Everything's ruined, our lives around our lands are ruined, our water, the air, everything.Their almighty dollar comes first. That's pretty sad. You can't eat money.
At the cost of our lives-as long as they get their money. They don't care how many of us they kill off.’
The part that really broke my heart was when Beaton is able to get away for a while and chase her dream far from the horrible conditions, only to find she can’t afford to do so and has to be plunged back into the oil sands again. I think of doing 80hr weeks in the factory (we wouldn’t know if we worked Saturday and Sunday until Friday afternoon so making plans was not happening) and people saying yea but overtime is great. Sure the money was alright but I was 25, I’d rather see my child and have a life. It’s not like a job I hated was fulfilling. Though then I worked jobs I didn’t hate and found I couldn’t afford to live on it, spending a few years where I was working three jobs, delivering bulk coffee around the Midwest (trading up for the uniform company driver job), picking up bookstore shifts and then bartending weddings every Friday and Saturday night. Just as exhausting (but slightly better pay but hey only 70hr weeks!). I’m not saying I don’t want to work but you shouldn’t have to be rich to not devote your whole existence to making money for someone above you. Beaton shows that very effectively here. And, as one character mentions, it isn’t those making their millions that are doing the dangerous work and away from their families so much.
This is a really heartfelt and heart wrenching look at life in that line of work but also a sharp condemnation of the misogyny that occurs there. This is a book I think everyone would benefit from reading and I am amazed at Kate Beaton for being so vulnerable and honest with this work. Ducks is one of the finest graphic memoirs I’ve ever read and while it is emotionally devastating, it is also very necessary.
5/5
Some jobs break more than just your back. Deeply necessary and often devastating, Kate Beaton’s harrowing graphic memoir Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands takes a brutal and bluntly honest look at the labor force from the safety risks, harassment to sexual assaults that occurred and puts a spotlight on how the workers are just as exploited as the land. Fresh out of college but also fresh out of money to pay off her loans, Beaton leaves home to take part in the Alberta oil boom becoming yet another in the lineage of those who must leave Nova Scotia to go where the money and jobs are. But in an isolated place where men outnumber the women 50 to 1, she finds this places a target on her for unwanted advances and harassment and all the while the destruction of the land by the oil industry, the unsafe conditions and the deaths of coworkers start assailing her mind as well. She shows how these conditions make sexual assault a near inevitability. Beaton takes a very empathetic look at those caught in this sort of life, and for many readers this might often leave you feeling rather empty inside at points, as if inside you was also a vast frozen land with icy wind being mined like the stolen lands in her narrative. There is a lot to process here and, truthful, this dredged up a lot of complicated emotions and memories of my own past working factories and other male dominated, physical labor jobs that also often took an existential toll on me. Yet there is still beauty within this story of Beaton’s struggles—as well as a rather lovely art style that helps propel the story told in a long series of anecdotes along a 2 year arc—and this is an important plea to understand the toll misogyny, harassment and assault takes on women as well as the mental and physical tolls this line of work can bring. Brilliantly layered themes addressed with plenty of empathy, nuances and addressing many issues as systemic instead of isolated, Ducks is an essential read.
This was a really important read done with such heartbreaking honesty and heartfelt integrity. The story really moves along and covers a lot of ground, and while it can seem a bit repetitive it doesn’t bog it down and instead seems a rather authentic representation of just how repetitive the days in this type of work can be. But also really effectively shows how the minor harassments or general creepiness from men start to become an unbearable weight under the constant repetition of examples. This can be a rather difficult read emotionally and also a touchy subject, as one character learns when she tries to write an article about the horrible conditions faced by women there and is told she is trying to vilify honest labor and make all men seem like monsters. Beaton addresses this more head-on in her afterword:
‘I have seen many people quick to become defensive against the suggestion that gendered violence exists in places like the oil sands. They may either work there and are proud of the work they do and the livelihoods they support with it, or they know and love men there, and are insulted by the insinuation of being lumped in with anything to do with something as abhorrent as sexual assault.’
The horrible part is how most of the men don’t see their actions as anything other than “how guys are” and find her frustration to be playful instead of actual disgust. Yet it is damaging and takes a huge toll. As Beaton writes in the afterword about the sexual assault that occurs ‘I was nothing in his life but a short release from the boredom and loneliness endemic in camp life, but he was a major trauma in mine.’
I found it rather effective the way she shows that, even if it isn’t everyone who is harassing (she makes a point several times to talk about how there are plenty of men there who leave her alone) the sheer quantity of it happening is unnerving and how it is practically inevitable that her safety will be violated. Especially in the camps where she keeps her door locked and hears men try to open it in the middle of the night (another woman says one time a man hid in her closet and jumped out at her), and how being taken advantage of while drunk is viewed as being her own fault—even her own friend accuses her of trying to make regrettable sex seem like an assault instead of owning her own decisions. But it is important to remember that there is no such thing as consent in a situation where you cannot say “no”. This includes situations where you feel saying no is a threat to your personal safety. It is addressed multiple times how speaking out even on everyday harassment is almost impossible, from being ignored or told to just take a joke, and if someone is fired over a complaint the woman is viewed by everyone as the villain, a troublemaker just trying to get attention. She constantly hears men saying the women at the camp only work there to get sex in a place with less competition and women who are assaulted are always blamed for it. It’s very distressing.
Much of Ducks focuses not only on how these men could be anyone but also on how the conditions of the camps enables it. Of those outside the situation her character says ‘they don't think that the loneliness and homesickness and boredom and lack of women around would affect their brother or dad or husband the same way.’ Which is just tragic and as much an indictment on the management as the men behaving this way. When one is not given a safe space to speak out, these acts become enabled through the culture of silence enforced around them.
I used to work in a factory, and later doing a uniform and floor mat delivery at factories and a lot of the depictions of labor hit very close to home. I would go to a good 30some factories a week, some that I knew every time I left I’d have weird allergies or feel ill from physically (I think of Beaton saying there ‘just shit’ in the air and when she asks ‘Do I even want to know what kind of cancer will have in 20 years?’ I think of all the glues and sprays we used in the sign-making factory I once worked at with no ventilation), and the thing that bothered me the most was the odd comments people would make to me during my stops. I think a big part was wondering what made them think I was a person they could say that too, and if they’d say that to a stranger what sort of terrible comments do they make around people they feel comfortable with. And what am I going to do, complain? I’ll just be replaced on that stop on the route. All the homophobic comments when I worked in the factory sure hurt but what was I going to do, out myself as pansexual by complaining? How’s that going to go for me after that? I mean, I can’t possibly truly understand what Beaton went through but I did have a lot of difficult memories about working in physical labor jobs while reading this. It happens everywhere, and part of the problem is that this sort of behavior is almost coded into the image of “tough labor guy.”
Though another aspect of this, which Beaton effectively demonstrates, is this is damaging to the men as well. The character Ryan, for example, is going through a difficult period of mental health and suicide ideation but doesn’t feel he can talk about it (it’ll just make him the butt of jokes if he does), and that gets into how toxic masculinity can become a sort of shame chamber where men feel they can’t express any emotion that isn’t anger.
The ducks are shown to not only be the literal ducks that die due to environmental destruction from the company, but also to metaphorically be the workers as well, led to what they think is a safe place to land and find themselves exploited. Most of the workers have traveled far to be there where the money is, many from Nova Scotia like Beaton herself. For many, this is all they have, and where will they have to go once the work dries up?
‘I need to tell you this--there is no knowing Cape Breton without knowing how deeply ingrained two diametrically opposed experiences are: A deep love for home, and the knowledge of how frequently we have to leave it to find work somewhere else.’
But there is also the element of the fact that literal ducks die from landing in the water there and the company’s solutions to environmental protection are about the same as their safety policy: lip service and half-assed attempts and looking like you are trying without caring either way. There are endless meetings about safety nobody pays attention to and it is noted how celebrating X amount of hours since a “lost time accident” is a way to gloss over the many injuries that actually are taking place. But then there is the environment being polluted and the indigenous activists speaking out only to be a blip on the media and then never given a voice again.
‘Everything's ruined, our lives around our lands are ruined, our water, the air, everything.Their almighty dollar comes first. That's pretty sad. You can't eat money.
At the cost of our lives-as long as they get their money. They don't care how many of us they kill off.’
The part that really broke my heart was when Beaton is able to get away for a while and chase her dream far from the horrible conditions, only to find she can’t afford to do so and has to be plunged back into the oil sands again. I think of doing 80hr weeks in the factory (we wouldn’t know if we worked Saturday and Sunday until Friday afternoon so making plans was not happening) and people saying yea but overtime is great. Sure the money was alright but I was 25, I’d rather see my child and have a life. It’s not like a job I hated was fulfilling. Though then I worked jobs I didn’t hate and found I couldn’t afford to live on it, spending a few years where I was working three jobs, delivering bulk coffee around the Midwest (trading up for the uniform company driver job), picking up bookstore shifts and then bartending weddings every Friday and Saturday night. Just as exhausting (but slightly better pay but hey only 70hr weeks!). I’m not saying I don’t want to work but you shouldn’t have to be rich to not devote your whole existence to making money for someone above you. Beaton shows that very effectively here. And, as one character mentions, it isn’t those making their millions that are doing the dangerous work and away from their families so much.
This is a really heartfelt and heart wrenching look at life in that line of work but also a sharp condemnation of the misogyny that occurs there. This is a book I think everyone would benefit from reading and I am amazed at Kate Beaton for being so vulnerable and honest with this work. Ducks is one of the finest graphic memoirs I’ve ever read and while it is emotionally devastating, it is also very necessary.
5/5
August 28, 2022
Quite terrific, often beautiful, and sometimes harrowing graphic memoir about a 22 year old Beaton’s work in Alberta’s oil boom. Genuinely couldn’t put it down until I finished. It took up a whole morning of my life. The stories in this book are often upsetting and deal with trauma head on, but Beaton's humor and art strike a necessary balance. I've always liked her work - this is on another level.
May 20, 2023
Sadly, I don't know a single woman currently over the age of 25 who could read this graphic novel without shaking her head in sadness or groaning with a great sense of solidarity and understanding of the circumstances described here.
The author and illustrator, Kate Beaton, who hails from Nova Scotia, worked for two years in the Northern Alberta oil sands to pay off her student loans from college. While there, she worked in a remote setting, “where men outnumber[ed] women by as much as fifty to one.”
Even though her time there was less than 20 years ago (2005-2008), it might as well have been 100 years, or more, in the past. And, even though the large majority of men working in these blue-collar, isolated work sites were family men who did not negatively interact with the small number of female employees there, the ones who did were relentless and incredibly toxic in their vicious threats and casual hatred toward women.
Kate Beaton writes in her Afterword:
I have seen many people quick to become defensive against the suggestion that gendered violence exists in places like the oil sands. They may either work there and are proud of the work they do and the livelihoods they support with it, or they know and love men there, and are insulted by the insinuation of being lumped in with anything to do with something as abhorrent as sexual assault.
Well, I had no difficultly, whatsoever, in believing what went on in these locations, particularly because I've heard almost everything that was said to Kate Beaton or in front of Kate Beaton at some point, or another, in my own lifetime.
Like most women, I've been locked in rooms, I've been cornered in cars, I've run for my life, I've dodged dangerous men more times than I care to count.
Any person who thinks these scenarios that women have endured are “made-up” or embellished are either delusional or very sheltered.
To be honest, I think the author was possibly TOO kind, in her approach. As far as I can tell, she can't easily be accused of telling an unbalanced story.
The DUCKS aren't the only victims here, and I think that Kate Beaton showed great humility in sharing a very painful story and being admirably honest in communicating who she is as a person.
This was a completely unique graphic novel for me—as strong in its narrative as it is in its artwork.
I wish every man on the planet would read this book.
The author and illustrator, Kate Beaton, who hails from Nova Scotia, worked for two years in the Northern Alberta oil sands to pay off her student loans from college. While there, she worked in a remote setting, “where men outnumber[ed] women by as much as fifty to one.”
Even though her time there was less than 20 years ago (2005-2008), it might as well have been 100 years, or more, in the past. And, even though the large majority of men working in these blue-collar, isolated work sites were family men who did not negatively interact with the small number of female employees there, the ones who did were relentless and incredibly toxic in their vicious threats and casual hatred toward women.
Kate Beaton writes in her Afterword:
I have seen many people quick to become defensive against the suggestion that gendered violence exists in places like the oil sands. They may either work there and are proud of the work they do and the livelihoods they support with it, or they know and love men there, and are insulted by the insinuation of being lumped in with anything to do with something as abhorrent as sexual assault.
Well, I had no difficultly, whatsoever, in believing what went on in these locations, particularly because I've heard almost everything that was said to Kate Beaton or in front of Kate Beaton at some point, or another, in my own lifetime.
Like most women, I've been locked in rooms, I've been cornered in cars, I've run for my life, I've dodged dangerous men more times than I care to count.
Any person who thinks these scenarios that women have endured are “made-up” or embellished are either delusional or very sheltered.
To be honest, I think the author was possibly TOO kind, in her approach. As far as I can tell, she can't easily be accused of telling an unbalanced story.
The DUCKS aren't the only victims here, and I think that Kate Beaton showed great humility in sharing a very painful story and being admirably honest in communicating who she is as a person.
This was a completely unique graphic novel for me—as strong in its narrative as it is in its artwork.
I wish every man on the planet would read this book.
July 24, 2023
My first graphic novel and likely my last.
This is a story of a girl who leaves Nova Scotia to get employment to repay her student loans. She heads to Alberta and its Oil Sands in 2005.This is where the money is at. Primarily for men, however.
The author does disclose that this is her story. Two years of her life subjected to misogynist behaviour. Assault, harassment; questioning her own identity. The loneliness from being isolated. The environmental erosion happening. Toxic in more ways than one.
I can honestly say this format did not appeal to me. However, I think there are a number of important messages here that Beaton shares. And they are disturbing ones.
3.5⭐️
This is a story of a girl who leaves Nova Scotia to get employment to repay her student loans. She heads to Alberta and its Oil Sands in 2005.This is where the money is at. Primarily for men, however.
The author does disclose that this is her story. Two years of her life subjected to misogynist behaviour. Assault, harassment; questioning her own identity. The loneliness from being isolated. The environmental erosion happening. Toxic in more ways than one.
I can honestly say this format did not appeal to me. However, I think there are a number of important messages here that Beaton shares. And they are disturbing ones.
3.5⭐️
October 11, 2022
However good and even important this long detailed memoir of working in the oil industry in Alberta, Canada between 2005 and 2008 may be, it ain’t an easy one to recommend. You wouldn’t call it a misery memoir, but it is profoundly unhappy. Part of it is about rape: this comment by Kate Beaton on p 381 encapsulates the horror – the situation is a very common one and is surely not limited to the hyper-masculine world of the oilfields – people are getting wrecked at a party, the woman is drunk, the guy is drunk, but he’s not too drunk to push her into a dark room and assault her. Thinking back on it later Kate says to her friend
It felt like I had a second to decide and an eternity to live with it
Decide to resist, that is, to scream or to not scream. She doesn’t and when she inadvertently tells two guys about it later they laugh. We were there and y’all were both drunk as fuck, we all were. C'mon. In the afterword Kate says
I was nothing in his life but a short release from the boredom and loneliness endemic in camp life, but he was a major trauma in mine.
So this whole book is about the moral Grey Zone, how women in a 99% male workforce get constantly sniped at and leered at and drooled over and every aspect of their being commented on and fantasized about and lied about and how they find themselves going along with it and putting up with such a lot they wouldn’t ever tolerate in the “real world” back home for one tiny minute. Kate makes it clear only half of the guys are gross pigs, but that’s still a lot. It’s also a story about her own acknowledged naivete about things like the widespread use of cocaine by the guys and – a big one this – how your own brother, your own father, should he be cooped up in an oil camp for a couple of years with no other company that bored rowdy men, might very well become just like one of the leering jeering locker-room nasty-comment guys. That was a sickening realisation for her.
Given all of the above, this graphic memoir might not be for everybody.
It felt like I had a second to decide and an eternity to live with it
Decide to resist, that is, to scream or to not scream. She doesn’t and when she inadvertently tells two guys about it later they laugh. We were there and y’all were both drunk as fuck, we all were. C'mon. In the afterword Kate says
I was nothing in his life but a short release from the boredom and loneliness endemic in camp life, but he was a major trauma in mine.
So this whole book is about the moral Grey Zone, how women in a 99% male workforce get constantly sniped at and leered at and drooled over and every aspect of their being commented on and fantasized about and lied about and how they find themselves going along with it and putting up with such a lot they wouldn’t ever tolerate in the “real world” back home for one tiny minute. Kate makes it clear only half of the guys are gross pigs, but that’s still a lot. It’s also a story about her own acknowledged naivete about things like the widespread use of cocaine by the guys and – a big one this – how your own brother, your own father, should he be cooped up in an oil camp for a couple of years with no other company that bored rowdy men, might very well become just like one of the leering jeering locker-room nasty-comment guys. That was a sickening realisation for her.
Given all of the above, this graphic memoir might not be for everybody.
May 25, 2023
Superb! Kate Beaton is a New York Times bestselling cartoonist from a small town in Cape Breton. Its fish, coal and steel industries have declined while unemployment has risen. Many men from the Atlantic provinces have found high-paying work in the Alberta oil sands area. After graduating from university with a BA degree, Kate moves to Fort MacMurray and works in the bleak barracks-like camps in the oil fields. Her goal is to pay off her student loans.
On March 30th, this was the first graphic novel to win Canada Reads 2023. This is a memoir of the hardship and trauma she experienced on the worksites. The artwork is a delight and fascinating. Her many characters are drawn with simple, minimalist line work, but all are recognizable. Her complex drawings of the camps, buildings, huge complicated machinery, and landscapes are detailed, layered and brilliant. I had my doubts about downloading the Kindle ebook but found it a comfortable and easy read on my iPad.
This is a memoir of Beaton's time in the oil fields from 2015 to 2018, when she returned to Cape Breton. She depicts little-recognized, uncomfortable truths about how capitalism and the big oil industry exploit and has a dehumanizing effect on individuals and are a destructive force on the environment. The story is gritty and harrowing as she discusses her trauma while living in the camps. The female workers are outnumbered 50 to 1. Some men retain their basic decency. Many are lonely, bored, and isolated from their families. They develop a camaraderie resulting in a toxic masculine culture. Drug and alcohol abuse are common. Kate Beaton, like other females, endured constant harassment, crude sexual comments and sexual assaults. These attacks were often unreported or rarely addressed by the management, and no mental health services were in place.
The basic living spaces were claustrophobic, and accidents were underreported. Temperatures outside of minus 50 were not uncommon. While dealing with her personal anguish, Kate becomes aware of the unpleasant results of the masculine-dominated industry and the devastating environmental disaster. Foul toxic air and water are having an effect on the land, indigenous communities and wildlife. The title 'Ducks' is from the death of migrating birds dying in the oil sludge and represents the ramifications on wildlife and nature.
She watches a TV broadcast featuring a local Cree elder where the people suffer from a high cancer rate. " Everything is ruined; our lives around our lands are ruined, our water, air, everything. At the cost of our lives as long as they get their money. They don't care how many they kill."
Recommended. It will be on my favourite list for 2023, but a disturbing read.
On March 30th, this was the first graphic novel to win Canada Reads 2023. This is a memoir of the hardship and trauma she experienced on the worksites. The artwork is a delight and fascinating. Her many characters are drawn with simple, minimalist line work, but all are recognizable. Her complex drawings of the camps, buildings, huge complicated machinery, and landscapes are detailed, layered and brilliant. I had my doubts about downloading the Kindle ebook but found it a comfortable and easy read on my iPad.
This is a memoir of Beaton's time in the oil fields from 2015 to 2018, when she returned to Cape Breton. She depicts little-recognized, uncomfortable truths about how capitalism and the big oil industry exploit and has a dehumanizing effect on individuals and are a destructive force on the environment. The story is gritty and harrowing as she discusses her trauma while living in the camps. The female workers are outnumbered 50 to 1. Some men retain their basic decency. Many are lonely, bored, and isolated from their families. They develop a camaraderie resulting in a toxic masculine culture. Drug and alcohol abuse are common. Kate Beaton, like other females, endured constant harassment, crude sexual comments and sexual assaults. These attacks were often unreported or rarely addressed by the management, and no mental health services were in place.
The basic living spaces were claustrophobic, and accidents were underreported. Temperatures outside of minus 50 were not uncommon. While dealing with her personal anguish, Kate becomes aware of the unpleasant results of the masculine-dominated industry and the devastating environmental disaster. Foul toxic air and water are having an effect on the land, indigenous communities and wildlife. The title 'Ducks' is from the death of migrating birds dying in the oil sludge and represents the ramifications on wildlife and nature.
She watches a TV broadcast featuring a local Cree elder where the people suffer from a high cancer rate. " Everything is ruined; our lives around our lands are ruined, our water, air, everything. At the cost of our lives as long as they get their money. They don't care how many they kill."
Recommended. It will be on my favourite list for 2023, but a disturbing read.
February 9, 2024
***SPOILERS HIDDEN***
In 2005, cartoonist Kate Beaton found herself in a dilemma as a recent college graduate with large student loans to pay off. Her double degree in history and anthropology wasn’t opening doors career-wise, so she headed to Alberta, Canada, to work in the oil sands, a job that paid handsomely. Ducks is a sequential-art memoir about her two years working there.
Extremely male-dominated--roughly fifty men to every one woman--oil sands are far from ideal workplaces for women, especially for a young woman making this her first job out of college. This memoir is 450 pages, and stunningly, the majority of it is a chronicling of constant sexual harassment and more: . It appears that not a day went by without some kind of harassment, whether that be quiet leering, objectifying comments to Beaton herself, or objectifying and misogynistic comments about women in general--yet Beaton soldiered her way through what would, understandably, break many people. It was a soul-crushing existence, and her fortitude, and work ethic, stand out as much as the outrageous depictions of harassment.
She wasn’t a robot, though. The panels portraying Making matters worse was that she had no recourse. Complaining would not only change nothing but could mean consequences for her, and she couldn’t afford to have the job get any worse than it already was, or to lose it altogether. In moments of introspection, Beaton pondered her dilemma and went further to examine how loneliness, isolation, and boredom can bring out another side of a person. She struggled with the reality that most of the men toiling away at this job were husbands, boyfriends, and dads, yet in addition to the sexual harassment and assault, cheating was a way of life at the work camps, expected and even encouraged. She never used the term “toxic masculinity,” but her memoir shows that the oil sands are the very embodiment of the mindset and behavior. In an environment so rough and intimidating, any man who didn’t follow the “male code” would be swiftly mocked and ostracized. She and her sister, who eventually joined her as a co-worker, wondered whether their own loving father could change for the worse if put in such an environment. Is anyone immune?:
She also made the best of her situation. She was friendly with many of the (better) men she worked with. All the while, some of these men addressed her as “Doll” and variations on that, but she let it pass. The impression isn’t that she approved of such belittling monikers, just that she recognized the limits of her miserable situation: Complaining wouldn’t be good for her, and her paycheck would. Ducks is Beaton’s reclaiming of some of the power she lost when she was forced to shut up to get what she needed.
People shouldn’t read this book if they can’t tolerate depictions of men behaving at their worst around women. The memoir is basically a series of these incidents. It doesn’t tell a story, and chronology is nonexistent, but that disorganization works somewhat to show that every day was the same--both the soulless, ugly work setting and the atrocious behavior:
In 2005, cartoonist Kate Beaton found herself in a dilemma as a recent college graduate with large student loans to pay off. Her double degree in history and anthropology wasn’t opening doors career-wise, so she headed to Alberta, Canada, to work in the oil sands, a job that paid handsomely. Ducks is a sequential-art memoir about her two years working there.
Extremely male-dominated--roughly fifty men to every one woman--oil sands are far from ideal workplaces for women, especially for a young woman making this her first job out of college. This memoir is 450 pages, and stunningly, the majority of it is a chronicling of constant sexual harassment and more: . It appears that not a day went by without some kind of harassment, whether that be quiet leering, objectifying comments to Beaton herself, or objectifying and misogynistic comments about women in general--yet Beaton soldiered her way through what would, understandably, break many people. It was a soul-crushing existence, and her fortitude, and work ethic, stand out as much as the outrageous depictions of harassment.
She wasn’t a robot, though. The panels portraying Making matters worse was that she had no recourse. Complaining would not only change nothing but could mean consequences for her, and she couldn’t afford to have the job get any worse than it already was, or to lose it altogether. In moments of introspection, Beaton pondered her dilemma and went further to examine how loneliness, isolation, and boredom can bring out another side of a person. She struggled with the reality that most of the men toiling away at this job were husbands, boyfriends, and dads, yet in addition to the sexual harassment and assault, cheating was a way of life at the work camps, expected and even encouraged. She never used the term “toxic masculinity,” but her memoir shows that the oil sands are the very embodiment of the mindset and behavior. In an environment so rough and intimidating, any man who didn’t follow the “male code” would be swiftly mocked and ostracized. She and her sister, who eventually joined her as a co-worker, wondered whether their own loving father could change for the worse if put in such an environment. Is anyone immune?:
The worst part for me about being harassed here isn’t that people say shitty things. It’s when they say them and they sound like me, in the accent that I dropped when I went to university. That they look like my cousins and uncle, you know, even though they’re from all over the country…that they are familiar. And that this place creates that where it didn’t exist before. This place. It’s not an excuse, it’s just…The worst thing is that your heart breaks.But Beaton also acknowledged that many men ignored her (not that they weren’t harassing anyone at all and/or cheating, however); it’s just that the abusive men so dominated her life that it was easy to forget about the ones who didn’t abuse her.
She also made the best of her situation. She was friendly with many of the (better) men she worked with. All the while, some of these men addressed her as “Doll” and variations on that, but she let it pass. The impression isn’t that she approved of such belittling monikers, just that she recognized the limits of her miserable situation: Complaining wouldn’t be good for her, and her paycheck would. Ducks is Beaton’s reclaiming of some of the power she lost when she was forced to shut up to get what she needed.
People shouldn’t read this book if they can’t tolerate depictions of men behaving at their worst around women. The memoir is basically a series of these incidents. It doesn’t tell a story, and chronology is nonexistent, but that disorganization works somewhat to show that every day was the same--both the soulless, ugly work setting and the atrocious behavior:
. . . work camps are a uniquely capsuled-off society, a liminal space, and analogue for so many other male-dominated spaces. Gendered violence does happen when men outnumber women by as much as fifty to one, as they can in the camps or [at] work sites. Of course it does. Of course this happens when men are in isolation for long stretches of time, away from their families and relationships and communities, and completely resocialized in a camp and work environment like that of the oil sands.That’s recognition of a disturbing reality, not an excuse. Beaton’s memoir won’t allow dysfunction to be swept under the rug.
August 25, 2022
Holy shit, what a book!! I've been reading Kate Beaton's work online since the livejournal days, starting in roughly 2009, just after the events which this memoir recounts. It's humbling to sit with the narrative of what was happening in the real life of an author I knew for her humorous history jokes in Hark! A Vagrant.
In 2005, Kate was a recent college graduate with a double degree in History and Anthropology, and a mountain of student debt. She came home to Cape Breton, in Eastern Canada, to a very bleak jobless landscape. So, she did what everyone was doing at the time: went to work in the oil sands in Alberta until she could pay her loans off. At twenty-two she had no idea what to expect or what she would find there; what the isolation, physically challenging work environment, and massive gender-imbalance of the employee population would lead to. Men outnumbered women sometimes fifty to one; sexual harassment during work hours and assault after hours in the camp dorms was rampant, as was depression and drug use. Slowly, over the course of three years, Kate became aware of the conversations around environmental impact and misuse of stolen Indigenous lands. This book, nearly 500 pages, does not tell; it shows, in excruciating detail, the human cost of this harsh, damaging industry. But while the money remains, people who feel they have no other choice will keep working the oil sands. No one who works there wants to be there, but the other industries they worked in before are gone.
I am extremely grateful that Beaton decided to write this book, and I hope the telling of the story was cathartic. Thank you also to Drawn and Quarterly, for giving me a copy in advance of its release. This is a heavy book, but I definitely recommend it, and I want to follow it up with some reading on how we begin addressing this huge, systemic problem.
In 2005, Kate was a recent college graduate with a double degree in History and Anthropology, and a mountain of student debt. She came home to Cape Breton, in Eastern Canada, to a very bleak jobless landscape. So, she did what everyone was doing at the time: went to work in the oil sands in Alberta until she could pay her loans off. At twenty-two she had no idea what to expect or what she would find there; what the isolation, physically challenging work environment, and massive gender-imbalance of the employee population would lead to. Men outnumbered women sometimes fifty to one; sexual harassment during work hours and assault after hours in the camp dorms was rampant, as was depression and drug use. Slowly, over the course of three years, Kate became aware of the conversations around environmental impact and misuse of stolen Indigenous lands. This book, nearly 500 pages, does not tell; it shows, in excruciating detail, the human cost of this harsh, damaging industry. But while the money remains, people who feel they have no other choice will keep working the oil sands. No one who works there wants to be there, but the other industries they worked in before are gone.
I am extremely grateful that Beaton decided to write this book, and I hope the telling of the story was cathartic. Thank you also to Drawn and Quarterly, for giving me a copy in advance of its release. This is a heavy book, but I definitely recommend it, and I want to follow it up with some reading on how we begin addressing this huge, systemic problem.
December 14, 2022
4 stars!
Ducks is the autobiographical account of Kate Beaton who worked in the oil sands in Canada to pay off her student loans. There she encounters a harsh reality of unsafe working conditions and trauma that went largely ignored by everyone who worked there.
I have to say, this book wasn’t even on my radar until it was nominated for the Goodreads Choice Award, and then I saw a few reviews from friends praising it. I never even knew about this area of Canada and the kind of work people did there. I thought this book was a very insightful look at an industry not a lot of people know about, but many workers there face many dangers and sacrifice a lot to be there to make money.
I’m really glad I read this story, and I am even more glad that Beaton wrote it. I think Ducks will someday become a classic in the graphic novel genre, I really do.
Ducks is the autobiographical account of Kate Beaton who worked in the oil sands in Canada to pay off her student loans. There she encounters a harsh reality of unsafe working conditions and trauma that went largely ignored by everyone who worked there.
I have to say, this book wasn’t even on my radar until it was nominated for the Goodreads Choice Award, and then I saw a few reviews from friends praising it. I never even knew about this area of Canada and the kind of work people did there. I thought this book was a very insightful look at an industry not a lot of people know about, but many workers there face many dangers and sacrifice a lot to be there to make money.
I’m really glad I read this story, and I am even more glad that Beaton wrote it. I think Ducks will someday become a classic in the graphic novel genre, I really do.
January 18, 2023
If I’m grateful for anything as I close the cover on Ducks, it’s that Kate Beaton gave herself ample room to tell her story. It’s only because she did that this graphic memoir manages to bring so much nuance to harsh blue-collar realities on the one hand, and the impossible balance between economic development and environmental protection, on the other.
I don’t know whether people from elsewhere realize how fantastically huge and mostly undeveloped Canada actually is. Most of us live along a thin strip that follows the American border, if you were to look at it from the sky. I’ve never been anywhere near the oil sands, myself. But the way Beaton described the lifestyle and realities around them – frigid, dirty, isolated, somewhat uncivil – is pretty much what I pictured. At the price it apparently pays to go there, you know it can’t be easy.
To get Kate Beaton’s impressions on it as a woman is just priceless. That she would softly contrast her time in the workcamps with her regular life as an East Coaster added so much warmth to this book, for me. That she would avoid magnifying drama to focus instead on how she felt, one wound after the other, letting the realizations sink in, won me over, as well.
This book, people, is as Canadian as it gets – if you’re done with Anne of Green Gables, already.
I don’t know whether people from elsewhere realize how fantastically huge and mostly undeveloped Canada actually is. Most of us live along a thin strip that follows the American border, if you were to look at it from the sky. I’ve never been anywhere near the oil sands, myself. But the way Beaton described the lifestyle and realities around them – frigid, dirty, isolated, somewhat uncivil – is pretty much what I pictured. At the price it apparently pays to go there, you know it can’t be easy.
To get Kate Beaton’s impressions on it as a woman is just priceless. That she would softly contrast her time in the workcamps with her regular life as an East Coaster added so much warmth to this book, for me. That she would avoid magnifying drama to focus instead on how she felt, one wound after the other, letting the realizations sink in, won me over, as well.
This book, people, is as Canadian as it gets – if you’re done with Anne of Green Gables, already.
October 11, 2022
Like everyone who loves Kate Beaton's work, I have my own stories of discovering her back in the LiveJournal days and being bowled over by her unique mix of historical curiosity, cute-smart art style, and dry humour. I was obsessed with her first book, Never Learn Anything From History, and couldn't wait to see what she would do with more scope and length.
This is probably not the sort of thing I would have imagined, but then you really have no idea what's going on in other people's lives, even – especially – when you think you know them over what wasn't yet called social media. At the same time as she was building up a loyal following on the internet, she was busy working off her student loans in the work camps of the Alberta oil sands.
(Click images in the review to enlarge them)
This is her memoir of that experience, and it's a valuable document to have out there, quite aside from any entertainment value. I've met a few people who worked in the oil sands and it seems like such a remote and opaque world – I've never seen any other books set there, and I've been trying without success to find an excuse to go out there myself though work for years.
What makes this story so moving is that it's presented from a completely personal point of view. It's not a political screed or a take-down or an exposé (though it can't fail to have the effect of all of these in places). It's just her own experience as a woman living remotely in a place where people live in isolation, where workers and the environment are sacrificed to corporate exigencies, and where men outnumber women by about fifty to one.
Because she is so patient in setting up this context, the sexual and corporate politics emerge absolutely organically, without any sense of animus or agenda. This gives the book's lessons an incredible power, while stripping them of any dogma or point-scoring. In fact Beaton doesn't shy away from questioning her own complicity in the industry, and she also makes a point of stressing the numerous perfectly nice and reasonable people who also worked around her.
Nevertheless, this is, at least in part, a memoir of trauma. Because I have followed her for so long and feel so much goodwill and affection towards Kate Beaton (which, perhaps, is another kind of imposition), I found it exquisitely painful to be taken through some of her experiences here, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. Her work has always had the personal tone of a shared private joke, and it's the same here – she's just so very personable, and you feel absolutely with her in whatever she goes through.
If I'm rigorously honest with myself, I perhaps felt a twinge of disappointment that this doesn't play to some of her key strengths. Not to say that this is a humourless book – it isn't – but her sights are clearly set on different things here. It invites comparison not with her earlier history strips, but with other great comics memoirs of recent years like Fun Home or Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?. She's shown that she can absolutely produce that kind of work with the best of them, though to be honest what I liked about her stuff is that she always seemed to be trying things that were completely different from that.
But that seems like a very unfair quibble when this story is so movingly, uneuphemistically told, and so brilliantly executed. After this, it's anyone's guess what she'll produce next, but hopefully it'll find her in a happier place.
September 26, 2022
Hark! Kate Beaton’s back with her first non-kiddles comic in seven years, and her first feature-length narrative - a memoir called Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands. It’s about her time working for various oil companies in rural Canadia between 2005 and 2008 and her observations on what that business does to the people who work in it, the surrounding environment, and, of course, her.
I’m somewhere in the middle on this one - I liked parts of it, others not so much. It’s a very thorough look at the day-to-day business of working as a tool crib (someone who gets the required tools out of storage for the engineers) and later on as an administrator in the office area. And there’s the rub: if you’re gonna do a realistic comic depicting tedious jobs, it’s gonna be tedious to read at times, even in the hands of a cartoonist as talented as Kate Beaton.
Her central thesis is that the oil business is damaging to almost everyone involved. Particularly the workers who travel from all over Canada (and the world) to work in these remote locations in harsh conditions, all because the pay’s so good and there aren’t any lucrative jobs anywhere else. What’s not considered is the psychological impact of being separated from civilisation and loved ones, leading to extensive substance abuse, loneliness, mental health problems, and broken homes.
And that’s not to mention the damage to the environment (a number of ducks die from oil poisoning, hence the title - it’s also symbolic of the rot of the business) and First Nation peoples who live nearby and get sick. And then there’s the damage Beaton herself endured as she reveals just how bad things can get in places where men outnumber women 50-1: she was raped twice.
She quickly establishes from the start the constant casual misogyny of working in these locations and unwanted attention she receives on a daily basis. Even so, it’s still jarring to see how extreme things got and it’s immensely brave of her to tell her story like this. Those sequences in particular are creatively portrayed so that they drift into the abstract rather than graphic and more accurately give the reader an idea of how she got through those traumatic experiences mentally.
There are glimpses of Beaton’s future cartooning success as she begins posting her strips online (these will go on to become the Hark! A Vagrant books) and she sketches a weird looking horse in what will become her children’s book The Princess and the Pony. Towards the end, her familiar humour becomes more noticeable too, possibly as she becomes more comfortable working in the environment, which reminded me of how funny she can be in her comics.
This is also the first Beaton comic I’ve seen that really showcases her artistic talents. Most of the comic is drawn in the familiar Hark! A Vagrant style but there are many splash pages showcasing both Beaton’s skill and Canada’s natural beauty that are quite something.
It’s quite a hefty book - 430 pages - and, as much a fan as I am of Beaton’s, reading about the dull jobs and constantly repulsive behaviour of her co-workers got really repetitive after a while and I found the book easy to put down.
It’s often an illuminating read as there aren’t any mainstream books, let alone comics, on this subject, and Beaton does present as balanced a view of life working in the oil sands as she can, given her experiences. She meets plenty of decent men and is able to achieve her goal of paying off her student loan from the money she makes working here, and acknowledges how life-changing the money can be for so many families whose (usually) husbands/fathers come to work here.
Similarly, she makes a convincing case for the damaging nature of the business. Hopefully things are different today with the proliferation of smartphones/wifi making boredom less of an issue, as well as the openness of talking about mental health possibly cutting down on the destructive behaviour of men who bottled it up until it exploded out of them.
This book shows that Beaton’s more than the creator of gag strips and is capable of producing full-length narrative comics that deal with complex and difficult topics. Ducks definitely isn’t as much fun as the Hark! A Vagrant stuff but then it’s not trying to be - still, there’s a lot of plodding, uninteresting sequences and scenes that keep cropping up. I get why she’s done that - to highlight the drudgery and consistent fear of what it’s like to be a young woman in these places - but they still weigh down the more thoughtful, impressive sequences.
Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands is a mixed bag for me but I’m glad Kate Beaton’s back and any new comic from her is better than none at all. Fans should expect a very different Beaton comic this time around but not an unwelcome one at that.
I’m somewhere in the middle on this one - I liked parts of it, others not so much. It’s a very thorough look at the day-to-day business of working as a tool crib (someone who gets the required tools out of storage for the engineers) and later on as an administrator in the office area. And there’s the rub: if you’re gonna do a realistic comic depicting tedious jobs, it’s gonna be tedious to read at times, even in the hands of a cartoonist as talented as Kate Beaton.
Her central thesis is that the oil business is damaging to almost everyone involved. Particularly the workers who travel from all over Canada (and the world) to work in these remote locations in harsh conditions, all because the pay’s so good and there aren’t any lucrative jobs anywhere else. What’s not considered is the psychological impact of being separated from civilisation and loved ones, leading to extensive substance abuse, loneliness, mental health problems, and broken homes.
And that’s not to mention the damage to the environment (a number of ducks die from oil poisoning, hence the title - it’s also symbolic of the rot of the business) and First Nation peoples who live nearby and get sick. And then there’s the damage Beaton herself endured as she reveals just how bad things can get in places where men outnumber women 50-1: she was raped twice.
She quickly establishes from the start the constant casual misogyny of working in these locations and unwanted attention she receives on a daily basis. Even so, it’s still jarring to see how extreme things got and it’s immensely brave of her to tell her story like this. Those sequences in particular are creatively portrayed so that they drift into the abstract rather than graphic and more accurately give the reader an idea of how she got through those traumatic experiences mentally.
There are glimpses of Beaton’s future cartooning success as she begins posting her strips online (these will go on to become the Hark! A Vagrant books) and she sketches a weird looking horse in what will become her children’s book The Princess and the Pony. Towards the end, her familiar humour becomes more noticeable too, possibly as she becomes more comfortable working in the environment, which reminded me of how funny she can be in her comics.
This is also the first Beaton comic I’ve seen that really showcases her artistic talents. Most of the comic is drawn in the familiar Hark! A Vagrant style but there are many splash pages showcasing both Beaton’s skill and Canada’s natural beauty that are quite something.
It’s quite a hefty book - 430 pages - and, as much a fan as I am of Beaton’s, reading about the dull jobs and constantly repulsive behaviour of her co-workers got really repetitive after a while and I found the book easy to put down.
It’s often an illuminating read as there aren’t any mainstream books, let alone comics, on this subject, and Beaton does present as balanced a view of life working in the oil sands as she can, given her experiences. She meets plenty of decent men and is able to achieve her goal of paying off her student loan from the money she makes working here, and acknowledges how life-changing the money can be for so many families whose (usually) husbands/fathers come to work here.
Similarly, she makes a convincing case for the damaging nature of the business. Hopefully things are different today with the proliferation of smartphones/wifi making boredom less of an issue, as well as the openness of talking about mental health possibly cutting down on the destructive behaviour of men who bottled it up until it exploded out of them.
This book shows that Beaton’s more than the creator of gag strips and is capable of producing full-length narrative comics that deal with complex and difficult topics. Ducks definitely isn’t as much fun as the Hark! A Vagrant stuff but then it’s not trying to be - still, there’s a lot of plodding, uninteresting sequences and scenes that keep cropping up. I get why she’s done that - to highlight the drudgery and consistent fear of what it’s like to be a young woman in these places - but they still weigh down the more thoughtful, impressive sequences.
Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands is a mixed bag for me but I’m glad Kate Beaton’s back and any new comic from her is better than none at all. Fans should expect a very different Beaton comic this time around but not an unwelcome one at that.
September 22, 2022
This book absolutely destroyed me, like the author, I am a woman who worked in the oil sands for years to pay off my student loans and the story was incredibly relatable. This is the most accurate depiction of my experience that I’ve never seen reflected in any media. Any time I tell some stories about that time, people shake their head in disbelief and I feel like no one who hasn’t been through that experience really gets it. So reading this was very validating.
September 20, 2022
This book felt profoundly important to me.
I'm from the other side of the island Kate Beaton grew up on and I'm living not terribly far from where most of this book is set. My experiences have been different, of course, but everything Beaton writes rings true. You notice it in the little things: buildings that look familiar, or that you realize looked like that in the years her story was taking place, or the way she draws certain documents, or realizing you might have a very vague connection to one of the people who die in an accident in the book, and then that sense of nailing it extends outward to the issues she's covering. There's a landscape drawing of Cape Breton early in the book that looks like a photo that hangs on my mother's wall, except they're from two slightly different angles.
What makes the book really special is that she gives people a fair hearing, and tries to understand where they're coming from. The stuff about the old guys in the book really rings true to me. Ducks transcends culture war bullshit and becomes real literature, important beyond the confines of the time and place she's writing about.
The only demerit I would issue is that I think in the end, the oil sands get off a little bit too lightly. Giving a few thousand pay cheques to Maritimers doesn't make up for the fact that this industry is destroying our ability to live on this planet and poisoning the water downstream on the Athabasca. But then, what the fuck am I doing about it? Nothing. And I know too many people who, like Beaton, have had a better life because the money they've made in this place.
So I dunno. It's a heartbreaking work and all the better for it.
I'm from the other side of the island Kate Beaton grew up on and I'm living not terribly far from where most of this book is set. My experiences have been different, of course, but everything Beaton writes rings true. You notice it in the little things: buildings that look familiar, or that you realize looked like that in the years her story was taking place, or the way she draws certain documents, or realizing you might have a very vague connection to one of the people who die in an accident in the book, and then that sense of nailing it extends outward to the issues she's covering. There's a landscape drawing of Cape Breton early in the book that looks like a photo that hangs on my mother's wall, except they're from two slightly different angles.
What makes the book really special is that she gives people a fair hearing, and tries to understand where they're coming from. The stuff about the old guys in the book really rings true to me. Ducks transcends culture war bullshit and becomes real literature, important beyond the confines of the time and place she's writing about.
The only demerit I would issue is that I think in the end, the oil sands get off a little bit too lightly. Giving a few thousand pay cheques to Maritimers doesn't make up for the fact that this industry is destroying our ability to live on this planet and poisoning the water downstream on the Athabasca. But then, what the fuck am I doing about it? Nothing. And I know too many people who, like Beaton, have had a better life because the money they've made in this place.
So I dunno. It's a heartbreaking work and all the better for it.
August 20, 2022
I adored Hark! A Vagrant! so when I saw Kate Beaton had a new graphic novel coming out I immediately grabbed it. This is not a silly collection of smart comics. It's so much more. It's a retelling of the author's year spent working in the Northern Alberta oil sands and that sounds like it should be sort of boring, but it wasn't at all. I felt like I was there with her, exploring this strange world. It's angsty and gritty and true. It's also quite long, which I appreciate in a graphic novel since they often are over before I really get to love the characters. I recommend.
September 21, 2022
“This story starts in 2005. I am 21 years old.
I just graduated from University with an arts degree, paid for with student loans”.
Kate is from Beaton, East Coast of Canada, in the Providence of Nova Scotia.
She tells us….
“The only message we got about a better future was that we had to leave home to have one”.
The breath, and depth of Kate’s struggles in this graphic- memoir — (one she battled for a couple of years) in her life are maddening.
The lines between laughter and hysteria, despair and rage — with frequent painful revelations about human behavior —had me ‘only’ slowing down my reading so that I could stare longer I see outstanding graphics.
“I was wondering if I could snag one of those nice safety vest’s now that the Calgary crew is gone”
“Oh . . .
OMG…..
One gets to a point where The New York Times is included ….
Headline reads:
“Canadians Investigate Death of Ducks at oil-Sands Project”
And then…
From the CBCNews.ca
“Calgary Man killed in head on crash near Fort McMurray”
“A 23-year-old Calgary man died Friday morning when he used car collided head on with a tanker truck on Highway 63 North Ave., Fort Murray”.
“John Ranald MacKinnon was killed after being thrown from his vehicle in a crash, which occurred shortly after 1 AM., RCMP said”
“The driver of the tanker track escaped serious injuries”.
“The highway, which links the Edmonton area to the oil sands plants north of Fort McMurray, has become infamous because of the high number of injuries and deaths on the narrow but busy roadway”.
“Lindsay, you ever get stuff on your skin from being here?”
“Like my back is covered in . . . I don’t know? Welts?”
“Oh—yeah, I don’t know what the Hell that is”.
“Do I even want to know what kind of cancer will have in 20 years?”
Submitted by Anonymous
“I really dislike people like you who have nothing good to say about Fort McMurray. I lived there for seven years and my family still does. It has brought so many opportunities for my family and I. If you have not lived there and truly got to experience all the good things about Fort McMurray, then I pity you. Fort McMurray is a wonderful place and it’s definitely not an ugly place to live”.
“The worst part for me about being harassed here isn’t that people say shitty things”.
“The worst thing is that your heart breaks”.
“I don’t know, you can’t just paint one picture. For an article”.
“It’s fucked up to be in a position of descending them”.
“Am I defending them? I don’t know, just, they are still my people. Even at their worst, they’re more mine than she is”.
In the afterword, Katie Beaton is incredibly generous sharing about her experience from working in the oil sands between the years 2005 to 2008–(for 2 years).
It is such a tragic and relatable story… I don’t think I will be able to stop thinking about it for a long time.
The oil sands operate on stolen lands. Their pollution, work camps, and ever-growing settler populations continue to have serious social, economic, cultural, environmental, and health consequences for the indigenous communities in the region.
There is a lot of history to try to understand….(Indigenous rights, misogyny, environmental issues, capitalism, the complexity of real people)….
issues still facing the Athabaskan Chipewyan First Nation, Fort McMurray, Mikisew Cree First Nation, as well as the Métis communities in Northern Alberta.
Kate Beaton ….is new to me …
a new heroine to me …
This was a phenomenal book…. so compassionately written…. deeply penetrating in experience.
The graphics… OMG….. it almost doesn’t even need to be said how incredibly talented Kate Beaton is as an artist too. Filled with expressions and emotions!!
I’ll be leaving for Calgary myself tomorrow to visit our daughter and her husband.
I just graduated from University with an arts degree, paid for with student loans”.
Kate is from Beaton, East Coast of Canada, in the Providence of Nova Scotia.
She tells us….
“The only message we got about a better future was that we had to leave home to have one”.
The breath, and depth of Kate’s struggles in this graphic- memoir — (one she battled for a couple of years) in her life are maddening.
The lines between laughter and hysteria, despair and rage — with frequent painful revelations about human behavior —had me ‘only’ slowing down my reading so that I could stare longer I see outstanding graphics.
“I was wondering if I could snag one of those nice safety vest’s now that the Calgary crew is gone”
“Oh . . .
OMG…..
One gets to a point where The New York Times is included ….
Headline reads:
“Canadians Investigate Death of Ducks at oil-Sands Project”
And then…
From the CBCNews.ca
“Calgary Man killed in head on crash near Fort McMurray”
“A 23-year-old Calgary man died Friday morning when he used car collided head on with a tanker truck on Highway 63 North Ave., Fort Murray”.
“John Ranald MacKinnon was killed after being thrown from his vehicle in a crash, which occurred shortly after 1 AM., RCMP said”
“The driver of the tanker track escaped serious injuries”.
“The highway, which links the Edmonton area to the oil sands plants north of Fort McMurray, has become infamous because of the high number of injuries and deaths on the narrow but busy roadway”.
“Lindsay, you ever get stuff on your skin from being here?”
“Like my back is covered in . . . I don’t know? Welts?”
“Oh—yeah, I don’t know what the Hell that is”.
“Do I even want to know what kind of cancer will have in 20 years?”
Submitted by Anonymous
“I really dislike people like you who have nothing good to say about Fort McMurray. I lived there for seven years and my family still does. It has brought so many opportunities for my family and I. If you have not lived there and truly got to experience all the good things about Fort McMurray, then I pity you. Fort McMurray is a wonderful place and it’s definitely not an ugly place to live”.
“The worst part for me about being harassed here isn’t that people say shitty things”.
“The worst thing is that your heart breaks”.
“I don’t know, you can’t just paint one picture. For an article”.
“It’s fucked up to be in a position of descending them”.
“Am I defending them? I don’t know, just, they are still my people. Even at their worst, they’re more mine than she is”.
In the afterword, Katie Beaton is incredibly generous sharing about her experience from working in the oil sands between the years 2005 to 2008–(for 2 years).
It is such a tragic and relatable story… I don’t think I will be able to stop thinking about it for a long time.
The oil sands operate on stolen lands. Their pollution, work camps, and ever-growing settler populations continue to have serious social, economic, cultural, environmental, and health consequences for the indigenous communities in the region.
There is a lot of history to try to understand….(Indigenous rights, misogyny, environmental issues, capitalism, the complexity of real people)….
issues still facing the Athabaskan Chipewyan First Nation, Fort McMurray, Mikisew Cree First Nation, as well as the Métis communities in Northern Alberta.
Kate Beaton ….is new to me …
a new heroine to me …
This was a phenomenal book…. so compassionately written…. deeply penetrating in experience.
The graphics… OMG….. it almost doesn’t even need to be said how incredibly talented Kate Beaton is as an artist too. Filled with expressions and emotions!!
I’ll be leaving for Calgary myself tomorrow to visit our daughter and her husband.
October 17, 2022
There are two Ducks. There’s Ducks by Kate Beaton and now there’s Ducks by Kate Beaton. Kate Beaton’s 2014 comic,
Ducks
, was roughly between 27 and 40 pages long (depending panels per page), and at the time I described it as “sad and funny and poignant and altogether human.” Kate Beaton’s 2022 comic, Ducks, is torrentially longer, expanding most of the original work into a 436-page heavyweight. It also, by nature of the expansion, becomes less funny and poignant as those elements retreat further into what is an absolutely harrowing recitation of grim realities (partially enhanced by having known a version of Beaton and her family through the stories she’s told for years on Hark! A Vagrant).
As if anticipating the dissonance felt between the two Ducks, Beaton includes on pages 265 and 266 of her 2022 Ducks a brief anecdote that almost feels out of nowhere save for to explain how these two very different Ducks by Kate Beaton could exist. As young Kate relates to George, her boss at the museum library, that there is an author named Helen Creighton who removed all the off-color stories from her own book written in the Fifties, a collection of folk tales from the Maritimes. Creighton’s reason was that they weren’t suitable for reader’s eyes. Thinking on this, young Beaton in that library (as told by Beaton-the-author) is thoughtful: “Makes you wonder what was left out though, doesn’t it? It’s nice, but it’s not the whole picture. And what good is that?”
It’s a strange moment and if you’re coming to Ducks for the first time in this 2022 incarnation, you might just think that it’s included as a statement of intent. With the additional context of what Beaton produced as Ducks before though? It reads as repentance, as a righting of the ship. Ducks, as it was, is “sad and funny and poignant and altogether human.” Ducks, as it is now, as true and whole a Ducks as we will see, is dark. I’ve mentioned grim and harrowing already, but throw in some other descriptors: heart-breaking, rage-inducing, tragic, awful. There are moments of humor, moments of poignancy, but the whole thing is smothered by the absolute, unquenchable awfulness of men when they are not at home.
While Beaton’s earlier attempt at telling stories from the Albertan oil sands (she worked for Syncrude and Shell) focused on the inhumanity of the work, the environmental impact of the oil extraction process, and the essential humanity of the workers cut off from their homes and families, in the present telling, Beaton tells more of the whole story, and that is a story of how a project focused on stripping resources from the land as efficiently as possible unsurprisingly also builds a world steeped in misogyny, sexual objectification, harassment, assault, and rape. As a result, many of the things that felt central to Ducks (2014) fade into the background of Ducks (2022). Beaton still includes most of the stories she used in the earlier Ducks, but the horror of asshole men is so exhaustingly pervasive that it dominates the book.
And that’s not a criticism. As young Beaton asks, what good would Ducks be if it elided the most everyday and constant of Beaton’s experiences on the oil sands? Ducks (2014) reminds us gently of the human cost of industry. Ducks (2022) will not allow us to forget the human cost of industry. It’s like Grave Of The Fireflies like that. Maybe Ducks‘ll be the lever that turns some kid toward empathy (Grave Of The Fireflies was one of a few works that did that for me)—and wouldn’t that be something!
Beaton juggles a lot here—and most of it successfully. We’ve got, of course, the culture of casual female assault here, but also the effect of being torn from home, the humanity of the individuals who get sucked into the oil sands vortex, the effect of dehumanizing labor on those individuals, the economy that prompts people to sacrifice themselves to industry like this, the importance of family, the difference between real world and the camps and if there’s actually a difference, and the issue of environmental calamity and how that calamity affects disproportionally the native populations that Canada has never properly cared for or valued. As I said, there’s a lot to juggle here.
Some of it gets a lot of space, and some of it just a couple thoughtful pages of ruminations from men in trucks. The only time I felt I wanted more was in Ducks’ discussion of the environmental crisis. There’s a moment, almost out of nowhere, where young Beaton turns on a Youtube video (after discussion of whether the company has blocked the site like it’s already blocked Facebook) and we get a 3-page interview clip from Celina Harpe (this clip in fact!) about the affects of the industry on the local population. It’s set differently from Beaton’s style of dialogue beats so I kind of, uh, tuned out. I realized it was important because it ends with a 2/3-page panel, rare in the book’s usual 6- and 9-panel grids, so I went back to pay closer attention. It’s good, but it still feels abrupt to me—especially with so little prior interest in the environment shown in the narrative.
That quibble aside, Beaton’s done something wonderful here in taking a familiar work and exploding it out into something truly daunting. Ducks is physically uncomfortable to read, being an heavy-with-ink hardcover but also having a jacket that feels coated in sandpaper—which kept me texturally unnerved for the duration. But all that is just foreshadowing for the discomfort and anxiety that comes from actually reading, thinking constantly, Oh, Katie, this is bad. Oh no, how are you going to get out of—oh. oh. oh no. oh no.
Our world is full of bad men. And of men who are bad but don’t think of themselves as bad. I am one of their victims and chances are you are too. I know that I know a lot of their victims. I’m glad Beaton drew the curtain back on Two Years In The Oil Sands, and I’m sorry she was able to have something to write about it at all. I don’t know if I’ll reread it. I haven’t rewatched Grave Of The Fireflies either. Ducks is good. Ducks is great. And it breaks my heart into this rage-shattered thing. I try to be a pacifist, but I’m not very good at it, and books like this just evaporate my inclinations toward peaceful solutions to the terror that people inflict on others.
____
One curiosity with the expansion of the work is that the titular ducks are no longer quite as large a part of the story. Their death in the Syncrude tailings pond occurs late in the book, once Katie is working for Shell and it’s kind of there and gone. Still, with the new book’s more expansive purpose, the title becomes something more. This is not just the environmental tragedy of sixteen hundred ducks dying as a sacrifice to human greed. Instead, the ducks are people like Kate, assaulted by the world that greed creates. The ducks are the workers who use drugs to get through and then get destroyed by them along the way. The ducks are the Cree, the women, the families, the destroyed marriages. The ducks in Ducks are those people sacrificed on the altar of Lord Mammon, careless castoffs that the corporations will never know or care about.
____
[note: if you’re concerned about the sensationalization of sexual assault, this book is not that. There is nothing exciting or titillating going on here. Beaton’s lens averts its eyes so that we get the before and the after but not the during so much. It’s careful in that respect, but perhaps no less traumatizing to read.]
As if anticipating the dissonance felt between the two Ducks, Beaton includes on pages 265 and 266 of her 2022 Ducks a brief anecdote that almost feels out of nowhere save for to explain how these two very different Ducks by Kate Beaton could exist. As young Kate relates to George, her boss at the museum library, that there is an author named Helen Creighton who removed all the off-color stories from her own book written in the Fifties, a collection of folk tales from the Maritimes. Creighton’s reason was that they weren’t suitable for reader’s eyes. Thinking on this, young Beaton in that library (as told by Beaton-the-author) is thoughtful: “Makes you wonder what was left out though, doesn’t it? It’s nice, but it’s not the whole picture. And what good is that?”
It’s a strange moment and if you’re coming to Ducks for the first time in this 2022 incarnation, you might just think that it’s included as a statement of intent. With the additional context of what Beaton produced as Ducks before though? It reads as repentance, as a righting of the ship. Ducks, as it was, is “sad and funny and poignant and altogether human.” Ducks, as it is now, as true and whole a Ducks as we will see, is dark. I’ve mentioned grim and harrowing already, but throw in some other descriptors: heart-breaking, rage-inducing, tragic, awful. There are moments of humor, moments of poignancy, but the whole thing is smothered by the absolute, unquenchable awfulness of men when they are not at home.
While Beaton’s earlier attempt at telling stories from the Albertan oil sands (she worked for Syncrude and Shell) focused on the inhumanity of the work, the environmental impact of the oil extraction process, and the essential humanity of the workers cut off from their homes and families, in the present telling, Beaton tells more of the whole story, and that is a story of how a project focused on stripping resources from the land as efficiently as possible unsurprisingly also builds a world steeped in misogyny, sexual objectification, harassment, assault, and rape. As a result, many of the things that felt central to Ducks (2014) fade into the background of Ducks (2022). Beaton still includes most of the stories she used in the earlier Ducks, but the horror of asshole men is so exhaustingly pervasive that it dominates the book.
And that’s not a criticism. As young Beaton asks, what good would Ducks be if it elided the most everyday and constant of Beaton’s experiences on the oil sands? Ducks (2014) reminds us gently of the human cost of industry. Ducks (2022) will not allow us to forget the human cost of industry. It’s like Grave Of The Fireflies like that. Maybe Ducks‘ll be the lever that turns some kid toward empathy (Grave Of The Fireflies was one of a few works that did that for me)—and wouldn’t that be something!
Beaton juggles a lot here—and most of it successfully. We’ve got, of course, the culture of casual female assault here, but also the effect of being torn from home, the humanity of the individuals who get sucked into the oil sands vortex, the effect of dehumanizing labor on those individuals, the economy that prompts people to sacrifice themselves to industry like this, the importance of family, the difference between real world and the camps and if there’s actually a difference, and the issue of environmental calamity and how that calamity affects disproportionally the native populations that Canada has never properly cared for or valued. As I said, there’s a lot to juggle here.
Some of it gets a lot of space, and some of it just a couple thoughtful pages of ruminations from men in trucks. The only time I felt I wanted more was in Ducks’ discussion of the environmental crisis. There’s a moment, almost out of nowhere, where young Beaton turns on a Youtube video (after discussion of whether the company has blocked the site like it’s already blocked Facebook) and we get a 3-page interview clip from Celina Harpe (this clip in fact!) about the affects of the industry on the local population. It’s set differently from Beaton’s style of dialogue beats so I kind of, uh, tuned out. I realized it was important because it ends with a 2/3-page panel, rare in the book’s usual 6- and 9-panel grids, so I went back to pay closer attention. It’s good, but it still feels abrupt to me—especially with so little prior interest in the environment shown in the narrative.
That quibble aside, Beaton’s done something wonderful here in taking a familiar work and exploding it out into something truly daunting. Ducks is physically uncomfortable to read, being an heavy-with-ink hardcover but also having a jacket that feels coated in sandpaper—which kept me texturally unnerved for the duration. But all that is just foreshadowing for the discomfort and anxiety that comes from actually reading, thinking constantly, Oh, Katie, this is bad. Oh no, how are you going to get out of—oh. oh. oh no. oh no.
Our world is full of bad men. And of men who are bad but don’t think of themselves as bad. I am one of their victims and chances are you are too. I know that I know a lot of their victims. I’m glad Beaton drew the curtain back on Two Years In The Oil Sands, and I’m sorry she was able to have something to write about it at all. I don’t know if I’ll reread it. I haven’t rewatched Grave Of The Fireflies either. Ducks is good. Ducks is great. And it breaks my heart into this rage-shattered thing. I try to be a pacifist, but I’m not very good at it, and books like this just evaporate my inclinations toward peaceful solutions to the terror that people inflict on others.
____
One curiosity with the expansion of the work is that the titular ducks are no longer quite as large a part of the story. Their death in the Syncrude tailings pond occurs late in the book, once Katie is working for Shell and it’s kind of there and gone. Still, with the new book’s more expansive purpose, the title becomes something more. This is not just the environmental tragedy of sixteen hundred ducks dying as a sacrifice to human greed. Instead, the ducks are people like Kate, assaulted by the world that greed creates. The ducks are the workers who use drugs to get through and then get destroyed by them along the way. The ducks are the Cree, the women, the families, the destroyed marriages. The ducks in Ducks are those people sacrificed on the altar of Lord Mammon, careless castoffs that the corporations will never know or care about.
____
[note: if you’re concerned about the sensationalization of sexual assault, this book is not that. There is nothing exciting or titillating going on here. Beaton’s lens averts its eyes so that we get the before and the after but not the during so much. It’s careful in that respect, but perhaps no less traumatizing to read.]
January 31, 2023
I finished reading this graphic memoir by Cape Breton cartoonist Kate Beaton (of Hark! A Vagrant! fame) over a week ago. It's been weighing heavily on my mind since then: not only the book itself, but an extratextual note about the memoir. And despite having sat on it and thought for so long, I'm still not sure how to respond.
The memoir itself is phenomenal. Beaton's art is precise and emotionally engaging, her choices of description and dialogue poignant and thought-provoking. As the subtitle says, it's a memoir about her two years working in the Northern Alberta oil sands (including work camps) in her early twenties after graduating university with massive student loans. For a book that consists mostly of conversations between co-workers, it's incredibly engaging and page-turning.
It is very firmly rooted in the time and place when Beaton was doing this work. The only revelations we encounter are ones Beaton herself had near the end of her time in the oil sands, and that includes about issues of misogyny, class, sexual harassment, and sexual assault that pertain directly to her, let alone things like climate change, environmentalism, colonialism, and Indigenous rights.
I can't imagine an older Beaton inserting her evolved thoughts from 2022 or contemporary information about Indigneous and/or environmental activism. It would be very clunky and would read as preachy, or as Beaton trying to redeem her past self and make herself look 'good' and 'politically correct.' The format she's chosen allows the reader to go on the same journey she does, which I think is a much more effective way to approach such a charged and multi-faceted topic. I mention this because I've seen numerous reviews insisting she should have covered political issues related to the oil sands explicitly, which I think narratively, artistically, and politically would have been a mistake.
The way she explores the interactions of class, gender, and regional origin in this book is so nuanced. Beaton works with a lot of fellow Atlantic Canadians, particularly others from Cape Breton and from Newfoundland. They are all fellow working class people forced to leave their homes because of lack of economic opportunities, often caused by the breakdowns of other environmentally exploitative industries like mining or fishing, particularly in marine resources controlled by the federal government, not local or provincial governments.
The men she works with – and they are of course overwhelmingly men, outnumbering women sometimes 50 to 1 – are a constant source of sexual harrassment, and on two occasions, sexual assault. But at the same time, Beaton experiences a kinship and establishes friendships with many men, some of whom act downright fatherly with her and who remind her of her cousins and uncles back home. As she tells us at one point after an unnerving conversation with a (woman) Toronto reporter wanting salacious details about her experiences working as a woman in the oil sands: "they're more mine than she is."
Her insistence on presenting her experiences as complicated and sometimes contradictory is one of the book's most compelling features. The people doing this environmentally devastating work aren't evil villains; they too are being exploited by the oil companies and have few other options for supporting themselves as blue collar workers. The men Beaton works with are suffering from isolation, terrible mental health conditions, the absolute jokes of workplace safety policies, and subsequent drug and alcohol (ab)use. Some of them are also perpetrators of rape, assault, and harassment. She is haunted by the uncertainty of how men she knows and loves would act trapped in such a toxic environment for so long. All these things are true at the same time.
So that's the book itself. It's truly an impressive achievement and I am so glad I read it. Back to the extratextual note. The review copy I received of this book came with a short typed note from the author. It fell out of the book when I picked it up to start reading. The note informed me that there were scenes of rape in the book and encouraged me, as a reviewer, to not warn readers about the fact that there was sexual assault in the book. Beaton writes that she understands why this is common now, but wants readers to experience the build up to the first assault which she calls a kind of narrative climax and how being in an environment like that grinds you down. Ironically, I hadn't read the book yet when I read this note, so it did exactly what Beaton was trying to prevent.
Honestly, knowing the topic of this book I wasn't surprised to learn it covered sexual assault and I bet other readers would make the same guess. But when I write reviews I do always mention if books have scenes of sexual assault and I don't consider it a 'spoiler,' I consider it care for other potential readers, particularly survivors of sexual assault who can be triggered or retraumatized. It's common practice now! It helps readers make an informed decision about whether or not to read the book, where and when to read it, and prepare themselves for troubling content. I and many other reviewers have picked up this practice as a result of the activism of survivors of sexual assault. My impulse is of course to honour the wishes of a survivor – Beaton – but not at the cost of other survivors. She doesn't get to decide for them. She also doesn't get to decide how professionals write about her book, particularly how other women write about women being raped.
So this tiny little note has really soured my experience with the book. As you can see, I decided not to adhere to Beaton's request and omit mentions of sexual assault in my review. I couldn't in good conscience do it. But now I'm not only deeply troubled by the content of the book itself, but by the unexpected conundrum this author note presented. I would love to hear thoughts from other feminist readers and reviewers, particularly if you also received the note.
The memoir itself is phenomenal. Beaton's art is precise and emotionally engaging, her choices of description and dialogue poignant and thought-provoking. As the subtitle says, it's a memoir about her two years working in the Northern Alberta oil sands (including work camps) in her early twenties after graduating university with massive student loans. For a book that consists mostly of conversations between co-workers, it's incredibly engaging and page-turning.
It is very firmly rooted in the time and place when Beaton was doing this work. The only revelations we encounter are ones Beaton herself had near the end of her time in the oil sands, and that includes about issues of misogyny, class, sexual harassment, and sexual assault that pertain directly to her, let alone things like climate change, environmentalism, colonialism, and Indigenous rights.
I can't imagine an older Beaton inserting her evolved thoughts from 2022 or contemporary information about Indigneous and/or environmental activism. It would be very clunky and would read as preachy, or as Beaton trying to redeem her past self and make herself look 'good' and 'politically correct.' The format she's chosen allows the reader to go on the same journey she does, which I think is a much more effective way to approach such a charged and multi-faceted topic. I mention this because I've seen numerous reviews insisting she should have covered political issues related to the oil sands explicitly, which I think narratively, artistically, and politically would have been a mistake.
The way she explores the interactions of class, gender, and regional origin in this book is so nuanced. Beaton works with a lot of fellow Atlantic Canadians, particularly others from Cape Breton and from Newfoundland. They are all fellow working class people forced to leave their homes because of lack of economic opportunities, often caused by the breakdowns of other environmentally exploitative industries like mining or fishing, particularly in marine resources controlled by the federal government, not local or provincial governments.
The men she works with – and they are of course overwhelmingly men, outnumbering women sometimes 50 to 1 – are a constant source of sexual harrassment, and on two occasions, sexual assault. But at the same time, Beaton experiences a kinship and establishes friendships with many men, some of whom act downright fatherly with her and who remind her of her cousins and uncles back home. As she tells us at one point after an unnerving conversation with a (woman) Toronto reporter wanting salacious details about her experiences working as a woman in the oil sands: "they're more mine than she is."
Her insistence on presenting her experiences as complicated and sometimes contradictory is one of the book's most compelling features. The people doing this environmentally devastating work aren't evil villains; they too are being exploited by the oil companies and have few other options for supporting themselves as blue collar workers. The men Beaton works with are suffering from isolation, terrible mental health conditions, the absolute jokes of workplace safety policies, and subsequent drug and alcohol (ab)use. Some of them are also perpetrators of rape, assault, and harassment. She is haunted by the uncertainty of how men she knows and loves would act trapped in such a toxic environment for so long. All these things are true at the same time.
So that's the book itself. It's truly an impressive achievement and I am so glad I read it. Back to the extratextual note. The review copy I received of this book came with a short typed note from the author. It fell out of the book when I picked it up to start reading. The note informed me that there were scenes of rape in the book and encouraged me, as a reviewer, to not warn readers about the fact that there was sexual assault in the book. Beaton writes that she understands why this is common now, but wants readers to experience the build up to the first assault which she calls a kind of narrative climax and how being in an environment like that grinds you down. Ironically, I hadn't read the book yet when I read this note, so it did exactly what Beaton was trying to prevent.
Honestly, knowing the topic of this book I wasn't surprised to learn it covered sexual assault and I bet other readers would make the same guess. But when I write reviews I do always mention if books have scenes of sexual assault and I don't consider it a 'spoiler,' I consider it care for other potential readers, particularly survivors of sexual assault who can be triggered or retraumatized. It's common practice now! It helps readers make an informed decision about whether or not to read the book, where and when to read it, and prepare themselves for troubling content. I and many other reviewers have picked up this practice as a result of the activism of survivors of sexual assault. My impulse is of course to honour the wishes of a survivor – Beaton – but not at the cost of other survivors. She doesn't get to decide for them. She also doesn't get to decide how professionals write about her book, particularly how other women write about women being raped.
So this tiny little note has really soured my experience with the book. As you can see, I decided not to adhere to Beaton's request and omit mentions of sexual assault in my review. I couldn't in good conscience do it. But now I'm not only deeply troubled by the content of the book itself, but by the unexpected conundrum this author note presented. I would love to hear thoughts from other feminist readers and reviewers, particularly if you also received the note.
November 21, 2022
A lot of this was interesting and compelling, but overall, the narrative was quite messy, with abrupt and unsatisfying jumps from one topic to the next. A good editor could have helped here.
November 8, 2022
I have been a fan of Kate Beaton’s work for a long time: her brand of literary references and weird humor is right up my alley, and one of her comic strips still makes me laugh until I cry every time I look at it. But “Ducks” is very, very different. It is autobiographical, nuanced, often upsetting and challenging – and explores a Canadian reality a lot of us are not sufficiently familiar with.
Katie studied the subject she was passionate about in university. Unfortunately, that doesn’t guarantee employment anymore, and the reality of her student debts was a heavy weight on her shoulder. So she did what a lot of Canadians from small, struggling regions end up doing: she packed her bags and went to work for oil companies in Fort McMurray, Alberta. The camps are isolated, the work is hard, the ratio of men to women employed there is essentially 50 to 1, and few people have the level of wit and education Katie brings along with her. This setting alone prepares the reader for some of the things Katie experiences during her two years of working at various camps in the oil sands region, but not for every moment she decides to explore. Of course, there is sexism, harassment, sexually threatening environments – but there is also concern for the mental health of everyone working in such a pressure cooker of a place. A lot of room is also given to the struggle of reconciling the idea of working for an industry that causes environmental and social damage on a huge scale, whilst knowing that your other options are even worst jobs that imply you will struggle financially for the rest of your life and never be able to give your family the means by which to get out of generational poverty.
One of the crucial things Katie wonders about is: is it the place that makes good people behave badly, or were they always bad and just better at not showing it in environment where their behaviors and words would not have been accepted. This is an important question, and deserves to be chewed on thoughtfully. The culture of toxic masculinity she experiences certainly hurts her and her female colleagues in many ways, but it also hurts the men who succumb to the pressure to behave in certain ways. This in no way excuses their words or actions, but it must be acknowledged.
I was terribly saddened by a few pages early on, where she is told that being young and pretty, she will have her pick of the men on site, which she shows no interest in – and her understanding that when some of the men there show interest in her, they are not interested in her because they like her specifically, but just because she is a girl who happens to be there. This is an incredibly lonely position to find oneself in at that age, an age at which popular wisdom said you should be meeting people, dating and having fun…
It isn’t all doom and gloom, and Katie forges beautiful friendships and share wonderful moments along the way, but the reality of that type of work is a strange and heavy weight – I am sad to say that big city slickers like me know very little about this topic: we are taught to be firmly against it because of it’s environmental impact and the way big oil has mistreated the Indigenous communities who were located there, but most of us have never spoken to someone who worked there, in the isolation, harsh weather and working conditions.
This book was beautiful, harrowing, moving and educational all at once, and it is an absolute masterclass on what can be done with the graphic novel format. An absolute must-read.
*It must be noted that this was a birthday present from my dad, who is famous for buying me books I end up wanting to chuck in the shredder. This year, he actually paid attention to the wish list and said that this book looked so interesting he got himself a copy, too! Thank you, dad!
Katie studied the subject she was passionate about in university. Unfortunately, that doesn’t guarantee employment anymore, and the reality of her student debts was a heavy weight on her shoulder. So she did what a lot of Canadians from small, struggling regions end up doing: she packed her bags and went to work for oil companies in Fort McMurray, Alberta. The camps are isolated, the work is hard, the ratio of men to women employed there is essentially 50 to 1, and few people have the level of wit and education Katie brings along with her. This setting alone prepares the reader for some of the things Katie experiences during her two years of working at various camps in the oil sands region, but not for every moment she decides to explore. Of course, there is sexism, harassment, sexually threatening environments – but there is also concern for the mental health of everyone working in such a pressure cooker of a place. A lot of room is also given to the struggle of reconciling the idea of working for an industry that causes environmental and social damage on a huge scale, whilst knowing that your other options are even worst jobs that imply you will struggle financially for the rest of your life and never be able to give your family the means by which to get out of generational poverty.
One of the crucial things Katie wonders about is: is it the place that makes good people behave badly, or were they always bad and just better at not showing it in environment where their behaviors and words would not have been accepted. This is an important question, and deserves to be chewed on thoughtfully. The culture of toxic masculinity she experiences certainly hurts her and her female colleagues in many ways, but it also hurts the men who succumb to the pressure to behave in certain ways. This in no way excuses their words or actions, but it must be acknowledged.
I was terribly saddened by a few pages early on, where she is told that being young and pretty, she will have her pick of the men on site, which she shows no interest in – and her understanding that when some of the men there show interest in her, they are not interested in her because they like her specifically, but just because she is a girl who happens to be there. This is an incredibly lonely position to find oneself in at that age, an age at which popular wisdom said you should be meeting people, dating and having fun…
It isn’t all doom and gloom, and Katie forges beautiful friendships and share wonderful moments along the way, but the reality of that type of work is a strange and heavy weight – I am sad to say that big city slickers like me know very little about this topic: we are taught to be firmly against it because of it’s environmental impact and the way big oil has mistreated the Indigenous communities who were located there, but most of us have never spoken to someone who worked there, in the isolation, harsh weather and working conditions.
This book was beautiful, harrowing, moving and educational all at once, and it is an absolute masterclass on what can be done with the graphic novel format. An absolute must-read.
*It must be noted that this was a birthday present from my dad, who is famous for buying me books I end up wanting to chuck in the shredder. This year, he actually paid attention to the wish list and said that this book looked so interesting he got himself a copy, too! Thank you, dad!
April 5, 2023
*** 2023 Canada Reads Winner! ***
DUCKS is the memoir of Cape Breton cartoonist Kate Beaton that focuses on her time working in Alberta’s oil sands. Landing in 2005, with a brief one year reprieve in British Columbia, Kate spent two years working and living in both Fort McMurray proper and at several of the work camps with the goal of paying down her student loans. She would return home to Nova Scotia in 2008.
As soon as I heard Kate Beaton was working on a memoir detailing her time in Northern Alberta, I was counting down the days until I could read it. While I do not know Kate personally, we’re the same age, we are both from Cape Breton and we were both in Fort McMurray around the same time (I arrived in 2007 and left in 2009).
That being said, that’s about where our similarities end. Not only was I lucky enough to have a Monday to Friday desk job in town during my time there, but I also had a home to go home to every evening. Kate worked long and difficult hours at a variety of job sites while also living on site in camp, so it was difficult to have that work/life separation that I think we all need.
In a town where females are outnumbered fifty-to-one, you can imagine how challenging it was for Kate and the women she worked alongside. Men are bored, isolated and away from their families and there is often a camaraderie among those who engage in “locker-room talk” by objectifying women and engaging in sexual assault. Now obviously, not all men are going to do this, but that’s not the point, it’s the ones that act this way toward women who are powerless to stop it and it’s an overwhelming number of them. It’s ingrained in the culture of the job and empty-handed gestures by companies do little to curb it.
It is so surreal to see so much of the town I lived in drawn with such accuracy. Fort McMurray is a place I haven’t been to since I left thirteen years ago, but Kate’s art put me right back on Franklin Avenue. It’s a time in my life that feels both far away yet recent at the same time. While Beaton is known for her trademark simplicity in her characters, her work on landscapes and the complicated machinery that goes hand-in-hand with the tough work that men and women do every day is exceptional.
The true heartache of this book lies in Kate’s struggles to keep her head above water amid financial woes, trauma and a never-ending battle with her conscience. Although she experienced conflict with several who drifted in and out of her life, she spoke highly of many of the relationships she forged with those who held her best interests in mind and helped her along the way.
I will say that this book made me homesick in a way I didn’t expect. Beaton is authentic with her Maritimer slang throughout the book’s dialog in such a way that I can hear the voices so clearly in my head. Having not been back to Cape Breton since 2018, it was nice to have a little bit of home brought to me.
DUCKS will easily find its way onto my shortlist for best of 2022. I do not think it’s possible for me to recommend this enough.
DUCKS is the memoir of Cape Breton cartoonist Kate Beaton that focuses on her time working in Alberta’s oil sands. Landing in 2005, with a brief one year reprieve in British Columbia, Kate spent two years working and living in both Fort McMurray proper and at several of the work camps with the goal of paying down her student loans. She would return home to Nova Scotia in 2008.
As soon as I heard Kate Beaton was working on a memoir detailing her time in Northern Alberta, I was counting down the days until I could read it. While I do not know Kate personally, we’re the same age, we are both from Cape Breton and we were both in Fort McMurray around the same time (I arrived in 2007 and left in 2009).
That being said, that’s about where our similarities end. Not only was I lucky enough to have a Monday to Friday desk job in town during my time there, but I also had a home to go home to every evening. Kate worked long and difficult hours at a variety of job sites while also living on site in camp, so it was difficult to have that work/life separation that I think we all need.
In a town where females are outnumbered fifty-to-one, you can imagine how challenging it was for Kate and the women she worked alongside. Men are bored, isolated and away from their families and there is often a camaraderie among those who engage in “locker-room talk” by objectifying women and engaging in sexual assault. Now obviously, not all men are going to do this, but that’s not the point, it’s the ones that act this way toward women who are powerless to stop it and it’s an overwhelming number of them. It’s ingrained in the culture of the job and empty-handed gestures by companies do little to curb it.
It is so surreal to see so much of the town I lived in drawn with such accuracy. Fort McMurray is a place I haven’t been to since I left thirteen years ago, but Kate’s art put me right back on Franklin Avenue. It’s a time in my life that feels both far away yet recent at the same time. While Beaton is known for her trademark simplicity in her characters, her work on landscapes and the complicated machinery that goes hand-in-hand with the tough work that men and women do every day is exceptional.
The true heartache of this book lies in Kate’s struggles to keep her head above water amid financial woes, trauma and a never-ending battle with her conscience. Although she experienced conflict with several who drifted in and out of her life, she spoke highly of many of the relationships she forged with those who held her best interests in mind and helped her along the way.
I will say that this book made me homesick in a way I didn’t expect. Beaton is authentic with her Maritimer slang throughout the book’s dialog in such a way that I can hear the voices so clearly in my head. Having not been back to Cape Breton since 2018, it was nice to have a little bit of home brought to me.
DUCKS will easily find its way onto my shortlist for best of 2022. I do not think it’s possible for me to recommend this enough.
February 7, 2023
I was hesitant to read this graphic novel thinking it might have a lot of horrible things happening to animals in the oil sands.
Thankfully, there is just one incident mentioned, and it's not very graphic (pun intended). Otherwise, I would have had to DNF this.
I'm glad that wasn't the case. I enjoyed reading it and seeing the drawings. It's about the author's time spent working for the oil company as a young woman, in order to pay off her student loans.
In this "man's world", she put up with a whole lot of crap. It was terrible. At the same time, I appreciate how she points out that it was the place they were in and the circumstances that made the men act this way.
Not an excuse, no. But it shows that people are shaped by their environment and, in a less than stellar one, might act in ways they normally wouldn't. She didn't demonize all men because of her experience there but at the same time she showed how women suffer in toxic male environments - and are expected to just "deal with it" and not complain.
I couldn't help but notice how concerned the uppers were about employees wearing the proper PPE in order to avoid physical injury while turning a blind eye to people suffering emotionally - both their employees and the First Nations people whose land, water, and air they were destroying.
This is well worth reading if you enjoy graphic novels, though not a lot happens so if you want action, it might not be the one for you.
Thankfully, there is just one incident mentioned, and it's not very graphic (pun intended). Otherwise, I would have had to DNF this.
I'm glad that wasn't the case. I enjoyed reading it and seeing the drawings. It's about the author's time spent working for the oil company as a young woman, in order to pay off her student loans.
In this "man's world", she put up with a whole lot of crap. It was terrible. At the same time, I appreciate how she points out that it was the place they were in and the circumstances that made the men act this way.
Not an excuse, no. But it shows that people are shaped by their environment and, in a less than stellar one, might act in ways they normally wouldn't. She didn't demonize all men because of her experience there but at the same time she showed how women suffer in toxic male environments - and are expected to just "deal with it" and not complain.
I couldn't help but notice how concerned the uppers were about employees wearing the proper PPE in order to avoid physical injury while turning a blind eye to people suffering emotionally - both their employees and the First Nations people whose land, water, and air they were destroying.
This is well worth reading if you enjoy graphic novels, though not a lot happens so if you want action, it might not be the one for you.
October 23, 2022
Katie Beaton gives an insider's view of the toxic masculinity pervading male-dominated, blue-collar workplaces in the Canadian Oil Sands in 2005-2008. I can't wait for the day when such a book is published and we can think, "Man, things were so rotten back then!" instead of having the sad realization that such sexual harassment, sexual assault, and rape is still ongoing and widespread.
I think Beaton goes out of her way to note that many of the men didn't behave awfully and to rationalize the behavior of the rest by pointing out factors like the environment, the economy, mental health issues, and substance abuse, but some men are just shits looking for the opportunity to be shitty is the real takeaway.
At times the narrative is a little choppy the large cast starts to blur together, but the book held my attention throughout, making me so mad and sad and sympathetic.
Concerns about oil extraction's environmental pollution and impact on indigenous people are also brought up, but more as side notes needing more exploration.
P.S., Another reviewer, Seth T., notes that this book was expanded from a much shorter prototype originally published on Tumblr. Here is the URL if you are curious:
https://beatonna.tumblr.com/post/8199...
I think Beaton goes out of her way to note that many of the men didn't behave awfully and to rationalize the behavior of the rest by pointing out factors like the environment, the economy, mental health issues, and substance abuse, but some men are just shits looking for the opportunity to be shitty is the real takeaway.
At times the narrative is a little choppy the large cast starts to blur together, but the book held my attention throughout, making me so mad and sad and sympathetic.
Concerns about oil extraction's environmental pollution and impact on indigenous people are also brought up, but more as side notes needing more exploration.
P.S., Another reviewer, Seth T., notes that this book was expanded from a much shorter prototype originally published on Tumblr. Here is the URL if you are curious:
https://beatonna.tumblr.com/post/8199...
February 5, 2023
My first five-star review of the year!
Kate Beaton's graphic memoir of her time spent in the Alberta Oil Sands is a fresh and essential look at a place that is both familiar and alien to many on the east coast of Canada. I know so many people who, for various financial reasons, had to upend their family lives in the mid oughts in order to seek out high paying jobs in the oil sector in Alberta. I remember someone saying that it was like they closed the mill, scooped everyone out of town and shipped them out West. Though no one in my immediate family made it out that way, I remember feeling the impact on the community: fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters working for four weeks, back in town for two.
Instead of needing to support her family, Beaton took off to Alberta in order to pay off her student loans. Highly relatable! What she encounters in the camps is a mix of people just trying to get by in terrible circumstances, men missing their families and becoming adrift without them, and personal danger to herself by virtue of being female. A warning that this graphic memoir depicts sexual assault and its aftermath. Though it might be easy to paint a picture of environmental atrocity and amoral men having their way with whatever women pass them by, Beaton instead makes a more nuanced and true to life account.
In the dialogue I found people I've known and loved, and in her art I found them beautifully realized. I'd originally come to Beaton through her hilarious historical and literary comic strips. That she makes the transition to dramatic memoir so smoothly is a feat in and of itself. I know that others will see their family and friends in these panels and pages, even when what is reflected isn't always pleasant.
I'm going to be passing this one around to family and friends for the foreseeable future. It's a deeply Canadian story about a world that most Canadians know second hand. It's both deeply personal and universal. More like this from Beaton would be welcome, she's a Canadian gem!
Kate Beaton's graphic memoir of her time spent in the Alberta Oil Sands is a fresh and essential look at a place that is both familiar and alien to many on the east coast of Canada. I know so many people who, for various financial reasons, had to upend their family lives in the mid oughts in order to seek out high paying jobs in the oil sector in Alberta. I remember someone saying that it was like they closed the mill, scooped everyone out of town and shipped them out West. Though no one in my immediate family made it out that way, I remember feeling the impact on the community: fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters working for four weeks, back in town for two.
Instead of needing to support her family, Beaton took off to Alberta in order to pay off her student loans. Highly relatable! What she encounters in the camps is a mix of people just trying to get by in terrible circumstances, men missing their families and becoming adrift without them, and personal danger to herself by virtue of being female. A warning that this graphic memoir depicts sexual assault and its aftermath. Though it might be easy to paint a picture of environmental atrocity and amoral men having their way with whatever women pass them by, Beaton instead makes a more nuanced and true to life account.
In the dialogue I found people I've known and loved, and in her art I found them beautifully realized. I'd originally come to Beaton through her hilarious historical and literary comic strips. That she makes the transition to dramatic memoir so smoothly is a feat in and of itself. I know that others will see their family and friends in these panels and pages, even when what is reflected isn't always pleasant.
I'm going to be passing this one around to family and friends for the foreseeable future. It's a deeply Canadian story about a world that most Canadians know second hand. It's both deeply personal and universal. More like this from Beaton would be welcome, she's a Canadian gem!
January 10, 2023
Beaton manages to capture so many things in this book - it's quite extraordinary.
- Collapse of fisheries and industry in the Canadian Maritime provinces
- Exodus and migration of eastern workers to Ontario and Alberta
- Cultural / linguistic retention even in re-location, finding "your own"
- Student loans and debt
- The burden and expectations of graduating from North American universities
- The allure of "the west"
- Short-term hardship for long-term gains
- The conflicts of working for/with an industry that scars and maims the earth
- The conflicts of working for/with an industry that injures and puts humans at risk
- Camp culture and toxic workplaces
- Isolation and mood shifts
- Gender roles
- Addiction and substance abuse
- Assault and shame
- Mental health
I could keep going. There's a lot to chew on here, and this is one that will stay with me.
Read the postscript too - a little more to the story there.
- Collapse of fisheries and industry in the Canadian Maritime provinces
- Exodus and migration of eastern workers to Ontario and Alberta
- Cultural / linguistic retention even in re-location, finding "your own"
- Student loans and debt
- The burden and expectations of graduating from North American universities
- The allure of "the west"
- Short-term hardship for long-term gains
- The conflicts of working for/with an industry that scars and maims the earth
- The conflicts of working for/with an industry that injures and puts humans at risk
- Camp culture and toxic workplaces
- Isolation and mood shifts
- Gender roles
- Addiction and substance abuse
- Assault and shame
- Mental health
I could keep going. There's a lot to chew on here, and this is one that will stay with me.
Read the postscript too - a little more to the story there.
December 20, 2023
un énorme énorme énorme banger j'ai rarement vu quelqu'un d'aussi doué pour la BD et la construction d'un récit graphique que Kate Beaton I mean MADAM ???? la subtilité des expressions faciales ??? le pouvoir de raconter mille mots en une seule case muette ??????? l'efficacité, la brutalité mais aussi le pouvoir de suggestion des transitions ?????????????????? c'est une pure dinguerie tout ce qu'elle arrive à aborder, évoquer et analyser dans ces 400 pages de roman graphique, rarement lu un truc d'une qualité pareille. ça parle de précarité, du fait d'être contraint à participer à des dégâts environnementaux à cause de cette même précarité car il n'y a que les pollueurs qui payent bien (forcément la pollution ça fait du profit), de harcèlement sexiste au travail, de ce qui fait des hommes des agresseurs, du silence, de la complicité, de la façon dont les hommes se couvrent, de la façon dont la contrainte économique peut priver de choix même ceux dont on pourrait croire qu'ils ont de quoi faire ce qu'ils veulent, c'est aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah j'ai adoré lisez
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July 25, 2023Las dinámicas más alienantes del neoliberalismo salvaje acaban pareciendo normales cuando quedan camufladas por el día a día, por ello son tan valiosas las narraciones que, en primera persona, muestran los estragos que produce en la gente un sistema perverso e inmoral. Porque, además de una historia sobre acoso, trabajo y medio ambiente, «Patos» es eso: la narración de una tragedia vital que nuestro sistema nos hace ver como normal o, al menos, como ineludible.
Kate Beaton es una autora internacionalmente querida por sus tiras cómicas sobre personajes históricos («Hark! A Vagrant»). Pero antes de conseguirlo, las pasó canutas. Estudió letras en una universidad de cierto prestigio y, como provenía de una familia humilde, tuvo que sufragarse los estudios con un préstamo indecente. Consciente de que el tiempo aumentaría la deuda a base de intereses y sabiendo que esa losa le impediría dedicarse a algo relacionado con lo suyo, decidió hacer lo mismo que mucha de la gente de su región, una zona azotada por el desempleo y la falta de inversión e infraestructuras: hacer un paréntesis en su vida e irse a trabajar a una petrolera hasta que ganase lo suficiente como para saldar su deuda y, entonces sí, iniciar su camino sin lastre.
En este libro autobiográfico, crudo y doloroso, Beaton nos cuenta lo que vivió (lo que sufrió) trabajando dos años en un ambiente aislado, hostil y salvajemente masculinizado. Su historia es la de tantas víctimas de los espacios gobernados por las testosterona: una vivencia de burlas, desprecios, humillaciones y, por supuesto, violencia (de varios tipos). Este cómic habla de un ambiente de trabajo, pero también de frustraciones, de la falta de cuidado de salud mental, de destinos escritos en piedra y de cómo la masculinidad tóxica destruye el mundo y a los propios hombres.
Me ha parecido un ejercicio soberbio, tanto en lo relativo a lo plástico como a la valentía de la autora de exponerse (y exponer) de esa manera. Al leerlo, se entiende que Obama lo eligiese como uno de sus favoritos del año y que acabe de recibir dos merecidísimos Premios Eisner. Es una lectura intensa que obliga al público lector a observar realidades que habría preferido no ver. Pero para eso sirven, justamente, el arte y la literatura.
Kate Beaton es una autora internacionalmente querida por sus tiras cómicas sobre personajes históricos («Hark! A Vagrant»). Pero antes de conseguirlo, las pasó canutas. Estudió letras en una universidad de cierto prestigio y, como provenía de una familia humilde, tuvo que sufragarse los estudios con un préstamo indecente. Consciente de que el tiempo aumentaría la deuda a base de intereses y sabiendo que esa losa le impediría dedicarse a algo relacionado con lo suyo, decidió hacer lo mismo que mucha de la gente de su región, una zona azotada por el desempleo y la falta de inversión e infraestructuras: hacer un paréntesis en su vida e irse a trabajar a una petrolera hasta que ganase lo suficiente como para saldar su deuda y, entonces sí, iniciar su camino sin lastre.
En este libro autobiográfico, crudo y doloroso, Beaton nos cuenta lo que vivió (lo que sufrió) trabajando dos años en un ambiente aislado, hostil y salvajemente masculinizado. Su historia es la de tantas víctimas de los espacios gobernados por las testosterona: una vivencia de burlas, desprecios, humillaciones y, por supuesto, violencia (de varios tipos). Este cómic habla de un ambiente de trabajo, pero también de frustraciones, de la falta de cuidado de salud mental, de destinos escritos en piedra y de cómo la masculinidad tóxica destruye el mundo y a los propios hombres.
Me ha parecido un ejercicio soberbio, tanto en lo relativo a lo plástico como a la valentía de la autora de exponerse (y exponer) de esa manera. Al leerlo, se entiende que Obama lo eligiese como uno de sus favoritos del año y que acabe de recibir dos merecidísimos Premios Eisner. Es una lectura intensa que obliga al público lector a observar realidades que habría preferido no ver. Pero para eso sirven, justamente, el arte y la literatura.
September 21, 2023
13th book from my reading challenge with Ted.
#14 - Read a literary graphic novel.
I’ve said it before – I find it somewhat difficult to hype myself up to read Canadian works. That being said, I have been in a rich vein of form this past month with respect to Canadian graphic novels, and what better way to get hit in the sack than a beautiful work by fellow Canadian Kate Beaton.
So why a hit in the sack? Well, she sets the stage beautifully prior to the main events in the book. She is from Cape Breton and knows a thing or two about the culture:
“The only message we got about a better future was that we had to leave home to have one. We did not question it, because this is the have-not region of a have-not province, and it has not boomed here in generations.”
“I learn that I can have opportunity or I can have home. I cannot have both, and either will always hurt.”
She needs money. She cannot make it at home. She goes to Fort McMurray to work at the oil sands.
It’s hard to describe what I felt while reading this. First and foremost, of course, it was empathy and sadness for the main character, Beaton herself. The need to leave home is not necessarily one that is present for those in Ontario (and especially Toronto). I would be devastated if I were told that this was to be my reality. But another part of the sadness I experienced was due to the corner in which Beaton found herself. Needing to make money, pay student loans off, do something right now, versus putting up with the culture that is the norm in the oil sands – one of crass phrases, raunchy remarks, and full on sexual assault. It was grim.
I also found myself looking up videos about these projects on YouTube. Accents as thick as I expected, and the look in their eyes sad and hollow. All of the workers were there to right their lives, make money for their families back home. It was all money. Exploitation to the nth degree.
Toward the latter stages of this book, I even came to realize why this book was called Ducks, which I found to be an apt metaphor. But I’ll leave that for you, in case you are interested in this. And really, I think you should be. Good to learn a bit about the lives of other Canadians outside of the guise of boring history classes.
#14 - Read a literary graphic novel.
I’ve said it before – I find it somewhat difficult to hype myself up to read Canadian works. That being said, I have been in a rich vein of form this past month with respect to Canadian graphic novels, and what better way to get hit in the sack than a beautiful work by fellow Canadian Kate Beaton.
So why a hit in the sack? Well, she sets the stage beautifully prior to the main events in the book. She is from Cape Breton and knows a thing or two about the culture:
“The only message we got about a better future was that we had to leave home to have one. We did not question it, because this is the have-not region of a have-not province, and it has not boomed here in generations.”
“I learn that I can have opportunity or I can have home. I cannot have both, and either will always hurt.”
She needs money. She cannot make it at home. She goes to Fort McMurray to work at the oil sands.
It’s hard to describe what I felt while reading this. First and foremost, of course, it was empathy and sadness for the main character, Beaton herself. The need to leave home is not necessarily one that is present for those in Ontario (and especially Toronto). I would be devastated if I were told that this was to be my reality. But another part of the sadness I experienced was due to the corner in which Beaton found herself. Needing to make money, pay student loans off, do something right now, versus putting up with the culture that is the norm in the oil sands – one of crass phrases, raunchy remarks, and full on sexual assault. It was grim.
I also found myself looking up videos about these projects on YouTube. Accents as thick as I expected, and the look in their eyes sad and hollow. All of the workers were there to right their lives, make money for their families back home. It was all money. Exploitation to the nth degree.
Toward the latter stages of this book, I even came to realize why this book was called Ducks, which I found to be an apt metaphor. But I’ll leave that for you, in case you are interested in this. And really, I think you should be. Good to learn a bit about the lives of other Canadians outside of the guise of boring history classes.
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