Hark! A Kate Beaton

Award-winning cartoonist and author Kate Beaton is in Halifax Friday to discuss the enduring connection between art-making, labour and community.

Beaton is in town to deliver the 2025 Cyril J. Byrne Memorial Lecture at Saint Mary’s University on Friday at 7pm. The lecture will be held in the Scotiabank Conference Theatre, located off the main lobby of the Sobey Building at 903 Robie Street.

Born in Mabou, Cape Breton, Beaton will explain that for her–like many others from communities tied to labour and industry–art has always been a part of life.

“Community informs the way that you see art, how you see value in your art, and a good understanding of who you are–even when you’re from an economically disadvantaged place,” she tells The Coast.

“I often return to art, class, representation and voices in my work because “Ducks” really went into that.” She’s talking about her 2022 award-winning graphic memoir of working in Alberta, Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands.

“It’s over 400 pages of drawings about work and labour, and it seemed an anomaly because we don’t get too many narratives like that from those industrial spaces. And yet, I have always valued that part of me because the value was in the community, in art–and I think that’s very true of the Maritimes.”

A sample from her award-winning 2022 graphic memoir, Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands. Credit: Kate Beaton

Early on, Beaton gained widespread recognition for her breakout webcomic series Hark! A Vagrant, which ran from 2007-2018 and has been published in several collections. The first was nominated as a Good Reads fan-favourite in 2011, and the reader-led site describes Hark! as “an uproarious romp through history and literature” in which “no era or tome emerges unscathed.”

Her work answers the burning questions. What really happened when Brahms fell asleep listening to Liszt? Was the ‘hipster’ born in an 18th-century aristocratic subculture in France? And what is going on in that Nancy Drew cover?

From her webcomic series, Hark! A Vagrant. Credit: Kate Beaton

She’s published eight books for children and adults, including Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands (2022); her critical analysis of the relationship between class, art, literature and representation through the lens of Cape Breton, Bodies of Art, Bodies of Labour (2024); and her new best-selling children’s book, Shark Girl, which has been called a “subversive and hilarious spin on the classic little mermaid fairytale” and follows Shark Girl’s revenge plot on the fishing captain that trapped her in a net.

Beaton has received multiple awards for her work, including the Will Eisner Comic Industry Award and the Doug Wright Award for Canadian Cartooning. She is a regular contributor to The New Yorker magazine, and her work has been translated and published worldwide.

Beaton moved back home to Mabou several years ago. On Friday at SMU, she’ll traverse her artistic journey–from Cape Breton to everywhere and back home again. Here’s how she describes it on her Hark! Page:

“About the author: Kate Beaton was born in Nova Scotia, took a history degree in New Brunswick, paid it off in Alberta, worked in a museum in British Columbia, then came to Ontario for a while to draw pictures, then Halifax, and then New York, and then back to Toronto, and then back once again to rural Nova Scotia. Maybe the moon next time, who knows.”

Her lecture came about through a conversation with Alexander MacLeod, a professor in the English Language and Literature Department and the Atlantic Canada Studies Program at SMU.

“He and I come from a common background,” says Beaton, “which is the west coast of Cape Breton Island, and we were talking about communities informing art, and how he and I have both benefited from that in our lives.” And this applies in places all over, she says, that are marked by industry, have experienced economic hardships and are rooted in community support.

“I visit the local elementary school sometimes,” she says, “and I draw with the kids. It’s my job to go around and say,’ ‘Listen, this is amazing. What you’re doing is amazing. I love your ideas. I love your drawings. I love everything,’ because I benefited from that. Even in a small community where there was no art class, I always had that support from all around. I want the kids to feel like their voice matters in whatever way.”

“Even in a small community where there was no art class, I always had that support from all around.”

Beaton was a teenager in the ‘90s, “and, of course, everything in Cape Breton was going to hell then,” she says. “We were told to ‘go get good jobs,’ and you understand that this economic anxiety was always there throughout life–but so was art.”

She’s referred to this duality as “the Janus face of Cape Breton” in previous talks. It describes how island was viewed by some, especially fleeting travellers, as competing between two totalizing narratives: of fantasy and decay.

“People thought of either fiddling, music and postcards and then, on the other hand, industrial decline and a grief-ridden space with closed down steel mills and a struggling fishing industry.” For people from the island, she says “both of those things inform an artistic voice and who you are. They seem separate, but they’re very connected.”

Her talk on Friday, We Were Always Working and Making Art: Rethinking the Economics and Value of Creativity, poses two questions: “What is the relationship between the arts and the economy?” and “How do we value the ‘work’ of art and the business of creativity in our daily lives, especially now?” She’ll answer through her own experiences, as an artist working in the oil industry, and through “interrogating this idea that art has always existed among workers and labourers.

“It’s always been extremely valuable, only maybe not as visible, maybe not as as money-making and maybe sometimes the art is just for yourself–but it enriches your life.”

She remembers a few years back hearing a writer from Newfoundland describe a similar feeling. The writer kept getting asked about the “explosion of Newfoundland writers where, all of a sudden, all this literature is coming from Newfoundland”–think Michael Crummey, Wayne Johnston, Lisa Moore. Beaton says the writer responded, “‘We were always here. We didn’t come out of nowhere. There were always people writing here and telling stories, it’s part of the culture.”

That’s the same way she feels, that it’s always been there but that having it recognized and valued by a wider audience is another thing altogether.

“In the world of art, there are class divides, among other divides, in terms of who has access to an audience, who gets a leg up and who gets to make a living at it,” says Beaton. “Especially since making ‘Ducks,’ this is the thing I’ve put my mind to a lot. so being able to talk to university students in my own province is a great opportunity to get into it a bit.”

She keeps labour as focus of her art because, “certainly my life is is very inextricable from that, having participated in massive industry,” but also because labour is a part of the same culture that binds artists to their communities.

She says, as Maritimers, “we’re far from the centres of power and we’re often trivialized and caricaturized. But I often say that it’s very important for any group of people, whoever they are, to be able to wield their own image in the broader culture.

“Otherwise somebody will do it for them and it will be to their detriment.”

“It’s very important for any group of people, whoever they are, to be able to wield their own image in the broader culture. Otherwise somebody will do it for them and it will be to their detriment.”

Beaton wants others to empower others to know they can be great artists and industrial labourers. “We don’t, as a society, look at people in hard hats, or whatever else, and think, ‘I wonder what they have to say.’ And, yet, that’s where so many of us come from, and we do have a lot to say.”

A recent political cartoon of Beaton’s up on her Patreon page is a timely reminder of this, as Beaton shows us how historical events can be simply forgotten or reframed.

It’s called “Kennedy-Pilled,” and can be read for free on her page here.

Read parts 3 and 4 for free on her Patreon page. Credit: Kate Beaton

“It’s very silly,” she says. “Everybody went nuts over that quote from John F Kennedy when he said we were always friends. In February, [Prime minister Justin] Trudeau quoted him when he first admonished the US tariffs.”

Trudeau: “As President John F. Kennedy said many years ago, ‘Geography has made us neighbours, history has made us friends, economics has made us partners and necessity has made us allies.’”

Beaton says JFK delivered that speech on a trip to Canada, “and everybody was like, ‘Whoa, we love this guy. He’s so handsome, and he’s complimenting us, and it sounds like great friendship.’ But then immediately after that, he tried to rig the Canadian election to get the guy that he wanted in against prime minister John Diefenbaker.”

She says JFK hated Diefenbaker for not wanting to arm Canada with nuclear missiles, which JFK wanted, so “he planted defamatory stories in the papers against him, invited opposition leaders to the White House and Diefenbaker lost by a landslide–which he might have anyway.”

She says the point is that, just because Canada had friendly-relations with the US before Don Trump’s tariffs, “it doesn’t mean everything has been great.”

On Friday at SMU, Beaton will join past lecturers and world-renowned authors like Alistair MacLeod, Anne Carson, Dionne Brand and Wayne Johnston in a memorial series honouring SMU literature professor Cyril J. Byrne. Byrne valued interdisciplinarity in his teaching and research. He established SMU’s Atlantic Canada Studies Program in 1975, the D’Arcy McGee Chair in Irish Studies in 1986, and was named to the Order of Canada in 1992. SMU says the series was created after he passed in 2006 “to celebrate his memory, his scholarly vision and his fun-loving spirit.”

Beaton’s lecture is sponsored by SMU’s Irish Studies Program and presented by the Department of English Language and Literature in tandem with the Faculty of Arts. Everyone is welcome to Hark! on down.