"It's history, but with more butts"
Oct. 16th, 2011 01:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bloodygranuaileThat line is how Kate Beaton describes her fabulous and amazing comic strip Hark! A Vagrant! in this week's Phoenix.
So, anyway, I went to the Boston Book Festival the other day, and I bought a copy of her shiny new book Hark! A Vagrant! and then I listened to her talk at a panel (she is so cute, you guys), and then she SIGNED my book and drew me a little picture of a Victorian lady with an updo going "Oooh" and I was like, the happiest little fangirl ever.
The very first comic in this book is Dude Watchin' With the Brontes, which is one of my favorites and a printout of which has been hanging in my various walls for three years:
Basically, this book is a collection of her best strips, which is almost all of them, and sometimes including the little commentaries she writes when she posts them, but there are also some new ones! Obviously I cannot post any examples of the new ones; you will just have to go buy the book. If you can find it. The BBF had completely run out of them by, like, three o'clock. There were so many overexcited Beaton fans there. I got to stand in line with them for hours and hours! Luckily, I had a book to read. ;)
Most of the HaV comics are standard six- to eight-panel jokes about books, history, and sometimes pop cultural things (like superheroes and hipsters). Sometimes she also picks a topic and does a bunch of three-panel strips all on roughly the same thing, like last year's set of Dracula comics, which have rendered me totally incapable of reading Dracula quite the same way ever again:
She also does these hilarious strips based on book covers, including a bunch of covers by Edward Gorey and nearly the entire Nancy Drew series, but you'll have to actually go to her website to check those out because two comics is enough to spam you with for one day.
If you have been to this blog before you may recognize some of these strips because I like to link to them when I can remember when there are jokes that are relevant to whatever I am reading, which is a lot of the time, because this comic is just that awesome.
So, anyway, I went to the Boston Book Festival the other day, and I bought a copy of her shiny new book Hark! A Vagrant! and then I listened to her talk at a panel (she is so cute, you guys), and then she SIGNED my book and drew me a little picture of a Victorian lady with an updo going "Oooh" and I was like, the happiest little fangirl ever.
The very first comic in this book is Dude Watchin' With the Brontes, which is one of my favorites and a printout of which has been hanging in my various walls for three years:
Basically, this book is a collection of her best strips, which is almost all of them, and sometimes including the little commentaries she writes when she posts them, but there are also some new ones! Obviously I cannot post any examples of the new ones; you will just have to go buy the book. If you can find it. The BBF had completely run out of them by, like, three o'clock. There were so many overexcited Beaton fans there. I got to stand in line with them for hours and hours! Luckily, I had a book to read. ;)
Most of the HaV comics are standard six- to eight-panel jokes about books, history, and sometimes pop cultural things (like superheroes and hipsters). Sometimes she also picks a topic and does a bunch of three-panel strips all on roughly the same thing, like last year's set of Dracula comics, which have rendered me totally incapable of reading Dracula quite the same way ever again:
She also does these hilarious strips based on book covers, including a bunch of covers by Edward Gorey and nearly the entire Nancy Drew series, but you'll have to actually go to her website to check those out because two comics is enough to spam you with for one day.
If you have been to this blog before you may recognize some of these strips because I like to link to them when I can remember when there are jokes that are relevant to whatever I am reading, which is a lot of the time, because this comic is just that awesome.