Webcomic Wednesday: The Superhero Comics of Kate Beaton

If you’re out to make the case that webcomics open up whole new avenues of expression for the art form, you can throw Kate Beaton down on the table and say “case closed.” From a small town in Nova Scotia, Beaton combined her history degree and her ridiculously accomplished, classic-New Yorker-style cartooning – a combination that couldn’t have gotten arrested at any publisher until its popularity proved itself online – to create a phenomenon. Hark! A Vagrant, the catch-all title for her frequently literary- or history-themed humor strips, is a cross-quadrant success: It’s big with webcomics people, it’s viral, it’s earned her tons of fans in the more traditional comics world via print publication from super-respected alternative-comics publisher Drawn & Quarterly, and it’s hit with the mainstream audiences that Eustace Tilley regards through his monocle every week. Why wouldn’t there be some good old-fashioned nerd culture in her venn diagram overlap?

Beaton hasn’t made a ton of comics about superheroes, but you can find the ones she has done by clicking here and scrolling down, and it’s worth doing so for a few reasons. First, you really need to pay attention to how she draws eyes. They’re so goddamn lively! Sly, silly, angry, bored, horny: Whatever she needs her characters to be, she’s able to communicate within those two ovals. Forget about humor or parody: Any writer or artist working in this genre should see this and consider how much impact a comparatively small detail of your work can have in communicating character, tone, and theme, if you take the time to get it right.

Second, I just really like her kind of lazy-Sunday pacing. Sure, a lot of these – like the series above – are traditional gag strips, where you’ve got three panels to get your joke across and that’s that. But Beaton’s sense of humor is sneaky. That final panel doesn’t come soundtracked with a rimshot; more often than not, the humor’s already begun bubbling up to the surface, and the final panel’s just an extra opportunity to wallow in the absurdity or misanthropy. She’s like a micro-raconteur who you listen to for the vibe rather than the plot.

Third, call me crazy, but Beaton’s Wonder Woman would actually work as an honest-to-god official DC Comics Wonder Woman, in an Elseworlds book or an alternate universe or something. Imagine: You’ve been swinging your lasso, brandishing your bracelets, and saving the day since World War II. You’ve stayed the same superhumanly perfect and powerful person you’ve always been. Imagine your frustration that even though the world has aged and changed under your feet, in some fundamental ways, it’s stayed the same too – but only in the sense that you’re facing the same stupidity, vapidity, and sexism you’ve always faced. Wouldn't you become a cynical, seen-it-all, foul-mouthed piece of work? I could easily see Beaton’s Wonder Woman standing around watching Frank Miller’s senior-citizen Batman take himself to the edge of coronary arrest and snorting with derision before saving his geriatric ass.