Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands

My favorite comic artist writing a memoir? I have been waiting for this one to come to the library for months now. It's a beautiful read about her time working in the oil sands of Canada. Topic I was totally unfamiliar with. It's got the same wry wit as Hark! A Vagrant. She went through a lot, I thought to myself many times that I would not have been tough enough to endure working there. The first quarter of the book about the shackles of student loan debt resonated with me so, so much.

I much prefer Beaton's humourous stuff and I ended up skipping a chunk because our trusty narrator was subjected to harassment that I didn't want to experience along with her. Interesting to learn about the extraction operations but not a fun read if you're female cause of the second-hand rage.

Re-reading for book club which means I will be doing the painful parts this time.

And that was even better than I remembered. Very excited to talk about this with other people.

Painful but also graceful take on wage slavery, toxic masculinity, rape, mental health, colonialism, ecocide, and more. Beaton convincingly and poignantly shows the many stages she experienced through multiple soul grinders: starting off as an innocent young art graduate desperate to pay off student loans, doing what she thought was necessary (and probably was), but paying prices noone should have to. Important reading, but the kind of people who need to read this, won't.

I remember reading Kate Beaton's ‘Ducks' back in 2014 when it was just a series of sketch comics on her “Hark a Vagrant” website. A lot of those stories made it into this book verbatim, which is good because I loved those comics.

This is not your typical Kate Beaton book. It's still smart and occasionally funny, but it's also very grounded in the mundane. None of her usual whimsy is to be found here. Even so, Beaton has proven herself to be an excellent storyteller with heavy subject matters.

Beaton does an amazing job humanizing her colleagues from the oil sands of northern Alberta, even the ones she doesn't seem to recall that fondly. She's empathetic enough to understand that even the surliest laborer is a distinct individual with their own inner life. It's this same empathy that makes this book a heavy read. Beaton has no shortage of sad or traumatic stories about her time spent working the oil sands. Stories about the long-term effects living an isolated life with little to do has on a person. The oil industry doesn't just remove value from the Earth for profit, it does the same for the humans who work for it.

There's a lot going on in this book, but the one overarching theme that unites everything is the incredible ability humans have to compartmentalize literally anything and keep moving forward. Environmental destruction, exploitative labor practices, harassment, drug addiction, sexual assault, & workplace fatalities are all things that occur within the pages of this book, and the people affected by these events are able to be file them away to be dealt with at some other time. Or not at all. “That's just how things are here!” is a common response for tragedies both large and small. Humanity's superhuman ability to persevere through tragedy can be easily commodified to tolerate abuse.

I don't think this is a book for everyone, it is challenging & sobering, but it is very good. Kate Beaton is a longtime favorite of mine, and I'm glad to finally see those sketch comic PNGs become a full fledged book.

Gorgeous and sad and infuriating. I love Beatons work so much and it was great to see some of her more serious stuff. I got so choked up about Becky even tho she isn't a part of the hook. There was something about a particular time on twitter that it really felt like you knew her. It was like seeing an old friend.

This is stunning, honestly. Like most Extremely Online people I've been a fan of Kate Beaton for a long time, and I remember seeing bits of Ducks in progress online awhile ago, but as a whole it's staggering. Not as LOL-funny as Hark A Vagrant, but so thoughtful and empathetic. And knowing about her sister Becky's death from cancer (outside the scope of the book) made reading about her relationship with Becky (and their frequent speculation about the health effects of working in the oil sands...) hit even harder. A great memoir and a great look at the environmental, economic, ethical, etc impacts of the oil industry on both a micro- and macro-level.

i guess i've been on kind of a memoir streak lately so i should have known what i was getting myself into, but i was still both wholly unprepared to read this and also unprepared for the amazing level of empathy kate beaton has despite/through it all. the afterword is really good, don't skip. it got me choked up.

i met KB very briefly in early 2012 at a topatoco tag sale, where she drew a stunning portrait of me inside my copy of hark! a vagrant. i stopped my daily webcomics rotation sometime after that, but i still feel some type of way about witnessing those very same panels (and that pony) being created in the background of the memoir, like i'm peeking behind the curtain or finding out how a hot dog gets made.

thought back to this federico fellini quote used in anatomy of comics, which i saw posted to bluesky out of context a few days before i started reading ducks:

Comics create a spectral fascination. Their paper characters and forever frozen situations are like motionless puppets with no strings attached. This cannot be transferred to cinema, whose seduction comes from movement, rhythm, and dynamics. It's a radically different style and way of expressing oneself. A different way of communicating, and influencing the gaze. The world of comics can generously lend cinema its scenarios, characters, stories. But it will not have this ineffable and secret power of suggestion which comes from the transfixed immobility of a pinned butterfly.

You might be tempted to dismiss Beaton's ability to tackle a more weighty memoir if you've only known her from her Hark! A Vagrant days, but she nails the industrial desolation of a Syncrude mining operation — the biting cold, the hulking machines, and the poison spewing industry of it all. That implacable desolation mirrors her own experience as she arrives in the oil sands in the hopes of severing the “weighted anchor” of $40K of student debt in a place where women are outnumbered 50 to 1.

It goes badly and yet Beaton exhibits far more empathy than you might expect. This could have easily been a sensationalist story, given to all the salacious detail and harrowing experiences — exactly what a reporter from the Globe and Mail kept fishing for in a later chapter to fill out her preconceived story. But Beaton can't help but wonder how the loneliness, homesickness and boredom might affect someone's brother or dad or husband.

So many have come from away, from coastal towns where the fishing has dried up, the mines long since closed, where opportunity requires a plane trip away from family, from home. It's a place where the death of hundreds of ducks in a tailing pond receives more national interest than the poisoning of Native lands, mining operations set up right next door to Indian settlements where young people are increasingly dying of cancer, the plants and animals spoiled by the poisons sent into the environment. And there are the workers and the mental toll that isolation breeds, the ugly aspects of self revealed, the people chewed up by this extractive industry. This is one hell of a memoir.

I read this in one day (nearly one sitting!). It's a horrific telling of the author's time in the oil sands, while also noting the shades of grey humanity often flits between depending on their environment. I'm still uncertain if it was almost too kind in its revelations, but that may have been the point. Highly recommend.

A journey through the shadows of industry. Each page, a step into the unknown. The weight of reality, heavy and unyielding. Beaton's voice, clear and unflinching, cuts through the noise. Characters etched in the dust, their stories linger. The pacing, deliberate, each moment a breath held. The impact, a whisper that stays. A book that doesn't let go.

I remember hearing about this book and not knowing anything about the oil sands made it seem like they were drowning people for money but the people employed had no other income streams and just had no choice but to drown people. 

Certainly there were negatives and positives, the misogyny, the sexual abuse, the way the loneliness crept up on the men and made them into a different sort of person, the way these people needed to make money to send home but lost all that time with their families versus the camaraderie and looking out for each other and the pay but unfortunately all the negatives are things that crop up with humans any sort of where.

I also appreciated the nuance as the book goes on as Katie starts to be changed herself by her time in the sands, hearing the vitrol in the comments from people back home, where she would so desperately love to be if she didn't need the money and how awkward it feels to make money somewhere else and take jobs from the locals because you yourself can't find jobs closer to your home.

A thoughtful graphic novel that deserves to be with other classics of their time.