A decade and a half later, Beaton has compiled her memories of her life in an Alberta camp – built to exploit one of the world’s largest oil fields – into a massive, no-holds-barred graphic novel memoir titled Ducks: Two Years on the Oil Sands. She was 21 and had just finished her bachelor’s degree in history and anthropology when she left her home on an island in the easternmost tip of Canada for the job more than 2,000 miles away. As the child of a working-class family who did not want to become a teacher, she could see no other way to pay off her student debt. “The only message we got about a better future was that we had to leave home to have one,” he writes. “We didn’t question it, because this is the no-one area of a province that hasn’t had and hasn’t been developed here for generations.” An illustration from Kate Beaton’s Ducks: Two Years on the Oil Sands. Alberta was the place to find a better life – “there it flourishes…there is no end to money,” Beaton writes. He arrived to find himself in an isolated camp, handing out tools in a warehouse 12 hours a day to men brutalized by spending months uninterruptedly cut off from their homes and families. “They call them shadow populations. You are not a member of any community. You fly in and you fly out,” he says. As she continued to make a name for herself as an award-winning cartoonist in Canada and the US, the story continued to haunt her. Little by little, Beaton began posting scenes on her website to see if anyone was interested. It was, but only now did he have the time and energy to put it all together in a book. “I’ve had a lot of breaks in my life along the way,” he says. “My sister was diagnosed with cancer and we lost her in 2018. And then I had two children. If I had done it at any other time, I think I would have finished it faster. But that’s life for you.” It’s 8 a.m. in Nova Scotia as we speak, and Beaton’s oldest child is running around in her pajamas, trying to get away from her dad. “Educating trifles: it’s a land of tears and destruction,” says Beaton, now 39, rolling her eyes. Ducks is her first feature project. It bears no resemblance to the funny cartoons that made her name, bringing together unlikely historical figures – Richard II, Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Ada Lovelace, perhaps, or Isaac Newton, Harvey Milk and her former prime minister Australia’s Gough Whitlam – although there is an unpleasant intertextuality as you see her drawing the first of these Hark! A bum strips late at night in her camp room or is told about surreptitious scans from the site’s photocopier. The book tells a dark story in monochromatic, chronological sections with tightly framed memoirs separated by generous dimensions of the landscape in which it is found. It is a tortured land, marked by the tracks of monstrous diggers, belching smoke from huge chimneys, but it is also a place of wide, starry skies, with occasional dreamy glimpses of the northern lights. In 2016, this landscape made another headline when massive wildfires shut down the city of Fort McMurray, which served the camps, highlighting a larger issue of environmental destruction that oil fields contribute to. But Beaton focuses on the two years she spent there, when her mettle was tested to the limit by the more local threat of social and behavioral breakdown, which led her into many difficult situations. As one of the few women in a camp full of men, she was under constant threat of sexual assault. She is willing not to reveal the details. “I was always worried, putting this book out, that that would be what people took away from it the most, and then what it would be limited to, because that’s what happens with women’s stories. Only then do they become “great,” he says. “But I also hope to build empathy and fear. I want them to be concerned that my character is in a dangerous place and to feel as scared for her as I was in that moment. If readers know, right off the bat, what’s going to happen, it takes that power away from it.” Suffice it to say that she was an innocent on the outside, completely unable to deal with the problems of camp life, unaware that many of her colleagues were being drugged with whatever drugs they got their hands on. In retrospect she is protective of them. There is an undercurrent of class anger in the book – about the media trying to demonize these t-shirt workers to entertain well-heeled readers whose wealth saves them from ever having to contend with such hellholes. “I feel like when you talk about drug use and stuff out there, people have a lack of sympathy because they’re making a lot of money and there’s a perception that these are bad choices: you did that to yourself.” says Beaton. “But it’s a trap they fall into.” Among those who fell was her boss, Ryan – a young father and “one of the good guys” – who became increasingly erratic at work before disappearing one day without a trace. She caught up with him years later via Facebook and consulted him about the memoir. “Yes, there were flyers advertising a helpline, but it wasn’t worth it. These people were not trained to deal with the reality of people in crisis. And there were a lot of people in crisis,” he says. “Then, because of the camp culture, when they quit, they just walk out of your life, which is traumatic in itself, and once they’re off the premises, the parent companies are absolved of all responsibility.” It is the story of migrant workers around the world. An illustration from Ducks: Two Years on the Oil Sands by Kate Beaton. One of the challenges was to portray boredom without becoming boring: he had to find a shape for the story that couldn’t be relegated to the relationship because people were always moving on. “Boredom is one of the things that destroys the mental health of people living in the camps,” he says. “You go to work and you do the same thing every day. You live in this tiny room. If you’re a woman, you can’t use the gym without all the men who are stuck at the door watching you.” Her first one-year contract predated social media and no working internet. Surprisingly, he returned for a second stint in a different camp, this time as an administrator, after a year working at a maritime museum in Victoria, but by then things had changed. “I left a place where I felt completely isolated and couldn’t write. I went back to one that had good internet in your room at night so I was making my comic online. It was something that gave me joy and made me feel like myself, when sometimes you didn’t feel like yourself at work because people reduced you to what they saw in front of them.” Her time at the museum gave her the idea to create Hark’s historical vignettes! The Vagrants, and the free time to create her own rudimentary website to display them. They soon began to sell, as they have done ever since. Hers is an unusual success story, in a world of comics where most writers depend on other sources of income. It’s one reason why there are so few comics about blue-collar life, he suggests. “I’m an anomaly and I owe a lot to the time I started,” he says. “The Internet was still small enough that people actually went to people’s websites to read things, which they don’t anymore. They were looking for new voices in comics. It qualified as a new voice, because I was doing these internal genres in niche comics, but it was broad enough that people responded to it. I hit a nerve.” She moved to New York, found an agent and joined an all-female animation collective, Pizza Island. “We just happened to be all women, but people were like, ‘Wow, women making comics in one room.’ And for some reason that also struck a nerve. There was a vision for us as more than just a bunch of people with our headphones. We even had someone ask if they could do a reality show for us.” But after years of paying too much rent and having her bike stolen, she decided to return to Canada, first to Toronto and then to her family in Nova Scotia, where – thanks to the internet – you no longer have to leave. to make a life She has since diversified into children’s picture books, bringing her quirky humor to stories of an ambitious princess and her hapless, rambunctious pony and a spoiled baby who acts like a king. Their bright colors are a million miles away from the dark shades of the Ducks, the story that had to be told. He has daily WhatsApp chats with the Pizza Island gang. Motherhood is what they talk about the most now, she says. “I’ll probably complain about potty training later today.” Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by Kate Beaton is published by Jonathan Cape (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
