Reading “Hark! A Vagrant”

By Caroline Daniel, Staff Blogger

As a fair warning to you all, dear readers, this blog should not be promoting procrastination. I feel as though this blog should promote things to do on boring weekends, or with the recent weather, rainy days. However, if you fail that test you have tomorrow because you were too busy procrastinating looking at the beautiful wonders of the internet, please don’t blame me. My feelings get hurt easily and I may cry.

Anyway, on to today’s procrastination – I mean thing you should be checking out.

I’m an avid comic reader. I don’t really know what started it, but I love internet comics with a passion, as I previously stated in my post about “Nimona.” Now if you’re like me, in 2008 you were dumb on the internet and you liked memes too much. One of these memes that went around was an “Old as balls” joke, stolen from an online comic about “The Great Gatsby.”

The creator of this hilarious accidental meme? Kate Beaton, a Canadian comic artist from Nova Scotia. Beaton is a history major turned world-famous comic artist, whose friends pushed her to start making comics based off her hilarious history jokes.

Since the start of “Hark! A Vagrant,” Beaton has made over 300 different comics, released two books, and has been on numerous mainstream panels at different conventions, most recently New York Comic-Con. Her art is well-loved around the internet by literature and history nerds alike.

Beaton’s jokes range from girls fawning over Mr. Darcy to Poe receiving letters from Jules Verne (“Around the World in 80 Days”) about them being in a hot air balloon as bros. Napoleon crying is featured a lot as well.

To be honest, Beaton’s comics are what made me love history. I’m not good at history by any means, but I do love it. I never was a fan of the French Revolution until Beaton’s brilliant comics, because they’re interesting and sadly, some of them are not too far from the truth.

Now unfortunately for some reason, SDUHSD blocks Beaton’s comics from being accessed by school computers, probably because she does like to use swear words every now and then. I wish this wasn’t the case, but there probably isn’t much to do about it. So if you’d like to check out Ms. Beaton you can do so on your smartphones disconnected from wifi or when you get home. I promise, you’ll accidentally go through every single one and wonder where your night went.

 

Visit Kate at http://harkavagrant.com