DUCKS - Serio Comics 4
DUCKS: Two Years in the Oil Sands written and drawn by Kate Beaton, published by Drawn + Quarterly
OK! Just getting this post in under the once-a-week promised to (free) subscribers/self-respect personal integrity deadline wire ;)
Had an exciting week!
A music film project collaboration is developing which might become a way to bridge between the music/memoir work of Shuffle Synchronicities and a future film adaptation of my upcoming debut graphic novel SHOULD WE, um, BUY A GUN? … YAY!
This week’s graphic novel is DUCKS: Two Years in the Oil Sands, which was written and drawn by Kate Beaton and published by Drawn + Quarterly.
It’s a candid yet compassionate coming-of-age graphic memoir about how she left her bucolic home in Nova Scotia to pay off her Canadian university art school loans by working in an isolated and benighted oil field in the western province of Alberta.
It’s something I read earlier in 2023 before starting Seriocomics and am revisiting it now for a proper enthusiasm!
I bought it originally from Skylight Books, I believe.
And it stuck out not just because a friend of a friend is Kate’s literary agent.
But because I had enjoyed her previous webcomic that became a best-selling book, Hark! A Vagrant, which mixes humor and political & literary history to hilarious effect:
Previously, in my always fledgling film career LOL, I collaborated with filmmaker and friend Joey Power (who guest posted on Shuffle Synchroncities post 130) on a historical humor screenplay called Magellan vs. Jones, which was an Age of Navigation frenemy comedy race to the Spice Islands sort of like a Pirates of the Caribbean meets a Will Ferrell & John C. Reilly-like Talladega Nights, of which a Hollywood exec once said: “We love it! We’d definitely be into this!! This is one of the best comedies we’ve read in years!! Except? Is there any way it could not be on water?”
LOL.
This silly note.
In retrospect.
Really wasn’t that silly!
Because filming a hard R-Rated action comedy that was also a period piece with almost all its sets on water would probably be $200 million even back then in 2010.
Maybe we should have turned it into a graphic novel, LOL?!
Later in the 2010s though, during the Trumpian epoch, while Joey was making amazing teen comedy-drama movies like Banana Split and After Everything, I refashioned my passion for the history of Exploration humor into a parody conflation book called: FAKE HISTORY!: The Story Of How Fake Historians Treated Christopher Columbus Very Very Unfairly, which you can read free excerpts of published in Points in Case and also The Satirist, and buy from Amazon, and which I still standby as quite funny even hopefully post-that guy!
This was one of my last purely comedic fiction works before turning more toward memoir with This Book Is The Longest Sentence Ever Written And Then Published and then of course the substack Shuffle Synchronicities.
So, yeah! Suffice it to say I was excited about how Kate would turn her similar youthful irreverence for the world at large…
…Into a more serious and mature introspective look at herself in graphic memoir form:
The first thing that struck me was that Kate showed the serious depths of her artistic capacities not just from a storytelling perspective but visually too.
Her drawings now had a cinematic solemnity:
Another immediate impression was…
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