With the additional context of what Beaton produced as Ducks before though? It reads as repentance, as a righting of the ship. It’s a strange moment and if you’re coming to Ducks for the first time in this 2022 incarnation, you might just think that it’s included as a statement of intent.

Thinking on this, young Beaton in that library (as told by Beaton-the-author) is thoughtful: “Makes you wonder what was left out though, doesn’t it? It’s nice, but it’s not the whole picture.

Creighton’s reason was that they weren’t suitable for reader’s eyes. As young Kate relates to George, her boss at the museum library, that there is an author named Helen Creighton who removed all the off-color stories from her own book written in the Fifties, a collection of folk tales from the Maritimes. It also, by nature of the expansion, becomes less funny and poignant as those elements retreat further into what is an absolutely harrowing recitation of grim realities (partially enhanced by having known a version of Beaton and her family through the stories she’s told for years on Hark! A Vagrant).Īs if anticipating the dissonance felt between the two Ducks, Beaton includes on pages 265 and 266 of her 2022 Ducks a brief anecdote that almost feels out of nowhere save for to explain how these two very different Ducks by Kate Beaton could exist. Kate Beaton’s 2014 comic, Ducks, was roughly between 27 and 40 pages long (depending panels per page), and at the time I described it as “sad and funny and poignant and altogether human.” Kate Beaton’s 2022 comic, Ducks, is torrentially longer, expanding most of the original work into a 436-page heavyweight. There’s Ducks by Kate Beaton and now there’s Ducks by Kate Beaton.

Ducks by kate beaton