Comic Strips: Hark! A Vagrant

For this topic, I refeshed my memory of one of my favorite webcomics/comic strips, "Hark! A Vagrant". I've been familiar with this strip for years, as screenshots of its mockery of historical jargon and iconic figures circled the internet. Kate Beaton, the strip's writer, artist, and self-publisher is a Canadian artist with a fascination for historical figures, both fictional and not. Beaton's strips show her great knowledge of facts, while also pushing just a little past reality for the joke.

She uses a simple style of cartooning, but somehow manages to strike a perfect comical likeness to the character she is depicting. Hark! A Vagrant, while technically a webcomic, provides readers with a nostalgic simple strip-format, also ususally shying away from color. Being self-published and quite popular, Beaton has also had the opportunity to sell merchandise of her work online and employ guest-artists as well. I have always found Hark! A Vagrant to be perfectly charming with a perfect brush of blue comedy, and since middle school it's helped me to become more intrigued with historical figures; Some on Beaton's strips have piqued my interest in a person enough to go into some late-night web research tangents. I'm always going to enjoy this strip, and I'm probably going to buy some merchandise for myself too.