Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands

i guess i've been on kind of a memoir streak lately so i should have known what i was getting myself into, but i was still both wholly unprepared to read this and also unprepared for the amazing level of empathy kate beaton has despite/through it all. the afterword is really good, don't skip. it got me choked up.

i met KB very briefly in early 2012 at a topatoco tag sale, where she drew a stunning portrait of me inside my copy of hark! a vagrant. i stopped my daily webcomics rotation sometime after that, but i still feel some type of way about witnessing those very same panels (and that pony) being created in the background of the memoir, like i'm peeking behind the curtain or finding out how a hot dog gets made.

thought back to this federico fellini quote used in anatomy of comics, which i saw posted to bluesky out of context a few days before i started reading ducks:

Comics create a spectral fascination. Their paper characters and forever frozen situations are like motionless puppets with no strings attached. This cannot be transferred to cinema, whose seduction comes from movement, rhythm, and dynamics. It's a radically different style and way of expressing oneself. A different way of communicating, and influencing the gaze. The world of comics can generously lend cinema its scenarios, characters, stories. But it will not have this ineffable and secret power of suggestion which comes from the transfixed immobility of a pinned butterfly.