20 funny comics to lighten your mood and make you laugh

Step Aside Pops: A Hark A Vagrant Collection (Cover image via Drawn and Quarterly)

10. Hark! A Vagrant

“I want my funny comics to have real intellectual and historically accurate rigor,” you might say. “But I also want some puns. And jokes about the history of cycling.”

You, my oddly specific friend, should, therefore, read pretty much everything by Kate Beaton.

Beaton first came to prominence through her webcomic, Hark! A Vagrant. This is no gentle exploration or history or literature, however. Through Beaton’s work, many of history’s most famous characters, such as Napoleon Bonaparte, are rightfully satirized. Even more noble people are the subject of Beaton’s focus, though perhaps more gently so.

For instance, Beaton rightfully takes some of the Brontës to task. Yes, they are beloved authors and ones that pioneered the way for other women to make their own way as writers. They also indulged in some of the worst tropes of Victorian literature: letting a bad man become a hero.

It’s true, even if you don’t want to think about it all that much. For all that readers might want to defend Jane Eyre’s Mr. Rochester, he does keep his mentally ill wife locked up in an attic. Even without his perpetual grumpiness, that’s a bit of an issue. Thankfully, Beaton can add her wit to her dissent, making it all the more palatable. It’s cathartic, really, to hear Beaton call Rochester “a creepy wife-hiding weirdo.”

As even a short scan of her work will tell you, Beaton is Canadian. She was born in Nova Scotia and often writes of her family there. She traveled across Canada to earn a history degree, work in Alberta’s oil fields and a museum in British Columbia, and many other places before returning to Nova Scotia. As she writes on her website: “Maybe the moon next time, who knows.”