![]() It brought to mind (to me) nothing so much as the CBBC series Horrible Histories, which the earliest of these cartoons definitely pre-date. This is witty, droll, humour, based on historical and literary characters, but with the language and concerns of the modern age. I, because I’m an idiot, read it like a book, constantly expecting (until I was well over three quarters of the way through) that something would happen to link everything together. ![]() This is a coffee table book, a toilet book, something to have in the back seat of a middle class car, y’know: it’s not for reading, it’s for looking at from time to time. Reading a book length collection of these things isn’t the way they’re meant to be consumed. some of them make you feel stupid for not understanding, some of them make you feel smug (for the opposite reason) and some of them are – to be fair – genuinely funny. They’re regularly included in the New Yorker, which I think tells you everything you need to know: i.e. Engaging with a human who treats me like a human, who tells me that the sad things I say are actually sad, who doesn’t try to trip me up when I discuss being literally penniless but not actually poor, it was great, for an hour I got to behave as if I had a friend or something, god I missed therapy, I-īeaton’s cartoons are fun and often funny. It was the most alive I’ve felt for months, the most real I’ve been in London in ages. Gave someone ten pounds and I got to cry and talk to them as if I was a real person again. I just went and did my first session of therapy for about 18 months, and it was GREAT. I want to go far away and never come back, I want to trip into the canal and get my sleeve caught on a fucking trolley so that I drown, accidentally, accidentally. I don’t really know where the narrative of my life is going, I’m confused and sad, angry but powerless. There’s not much left of me any more, not in between books and bottles, sadness and regret. I’m sick, sick to the skull sick to the brain sick to the heart. The thing about cutting booze is that I immediately begin to see a weight loss, but I also start feeling incredibly physically unpleasant, ill ill ill ill ill. I feel like shit, I feel rough, either genuinely ill or still on the fucking booze withdrawal, a full week of sobriety under my ever-wider (except for when I’m not drinking) belt. That is not true, because Hark! A Vagrant, written by Canadian cartoonist Kate Beaton, is not a “book” in the traditional (non-literal) sense of the word, rather it is a collection, an album, an amassed trove, of (mostly) unlinked cartoons, spanning several years of this artist’s creative life.Ĭlick here to have a look at Beaton’s cartoons, I’m not really certain I have much more to say about them than can be captured by actually reading. I always thought the difference was negligible, y’know, almost as if the two words were synonyms rather than anything more rigidly separate. Well, what I’ve learnt here is the difference between cartoons and comics.
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