If you go to Beaton’s Instagram, you’ll find some of her most recently posted comics, which are meditations of grief. I lost different people in different ways. I was in college when I got into Hark, referencing the comic with friends in the school newspaper. Kate Beaton’s a mom now, caring for her baby and making little comics about her dad. The thought of the passage of time is hitting me different right now as I’m writing this. This is normally the part of the column where I talk about how a meme, after some time, diffuses into the aether to become an unseen but palpable force in culture, but I do wanna do Hark like that.
Contrary to what the devotees of Ricky Gervais and Louis CK might say, funniness isn’t about edginess. It happened to be educational, it happened to appeal to certain niches, but it was alway great comedy. Hark has always been, in the years it was active, great comedy. I want to say that Hark is practically a treasure trove of reaction images to save, what with Beaton’s impeccable, incomparable knack for gesture and expression, but that would be extremely reductive.Īnd while I like to tell people that this column is about “vintage memes,” Beaton’s work has always transcended the condition of memehood, Mr Darcy with his cravat still on be damned. And any extremely online Tom, Dick and Larry who’ve made being funny their personality owes a debt to Kate Beaton.īecause of Hark I think our generation has earned, to some degree, to engage with history and popular culture in a tongue-in-cheek way, and boil down complex narratives and mythologies into things we can laugh at.
I’ve gotten so much serotonin from Hark’s brilliance that I’m practically in debt. I wonder what’d be going up on Hark if Kate Beaton decided to make a comic about the new Little Women movie. Or what about Beaton’s comic on Pope John Paul II? There’s a palpable glee that comes with reading a Hark! A Vagrant comic, the kind that makes you wanna read it out loud.Įverything Kate Beaton does is a comedy chef’s kiss, from her characters’ facial expressions to the way she makes people in period outfits deploy colloquial language. Or what about “What if your wife orbits my dick?”Iconic panel. Who could forget such hits as Ooh Mister Darcy? The comic is a masterwork, nailing every single stereotype about Pride and Prejudice while providing you an easy template upon which you could place your favorite ship, and let the sheer prowess of their love rip bodices off of anyone within a 20 miles radius. Even though it likely appealed most to peeps with history degrees, Hark! A Vagrant was for everybody. Most of the other webcomics were gamer-targeted content, like Awkward Zombie (still active and still high quality), Penny Arcade (meh), and Ctrl+Alt+Del, whose induction into memedom is undeniable.
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