FWIS3

Kate Beaton is a fairly well-known web cartoonist. She tends to write comics about history and Canadiana. I like them a great deal.

Before she was an artist, she apparently spent some time working on the oil patch in northern Alberta. She's done a few autobiographical comics about then, and they without fail hit me really hard in the gut. Every time. They're fantastic. Here they are:

Night Shift
Ducks Part 1
Ducks Part 2
Ducks Part 3
Ducks Part 4

(There's one more part coming, apparently. I'll post it when she puts it up.)

Why do you suppose they 'hit you in the gut'?

Good stuff, though.

They're just absolutely heartbreaking, I suppose.

First, you have this woman, right out of university, with no opportunities. So she takes a job in a hellhole, where the air you breathe or the water you drink will kill you. Underemployed, alone, thousands of kilometres from home. Hating what you do. Hating where you are. Hating what your company does. Hating the callousness of the people around you. Being sure that your life should be better than it is. That's not just heartbreaking, it hits pretty close to home for me. I think it does for a lot of people my age. Hell, the artist is about my age.

And, well, she was also a young woman in a mining camp full of lonely men. There's some of that harassment in the first comic. Nothing really overt, but a constant atmosphere of tension and unease, all the time. I can't seem to find the follow-up comic, but it looks like her company tried to hush her up about it.

Second, there's some broader context, here. Did you notice that a number of the characters speak with an accent? That's not your generic "Canadian accent," that's either a Maritimes or a Newfoundland accent. See, the provinces out east are poor. Especially Newfoundland, since the collapse of the cod fishery. So people head west to work the oil patch. It's all there is for them. They toil in shale and mud for decades, hating it. Missing their families. Missing their homes. It's been that way for a very long time (Wiki link). It destroys communities that have existed for centuries, and it destroys lives with unfulfilling, back-breaking work.

It's kind of hollowed out the eastern provinces entirely, and turned them into really, really sad places. And, hey, both my parents are from Nova Scotia. I still have family out there. So that hits where it hurts, too.

These comics are just all... I don't know, "sad" doesn't really describe it. Melancholic, maybe?

Anyway, here's the final part: Ducks Part 5

The first of those was enough for me. I didn't read the rest.

Look, I know the world sucks horribly, I know it's getting worse, I know there's no end in sight and humanity is probably doomed. But I need to maintain some reason to stay alive, okay? And that means not glomming on to every depressing thing I come across. Even if that basically amounts to sticking my head in the sand.

If there's one damn thing I've learned in my life so far, it's that one can't accomplish anything useful or decent just by drowning in other people's misery. To improve the world you have to be able to function in it, no matter how much it sucks.

So yeah. The first one was excellent. The rest I'm not even going to bother with. Hope you don't mind.

Why would I mind? These are hard things to read. I find it helps me to read them - it brings me catharsis. If it doesn't do that for you, if it's better that you don't read them, then don't read them. I understand where you're coming from.