Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands

I usually don’t read memoirs or autobiographies in comic book format. I tend to find them a bit too self-indulgent for my taste. With that, I can’t now recall how Ducks by Kate Beaton got on my reading list, but I figure if it did, it must have been due to high praise. Finally, I decided to read it in a moment of mild embarrassment, when I realized how little I know about Alberta or the oil industry there despite being a Canadian citizen. Maybe this book could enlighten me a little.

In essence, Ducks is about life as a female labourer in the oil sands, and sexual abuse. It’s also about how the latter is almost inevitable within the former. If a man wrote about his experiences at the same time, in the same places, doing the same work, this would be a completely different book. You would almost expect that to be more MAS*H-like, where Beaton’s character would be reduced to one of the nurses in the show.

Where I really connected with the book is how it is also a lot about the immigrant experience. We don’t usually think about people who move between provinces as immigrants, but in a country like Canada, they really are. There is levity when they make fun of each other, but also frequent discrimination between the workers from Alberta, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland. As far as I can recall, there is only one non-white character in the story. You can, however, see how we always find ways to create “others” in our social circles.

Finally, I’m amazed at how Beaton tells this story. There is no captioning or third-person narrator; everything is told through Beaton’s art and dialogue. I am a huge fan of dialogue-driven storytelling in comics, and this book is a perfect example of it. But even on pages with no dialogue, Kate Beaton does an amazing job conveying emotion.

Highly recommended. My rating: 9/10.