Kate Beaton

Kate Beaton
Beaton at the Calgary Comic & Entertainment Expo in BMO Centre, Calgary (19 June 2011)
Born	(1983-09-08) September 8, 1983 (age 33) Nova Scotia, Canada
Nationality	Canadian
Notable works	Hark! A Vagrant
Signature
http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php

Kathryn Moira Beaton (born 8 September 1983) is a Canadian comics artist and the creator of the comic strip Hark! A Vagrant.

Of Scottish descent, Beaton grew up in Mabou on the isle of Cape Breton and has three sisters. She went to a small school for K-12, only having 23 people in her class. /She graduated from Mount Allison University in 2005 with a Bachelor of Arts in history and anthropology. Beaton began drawing comics for the university newspaper, The Argosy, during her third and fourth years at school. After college, she worked as an administrative assistant in the Maritime Museum of BC in Victoria.

After graduating from Mount Allison in 2005 Beaton worked at Fort Mac to pay off her student loans. In 2007, while still working at the Maritime Museum of BC, Beaton decided to publish some of her history-inspired comics on the Web. She posted comics to a new website, katebeaton.com, and to a LiveJournal blog. In December of that year, she published the first of two popular batches of history-themed comic strips, whose subjects were ones suggested by at least twenty of her readers. She moved to her current website, Hark! A Vagrant, in May 2008.

Beaton publishes her webcomic, Hark! A Vagrant, occasionally. Its subjects are usually historical figures, such as James Joyce and Ada Lovelace, or fictional characters from Western literature. In several comics, Beaton caricatures herself, past and present. All were drawn by Beaton using MS Paint during her breaks at work. Beaton has a simple artistic style, with particular attention to detail paid to her characters' facial expressions; her skill at comic pacing has also been noted.Hark! A Vagrant won the 2011 Ignatz Award for Outstanding Online Comic.