Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands

While Kate Beaton was first creating the goofily hilarious history comics that made Hark! A Vagrant such a hoot, her day job was in the oil fields of Alberta, trying to make money quickly, like so many of her fellow Canadians from the Maritimes, where well-paying jobs were few and far between. Now she looks back on those years in an epic graphic memoir in which her humor is subdued but not her powers of observation of the boredom, isolation, and low-key brutality—and the humanity—of working as a young woman in the masculine world of resource extraction. It's a quietly harrowing and sometimes heartening (and sometimes funny!) portrait of a place rarely seen.