Twee Magazine

Hark! A Vagrant: You see me rollin up pops you step aside.

Had Kate Beaton not started to write and illustrate comics, she might have wound up twee anyway. She's Canadian, studied art history and anthropology, and worked in Victoria's Maritime Museum. She developed a fascination for obscure historical figures -- she told interview magazine that she found herself amazed that nobody outside the museum knew who the first Justice of the Peace of British Columbia was.

And so her next decision is one that cemented her into the twee firmament: She started drawing little, adorable, frequently daffy cartoons about history. She began to publish on the web, naming her site after a very early comic in which a contemporary panhandler speaks like a Dickensian pauper. ("O crack," he says, "I am a fool for the love I bear unrequited.") Unexpectedly, her comics caught on, and she eventually moved to New York to pursue cartooning professionally.

I say "unexpectedly," but, really, the world is full of adults with underutilized history and literature degrees, and Beaton's comics hit the sweet spot between being clever enough to surprise but not so clever as to be incomprehensible. An example: She did a series of comics inspired by "The Great Gatsby," and a recurring joke was about Tom and Daisy's baby. In order to appreciate the joke, you must be versed enough in Fitzgerald to recall that the baby briefly appears in "Gatsby," but Daisy is almost entirely disinterested in it. And so we have a cartoon in which Daisy is shown actually sitting on the baby while seeming confused when asked about it, and another in which Gatsby and Daisy make love on a sofa while the baby plummets from beneath them.

This is the sort of joke that's only going to be appreciated by someone who spent hours in a lit class discussing the symbolism of the book's forgotten infant, but Beaton is canny enough to know this. Her sense of humor is anarchic and wide-ranging, mixing highbrow with lowbrow, and so the Gatsby series also includes a cartoon in which Tom brags about how old his money is, and, when pressed for specifics, simple answers "Old as balls."

One of my favorite recurring cartoons is a series in which Beaton reprints covers of Nancy Drew books and then imagines the contents based on the cover alone. Without context, the famous teen detective simple seems to constantly be creeping around, and so Beaton's version of Drew is positively psychopathic. In her version of "The Mystery at the Moss Covered Mansion," an image of Drew and her friends digging up treasure becomes one of Drew burying treasure. "I don't trust the banks," she says, "I don't trust anyone." And then she starts shooting her friends.

Beaton has done something similar with Victorian Halloween cards. She has a particular taste for paralleling the odd manners of previous eras with the odder manners of our own, and so she starts with Halloween card that shows a Victorian staring in a mirror, hoping to see a reflection of her beloved. Halloween isn't really a time for divination games anymore, and so the moment a gentleman's reflection appears in the mirror, it pulls out a cell phone and sends her dick picks.

And I don't want to overemphasize one type of cartoon she does, but I can't help myself, because she sometimes uses random old books for the same purpose, and I can't help but love one based on "True Tales from the Annals of Crime and Rascality," a collection of stories from the New Yorker with a cover by Edward Gorey that shows a man in stripes and yellow kid gloves beckoning down an alley. Beaton animates this scene, with the hoodlum calling out "Come let me tell you a tale of crime and rascality," and then, when a listener draws near, running off with his wallet.

Ultimately, whatever your particular interest in history or literature, Beaton will sooner or later offer up a cartoon that seems tailor-made for your particular tastes: She has tackled Vikings, the founding fathers, the Medieval era in Europe, and a number of cartoons about great, forgotten women from history. She has a special affection for the suffrage movement, whose history she treats as complex, often heroic, and hilariously contradictory. She also has a taste for the early years of bicycle riding, which treated women bicyclists as though they were violent criminals. So Beaton treats them like members of a motorcycle gang, riding while smoking and snarling at men who dive out of their way, saying "You see me rollin up pops you step aside."

In fact, that cartoon reintroduces an old word for female bicyclist, velocipedestrienne, and, my God, what a marvelous word. If this were a perfect twee universe, we would see gangs of women out riding antique boneshakers, wearing Victorian bustles, smoking cigarettes, and terrorizing neighborhoods. It may never happen, but, thanks to Kate Beaton, at least we can imagine it.