Who could resist a book called Step Aside, Pops? Not me, that’s for sure. But in case its title alone is not enough to persuade you that this is a collection of comics worth reading, let me tell you about it anyway. Kate Beaton, a young Canadian cartoonist, is the creator of an amazingly popular website called Hark! A Vagrant, and it was there that the contents of Step Aside, Pops originated. Beaton named her website (and later her first book) Hark! A Vagrant, in an effort to call it something that was at once both “nothing in particular” and “vaguely old-timey and absurd”. Although she now says that her advice to younger artists is “to name their comic something that doesn’t require them to repeat themselves several times when someone asks for it”, she was surely right to go for something cute but essentially nonsensical, for the range and singular wit of her brilliant historical, literary and pop-culture parodies is simply impossible to capture in just a few words. Everyone and everything is in her sights, from Wuthering Heights to the video for Janet Jackson’s Nasty, to – my favourite – Nancy Drew (“You’re not my co-pilot, you’re a TEENAGE GIRL”).
Beaton’s drawings, though fluid, are typically sketchy; her strips, having first made you hoot with laughter, at times peter out, as if she were running out of steam, and at others conclude abruptly, her attention having suddenly moved elsewhere (her Wuthering Heights skits conclude with an author’s note, which reads: “If we kept going with these, they’d be half of the book. And so, another time, my friends”). This is not a criticism. Everything she does is brilliantly immediate. Her bent is feminist, so her take on Wonder Woman is that she is as frustrated as the rest of us, career-wise. “Why don’t you chase him?” asks a passer-by as a thief dashes off with a bag of swag. “Girl, I’m wearing a strapless bathing suit and high-heel boots, what would you do?” replies Wonder Woman, grumpily.
I adore her Straw Feminists, two hairy-legged women who tear the Justin Bieber posters from teenage bedroom walls in dead of night (they replace them with images of Mother Earth), and who hang about in department store lingerie departments where they tell innocent young females: “You don’t want a training bra, little girl… You want all the men in the world to be dead.”
Beaton has no time at all for daffy, male-obsessed women, up to and including the Lady of Shallot, who, in her version of the tale, spies her beloved knight as he hastily lowers his chainmail, having been caught short at the side of the road. “I’m sure Lancelot was a babe,” she writes, mock-despairingly. “But still.” It’s all tremendous fun, eccentric and warm and funny. But you sense, too, a fierceness – it’s close to anger – just beneath the surface, and it’s this that gives all the Hark! A Vagrant cartoons their unique energy. If they were people, their eyes would be wild, and their hair would be blowing crazily in the wind.
Step Aside, Pops is published by Jonathan Cape (£12.99). Click here to order it for £10.39
