Crumb took pains to preserve every word of Genesis—drawing from numerous source texts, but mainly Robert Alter’s translation, The Five Books of Moses (2004)—and he clearly did his homework on the clothing, shelter and landscapes that surrounded Noah, Abraham and Isaac. The book chronicles the two years she spent working at three different mines in the Athabasca oil sands, in northeastern Alberta—another liminal space. Like her, they were desperate and they were exploited, stuck there in the tailings ponds of Alberta, far from home. She constantly hears men saying the women at the camp only work there to get sex in a place with less competition and women who are assaulted are always blamed for it. Many of the book’s important events are cropped out, into the invisible areas between pages and chapters, to be revisited later.

Kate Beaton on ‘We had to leave home for a better future’: Kate Beaton on

A decade and a half later, Beaton has piled her memories of life in a camp in Alberta – built to exploit one of the world’s largest single oil deposits – into a chunky, no-holds-barred graphic novel memoir titled Ducks: Two Years on the Oil Sands. The author begins with an introduction to her home in Cape Breton, where the people have “a deep love for home, and the knowledge of how frequently they will have to leave it to find work somewhere else. There are decent guys and awful ones, but in many of them the good and the awful are nauseatingly mixed together - avuncular coworkers are kind one moment and sexually aggressive the next.

One of the challenges was depicting boredom without becoming boring: she had to find a shape for the story that couldn’t be relationship-driven, because people were always moving on. As the child of a working-class family who didn’t want to be a teacher, she could see no other way of paying off her student debt.

Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by Kate Beaton | Goodreads

But Katie will spend most of her time indoors, working long hours in the institutional corridors and prefab cabins that squat on this scarred wilderness. Boredom is one of the things that chips away at the mental health of people who live in the camps,” she says. The epilogue provides explanatory context and where-are-they-now accounts, and Sloan’s streamlined, uncluttered illustrations nicely complement the text, consistently emphasizing the humanity of each person. With the singular goal of paying off her student loans, Katie heads out west to take advantage of Alberta's oil rush ― part of the long tradition of East Coasters who seek gainful employment elsewhere when they can't find it in the homeland they love so much. Late in the book, her boss, Ryan, proclaims that the tool crib where she works is “only good for idiot sons and lame horses.

I have seen many people quick to become defensive against the suggestion that gendered violence exists in places like the oil sands. The book relates a dark story in monochrome, its chronological sections of tightly framed memoir separated by generous spreads of the landscape in which she found herself. When he learns that Beaton will be an on-site dweller mixing with day workers, he says, "You be careful, young girl. Even in her most elaborate sequences, she managed to give the deceptive impression that she had happened purely by accident upon precisely the right line to communicate a haughty glare or an embarrassed slouch.