People like Kate Beaton

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 with her three sisters in Mabou on the isle of Cape Breton. 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 McMurray 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 new website, Hark! A Vagrant, in May 2008.