Step Aside, Pops

As the sequel to her bestseller Hark! A Vagrant, this collection—once again bringing together strips from Beaton’s popular website—is a wonderful second installment. It offers her take on a variety of different historical, literary, and cultural institutions, usually by finding something absurdly idiosyncratic in them and taking this to its ridiculous and, indeed, hilarious conclusion. Whether it’s a retelling of Cinderella that involves a night of weight lifting or an exploration of what the Lady of Shallot might have actually seen her knight doing when she looked out of her tall tower, Beaton has an uncanny ability to take the sacred and shake its foundations with the delightfully mundane. Her apparently “simple” art style uses a wide variety of sophisticated visual techniques that perfectly accompany the wit and humor of her prose. From Julius Caesar to The Secret Garden and from the late Romantics to Kokoro, Beaton knocks it out of the park, having a go at anything and everything with her razor-sharp wit. (Sept.)