Hark! A Vagrant opens with ‘Dude Watching with the Brontes’ (“So brooding!”), has a poke at the Scottish Play when one of the three weird sisters can’t meet up when the hurly burly’s done because she has a dental appointment on her calendar, has Nancy Drew’s Ghost of Blackwood Hall playing Bennie and the Jets, and compresses Crime and Punishment into 24 panels, the key clue being Raskolnikov’s article “Murdering Old Ladies: Not Even a Big Deal”. The helpful and funny footnotes aid comprehension, though not in an entirely straightforward way.Ĭollected from a long-running website, the short strips are mainly grouped around satirical literary themes. The black and white drawings are deceptively simple, but the characters’ expressions embellish many of the jokes. The comics are witty, erudite, supersmart (though definitely not above a fart joke), have a feminist bent, and make me laugh harder than anything I’ve read or seen in ages.
We’ve had several of the comic strips up in my library and, though it was a bit of a slow burn, they now have many committed fans among the cool young cognescenti.
Hark! A Vagrant is not strictly YA, but nonetheless has enormous appeal to older teens.
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