Ducks, by Kate Beaton

Before Kate Beaton began her popular comic strip Hark a Vagrant, she moved to the Alberta tar oil sands for work so that she might pay off her student loan. Her two years there are the subject of Ducks, a masterpiece of comics memoir and her most ambitious work to date. Its subject matter is no less than the destruction of human beings and the environment by vast interlocking systems of class, commerce, and exploitation. But Beaton renders her experiences in simple and expressive cartooning accessible to all readers.