Step Aside, Pops by Kate Beaton (drawnandquarterly.com) is another delightful collection of Beaton's history-inspired comics, as seen on her popular site Hark! A Vagrant (harkavagrant.com).
Beaton has a charming illustrative style, which is clean, rounded, and involves everyone having the most charming eye shapes imaginable - I just love her eye shapes!
Her humor centers on reinterpreting history, in which we learn that warring princes were egocentric teenage boys, heroines of public health must provide extremely basic instruction on how to carry babies, Mexican history becomes more personal, Alexander Graham Bell invents ways to send inappropriate selfies, and the choice of pajamas Julius Caesar was wearing when he died are finally revealed.
In this volume, there are loads of fictional characters having fun as well! Nancy Drew covers get a new spin, fictional characters like Wonder Woman get to display attitude when other heroes get lippy, and the imaginary evils of feminism are hiding in the closet, hissing!
Beaton's reinterpretation of Cinderella is everything I could have hoped for.
Drawn and Quarterly publishes some charming work, and Beaton's is especially charming! I recommend this and her prior, best-selling book, Hark! A Vagrant. (From that volume, I especially adore the poor, misunderstood squid here. So friendly! So cute! So... harpooned. :( )
You will enjoy this book if you adore her on-line strips.
images and text Copyright © 2015 A. E. Graves, book cover images are the copyright of their respective owners
(posted November 14, 2015 refreshed February 2019)