# Hark! A Vagrant

Hark! A Vagrant is Kate Beaton's history-nerd webcomic that launched on March 12, 2009 and turned obscure historical figures into deadpan panel gags. Beaton's sketchy black-and-white strips won back-to-back Harvey Awards for Best Online Comic in 2011 and 2012, and became such a fan-redraw favorite that entire Tumblrs sprang up recasting the panels with characters from Homestuck, Sherlock and Mass Effect.

## Origin
Cartoonist Kate Beaton first drew the strips for her university paper The Argosy, then started posting them online in 2007 on her LiveJournal Beatonna and the now-defunct katebeaton.com[7]. She launched the standalone webcomic Hark! A Vagrant on March 12, 2009, opening with a strip titled 'Duchamp' about the French surrealist Marcel Duchamp[4].

- **Platform:** LiveJournal / harkavagrant.com (viral spread)
- **Creator:** Kate Beaton
- **Date:** 2009

## Overview
The strips run in loose black-and-white ink, usually three to eight panels of Beaton's expressive scribbled figures riffing on captions, book covers or old paintings[1]. The gag setup takes a scene from history and lets a modern-sounding character step in and puncture it. Beaton's bachelor's degree in history sits behind most of the humor, which cheerfully digs into figures who rarely get comedy treatment[4].

Alongside the history strips, Beaton runs recurring bits about Nancy Drew book covers, where she writes jokes based only on the vintage art, and superhero send-ups aimed at Wonder Woman and the X-Men[4]. Notable individual entries include the 'Juarez and Maximilian' strip, a typical example of pairing an obscure historical clash with a punchy modern beat[6].

## How It Spread
Beaton's first print collection, Never Learn Anything About History, won the 2009 Doug Wright Award for Best Emerging Talent[3]. Hark! A Vagrant picked up Joe Shuster Award nominations in 2009 and 2010 and a Harvey Award nomination in 2010 before winning the Harvey Award for Best Online Comic in both 2011 and 2012[2].

Fan artists redrew Beaton's panels for their own fandoms almost immediately, keeping the original dialogue but swapping the cast for characters from Sherlock, Mass Effect and Adventure Time[4]. The Homestuck fandom took it furthest with Beatonstuck, a Tumblr dedicated to Homestuck versions of Hark! A Vagrant strips[5]. The redraw trend kept the comic circulating well outside its original webcomic audience, feeding fan communities that used Beaton's panel layouts as a template for their own jokes[5].

## How to Use
The redraw format is straightforward: fans pick a Hark! A Vagrant strip, keep Beaton's dialogue and panel layout exactly, and redraw the characters as their own fandom's cast[5]. The Homestuck-focused Beatonstuck Tumblr collects hundreds of these swaps, and similar batches circulate for Sherlock, Mass Effect and Adventure Time[4].

## Frequently Asked Questions
### What is Hark! A Vagrant?
A history-focused webcomic by cartoonist Kate Beaton, launched in 2009, that turns historical figures and old book covers into deadpan panel-strip gags[1].

### Where did Hark! A Vagrant come from?
Kate Beaton drew the earliest strips for her university paper The Argosy and posted them to her LiveJournal Beatonna in 2007 before launching the Hark! A Vagrant webcomic on March 12, 2009 with a strip about Marcel Duchamp[4].

### What does Hark! A Vagrant mean?
'Hark! A Vagrant' is Beaton's arch, old-timey title for the site, matching the exclamatory tone she gives many of the historical figures who show up in her strips[1].

### How do you use Hark! A Vagrant?
Fans redraw a chosen strip panel-for-panel, keeping Beaton's original dialogue but replacing her cast with characters from another series, as seen in the Homestuck-focused Beatonstuck Tumblr[5].

### Is Hark! A Vagrant still popular?
The comic won back-to-back Harvey Awards for Best Online Comic in 2011 and 2012 and is still cited as a classic history-comedy webcomic[2].

## References
1. [https://www.harkavagrant.com/](<https://www.harkavagrant.com/>)
2. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kate_Beaton](<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kate_Beaton>)
3. [https://www.dougwrightawards.com/](<https://www.dougwrightawards.com/>)
4. [https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sites/hark-a-vagrant](<https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sites/hark-a-vagrant>)
5. [https://beatonstuck.tumblr.com/](<https://beatonstuck.tumblr.com/>)
6. [https://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=79](<https://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=79>)
7. [https://beatonna.livejournal.com/](<https://beatonna.livejournal.com/>)

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