Kathryn Moira Beaton is a Canadian comics artist best known as the creator of the comic strip Hark! A Vagrant, which ran from 2007 to 2018. Her other major works include the children's books The Princess and the Pony and King Baby, published in 2015 and 2016 respectively. The former was made into an Apple TV+ series called Pinecone & Pony released in 2022 on which Beaton worked as an executive producer. Also in 2022, Beaton released a memoir in graphic novel form, Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands, about her experience working in the Alberta oil sands. Publishers Weekly named Ducks one of their top ten books of the year.

Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands is an autobiographical comic by Canadian cartoonist Kate Beaton. Published by Drawn & Quarterly in 2022, Ducks is an extension of a five-part webcomic Beaton initially posted to Tumblr in 2014. It is an account of her experience as a woman from Atlantic Canada working in the Athabasca oil sands in Alberta in order to pay off her student loans. The book is named after a disaster in which hundreds of ducks died after landing in a toxic tailings pond.