Hark! A Vagrant

The dumbing-down of American education may be overestimated, based on the extravagant praise lavished upon this web-comic: you need more than a passing howdy with history and literature to get most of the jokes. Suffragettes dish about men like Sex in the City vixens. Tesla, Edison, and Marconi steal one another's inventions. Annabel Lee returns to Poe, but she's such a bummer. Jane, Mr. Rochester, and Bertha act out the love triangle from hell. Three Dr. Watsons vie for Holmes's attention. Friday gets his licks in against Robinson Crusoe. Watson and Crick snoop into Rosalind Franklin's research report. An especially funny set of strips proposes loopy plots based on a book's cover. Beaton's success certainly proves you can do something novel with a humanities degree. While she has self-published previous collections, all of these strips are new.