Origin of Man", her comic celebrating Charles Darwin's 200th birthday, was showcased by MySpace Dark Horse Presents in March 2009. In June 2009, she released a book titled Never Learn Anything from History. Several of her cartoons have been published in The New Yorker. Drawn & Quarterly released her second book, also titled Hark! A Vagrant, in September 2011. Time magazine named it one of the top ten fiction books of the year, with Lev Grossman calling it "the wittiest book of the year." Beaton's self-published Never Learn Anything from History won the 2009 Doug Wright Award for Best Emerging Talent. Hark! A Vagrant won the 2011 Harvey Award for Best Online Comics Work, having been nominated the previous year, and was also nominated for Joe Shuster Awards in 2009 and 2010. Beaton followed up her 2011 Harvey win by taking home three Harveys in 2012, for Humor, Online Work, and Best Cartoonist. She is a former member of Pizza Island, a cartoonist's studio in Greenpoint, Brooklyn which was formed by herself and cartoonists Lisa Hanawalt, Domitille Collardey, Sarah Glidden, Meredith Gran, and Julia Wertz. Beaton has contributed to Marvel Comics' Strange Tales anthology. In 2014, Beaton uploaded the five-part webcomic Ducks, which presents a more serious and complex story based on Beaton's experiences working at a remote mining site in Canada. Step Aside, Pops, a collection of her Hark! A Vagrant comics, topped The New York Times graphic novel bestseller list in October 2015. In a 2015 poll, Beaton ranked fourteenth among the top all-time female comics artists. Beaton's first children's book, The Princess and the Pony, was released in 2015. In 2016, she published the picture book King Baby. In October 2018, Beaton ended the ongoing serialization of her webcomic, saying, "I feel like this is a project that has run its course." In 2022, an animated TV series based on Kate Beaton's The Princess and the Pony, called Pinecone & Pony, was released on the streaming service Apple TV+, with Beaton serving as executive producer. In September 2022, Beaton released a memoir in graphic novel form called Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands, which documented her experience working in the energy extraction industry for Alberta oil sands before she became a cartoonist. It expanded on her earlier 2014 webcomic Ducks. The book was selected for the 2023 edition of Canada Reads, where it will be championed