CANR

• It's a Good Life, If You Don't Weaken - 1996 Drawn and Quarterly, Montréal, QC, Canada
• Clyde Fans: Part One - 2000 Drawn and Quarterly, Montréal, QC, Canada
• Vernacular Drawings - 2001 Drawn and Quarterly, Montréal, QC, Canada
• Clyde Fans: Part Two - 2003 Drawn and Quarterly, Montréal, QC, Canada
• Clyde Fans: Book One - 2004 Drawn and Quarterly, Montréal, QC, Canada
• Wimbledon Green - 2005 Drawn and Quarterly, Montréal, QC, Canada
• George Sprott - 2009 Drawn and Quarterly, Montréal, QC, Canada
• Palookaville #20 - 2010 Drawn and Quarterly, Montréal, QC, Canada
• The Great Northern Brotherhood of Canadian Cartoonists - 2011 Drawn and Quarterly, Montréal, QC, Canada
• Who Could That Be at This Hour? - 2012 Little, Brown and Co, New York, NY
• Palookaville #21 - 2013 Drawn and Quarterly, Montréal, QC, Canada
• When Did You See Her Last? - 2013 Little, Brown and Co, New York, NY
• File Under: 13 Suspicious Incidents - 2014 Little, Brown and Co, New York, NY
• Shouldn't You Be in School? - 2014 Little, Brown and Co, New York, NY
• Palookaville #22 - 2015 Drawn and Quarterly, Montréal, QC, Canada
• Why Is This Night Different From All Other Nights? - 2015 Little, Brown and Co, New York, NY
• Palookaville #23 - 2017 Drawn and Quarterly, Montréal, QC, Canada
• Clyde Fans - 2019 Drawn and Quarterly, Montréal, QC, Canada

• Wikipedia -

  Seth (cartoonist)
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  Seth
  Seth-cartoonist.jpg
  Seth
  Born Gregory Gallant
  September 16, 1962 (age 57)
  Clinton, Ontario
  Nationality Canadian
  Area(s) Cartoonist, writer, artist
  Pseudonym(s) Seth
  Notable works
  It's a Good Life, If You Don't Weaken
  Palookaville
  Awards
  Ignatz Award, 1997
  Eisner Award, 2005
  Harvey Award, 2005
  Gregory Gallant (born September 16, 1962), better known by his pen name Seth, is a Canadian cartoonist. He is best known for his series Palookaville and his mock-autobiographical graphic novel It's a Good Life, If You Don't Weaken (1996).

  Seth draws in a style influenced by the classic cartoonists of The New Yorker. His work is highly nostalgic, especially for the early-to-mid-20th Century period, and of Southern Ontario. His work also shows a great depth and breadth of knowledge of the history of comics and cartooning.

  Contents
  1 Personal life
  2 Career
  3 Graphic novels
  4 Model buildings
  5 Awards
  6 Bibliography
  6.1 Books and collections
  6.2 Other
  7 Further reading
  8 References
  8.1 Works cited
  9 External links
  Personal life
  Seth was born Gregory Gallant on September 16, 1962, in Clinton, Ontario, Canada. His parents were John Henry Gallant[1] and the English-born[2] Violet Daisy Gallant (née Wilkinson);[1] he was the youngest of their five children. His family moved frequently, and he grew up mostly in Tilbury, Ontario. He was inward, unathletic, and had few friends, and took to comic books and drawing at a young age.[2]

  Seth attended the Ontario College of Art in Toronto[3] from 1980 to 1983.[1] He became involved with the punk subculture and began wearing outlandish clothing, bleaching his hair, wearing makeup, and frequenting nightclubs.[2] He took on the pen name Seth in 1982.[1]

  As of 2004, Seth lived in Guelph, Ontario, with his wife[4] Tania Van Spyk, whom he married in 2002.[1]

  Career
  Seth, then living in Toronto, first drew attention to his work in 1985 when he took over art duties from the Hernandez brothers for Dean Motter's Mister X from Toronto publisher Vortex Comics.[5] His run covered issues #6–13 (1985–88), after which he did commercial artwork for publications including Saturday Night and Fashion. In 1986 he met fellow Toronto-based Vortex artist Chester Brown, and in 1991 Toronto-based American cartoonist Joe Matt.[1] The three became noted for doing confessional autobio comics in the early 1990s, and for depicting each other in their works.[6]

  In April 1991 he launched his own comic book, Palookaville, with Montreal publisher Drawn and Quarterly. By this time, Seth's artwork had evolved to a style inspired by The New Yorker cartoons of the 1930s and 1940s.[5]

  He is also a magazine illustrator and book designer, perhaps best known for his work designing the complete collection of Charles M. Schulz's classic comic strip Peanuts. The books, released by Fantagraphics Books in 25 separate volumes (so far) combine Seth's signature aesthetic with Schulz's minimalistic comic creation. Similarly, he is designing the Collected Doug Wright, and the John Stanley Library.

  Seth's illustration work includes the cover artwork for Aimee Mann's album Lost in Space (2001) and the jacket and French flaps for the Penguin Classics Portable Dorothy Parker (2006).[7]

  Clyde Fans, the story of two brothers whose trade in electric fans suffers and eventually goes out of business from the failure to adapt to the rise of air conditioning, was serialized in Palooka-ville. Seth's short graphic novel Wimbledon Green, about an eccentric comic-book collector, was published in November 2005.

  Graphic novels
  From September 2006 to March 25, 2007, Seth serialized a graphic novel titled George Sprott (1894–1975), for the Funny Pages section of The New York Times Magazine.[8] Selections from George Sprott were featured in Best American Comics 2009. In the liner notes of that publication, Seth announced he was expanding Sprott into a book, filling in gaps that were cut to meet the restraints given by NYTM. The book was published by Drawn & Quarterly in May 2009.[9]

  Seth's affection for early- and mid-20th century popular culture and his relative disdain for pop culture since then is a recurrent theme in his work, both in terms of the characters (who are often nostalgic for the period) and his artistic style.[10] Although, as a teenager, he was a vocal fan of mainstream superhero comics; he even had a couple of fan letters published.[citation needed]

  Seth's artwork has landed on the cover of The New Yorker three times, which he said was a professional milestone he was happy to achieve.[11]

  Seth collaborated with children's novelist Lemony Snicket on his four-part series All the Wrong Questions, starting with Who Could That Be at This Hour? released on October 23, 2012 and ending with Why Is This Night Different From All Other Nights? released on September 29, 2015.[12]

  Model buildings

  Seth's Dominion models on display at the Confederation Centre of the Arts in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island
  A selection of Seth's original models (studies for his fictional city, Dominion) has been exhibited extensively, most notably at the Phoenix Art Museum in 2007[13] and the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2005[14] and 2017[15].

  In 2008, Seth collaborated with the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery and RENDER (now the University of Waterloo Art Gallery), on an exhibition titled "The North Star Talking Picture House". For this exhibition one of the buildings from Seth's Dominion City project was re-built at the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery as a walk-in theatre wherein visitors could sit and watch a program of black and white documentary shorts that had been produced by the National Film Board of Canada.

  Seth is the subject of the 2014 documentary film Seth's Dominion, which received the grand prize for best animated feature at the Ottawa International Animation Film Festival.[16]

  Awards
  Seth has won a number of industry awards throughout is career, and in 2011 was honoured by being the first cartoonist to win the literary Harbourfront Festival Prize.[17]

  Year Organization Award for Award
  1997 Ignatz Awards Outstanding Artist[18] Seth
  Outstanding Graphic Novel or Collection[18] It's a Good Life, If You Don't Weaken
  2005 Eisner Awards The Complete Peanuts Best Publication Design[19]
  Harvey Awards Special Award for Excellence in Presentation[20]
  2011 Authors at Harbourfront Centre Harbourfront Festival Prize[21][22] Seth
  Bibliography
  Books and collections
  Year Title Publisher ISBN Notes
  1996 It's a Good Life, If You Don't Weaken Drawn and Quarterly 1-896597-70-X originally serialized in Palookaville #4–9 (1993–1996)
  2000 Clyde Fans: Part One 978-1-894937-09-2 originally serialized in Palookaville #10–12 (1997–1998)[23]
  2001 Vernacular Drawings 1-896597-41-6 Sketchbook
  2003 Clyde Fans: Part Two 978-1894937603 originally serialized in Palookaville #13–15 (1999–2001)
  2004 Clyde Fans: Book One 1-896597-84-X Collects the same contents as Clyde Fans parts one and two, originally serialized in Palookaville #10–15[24]
  2005 Wimbledon Green 1-896597-93-9
  2009 George Sprott 978-1-897299-51-7 originally serialized in The New York Times Magazine in 2006
  2011 The Great Northern Brotherhood of Canadian Cartoonists 978-1770460539
  2012 Who Could That Be at This Hour? Little, Brown 978-0316123082 Written by Lemony Snicket
  2013 When Did You See Her Last? 978-1405256223
  2014 File Under: 13 Suspicious Incidents 978-0316284035
  Shouldn't You Be in School? 978-0316123068
  2015 Why Is This Night Different From All Other Nights? 978-0316123044
  2019 Clyde Fans Drawn and Quarterly 978-1770463578
  Other
  (2002) Inner Drawings and Cover Art for the Record Lost In Space by Aimee Mann, Super Ego Records.
  (2002) Cover art and design for the CD Vinyl Cafe Inc. Coast to Coast Story Service by Stuart McLean, Vinyl Cafe Productions, ISBN 9780968303184.
  (2003) Cover art and illustrations for the book Vinyl Cafe Diaries by Stuart McLean, Viking/Penguin Books Canada, ISBN 9780143169727.
  (2004) Editing, Illustrations and cover art for "Bannock, Beans & Black Tea" by J. H. Gallant – Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly, ISBN 1-896597-78-5
  (2004) Cover art and design for the CD A Story-Gram from Vinyl Cafe Inc. by Stuart McLean, Vinyl Cafe Productions, ISBN 9780968303191.
  (2005) Cover art and illustrations for the book Stories from the Vinyl Cafe (10th anniversary edition) by Stuart McLean, Penguin Canada, ISBN 9780670864768.
  (2005) Design and Inner drawings for "Christmas Days", by Derek McCormack, Anansi, ISBN 978-0-88784-193-4.
  (2006) Cover art and illustrations for the book Secrets from the Vinyl Cafe by Stuart McLean, Viking Canada, ISBN 9780670064465.
  (2006) Cover art and illustrations for the book Home from the Vinyl Cafe by Stuart McLean, Penguin Canada, ISBN 9780143056034.
  (2006) Forty Books of Interest: A Supplement to Comic Art No. 8
  (2007) Design and Inner drawings for "Cocktail Culture", by Mark Kingwell, ISBN 978-1-84627-114-4
  (2007) Cover art and design for the CD An Important Message from the Vinyl Cafe by Stuart McLean, Vinyl Cafe Productions, ISBN 9780973896510.
  (2008) Design and Inner drawings for "The Idler's Glossary," by Joshua Glenn and Mark Kingwell, Biblioasis, ISBN 978-1-897231-46-3.
  (2008) Cover art and design for the CD The Vinyl Cafe Storyland by Stuart McLean, Vinyl Cafe Productions, ISBN 9780973896527.
  (2009) Cover of The Criterion Collection's DVD release of Leo McCarey's Make Way for Tomorrow (spine #505).
  (2009) Cover art and design for the CD Planet Boy by Stuart McLean, Vinyl Cafe Productions, ISBN 9780973896534.
  (2010) Cover art and design for the CD Out and About by Stuart McLean, Vinyl Cafe Productions, ISBN 9780973896541.
  (2011) Design and Inner drawings for "The Wage Slave's Glossary", by Joshua Glenn and Mark Kingwell, Biblioasis, ISBN 978-1-926845-17-3.
  (2013) Cover of The Criterion Collection's Blu-ray/DVD release of Charlie Chaplin's City Lights (spine #680).
  Comics portal
  Biography portal
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  (2017) Christmas Ghost Stories (Charles Dickens' The Signalman, A. M. Burrage's One Who Saw, Marjorie Bowen's The Crown Derby Plate, Edith Wharton's Afterward, M. R. James's The Diary of Mr. Poynter, E. F. Benson's How Fear Departed the Long Gallery, W. W. Jacobs' The Toll House, and Algernon Blackwood's The Empty House) designed and illustrated by Seth [1]
  (2018) Cover of The Criterion Collection's Blu-ray and DVD release of Gregory La Cava's My Man Godfrey (spine #114).[25]

• Quill and Quire - https://quillandquire.com/authors/modern-life-is-rubbish/

  By Q&Q Staff

  Issue Date: 2004-5

  Modern life is rubbish
  Acclaimed cartoonist Seth turns alienation into art

  Seth is building his own private city.

  SethIt’s made from cardboard and housepaint, and it’s in a small room in the basement of the cartoonist’s house in Guelph, Ontario. He’s planned it to resemble Hamilton, Ontario, though in his mind this make-believe city is located somewhere in the Canadian north – a place, Seth says, that even Canadians still find mysterious. Each of the miniature buildings sitting on the room’s shelves has been constructed with meticulous attention to detail. Seth has filled a ledger book with the city’s fake history, slowly sketching out its inhabitants and the stories of their lives. It’s a beautiful, odd, extraordinary project, one with little to no commercial prospects. Seth can’t even explain why he’s doing it – he just feels compelled to.

  The same obsessive attention to detail and craftsmanship found in this cramped basement room can be found in all of Seth’s work. Over the past 10 years, the 41-year-old has drawn spot illustrations for countless magazines in North America, from the heights of literature (The New Yorker) to the heights of chartered accountancy (Chartered Accountant). In his illustration work he keeps the drawings light and optimistic, with peppy colours and dashing lines. But his real work is his own comic narratives – ongoing storylines that usually appear in his comic magazine Palookaville and are later collected into book form. In his own comics, Seth keeps his palette down to a few muted tones, and one overarching theme has gradually emerged. He is searching again and again for ways to portray a deeply intangible sensation: the inherent melancholy of life.

  Among Seth’s current projects is Clyde Fans (reviewed May 2004), about two fictional brothers working for a faltering electric fan company (inspired by a real Toronto storefront) – the first of two bound volumes has just been released. He’s also just published Bannock, Beans and Black Tea, which matches Seth’s illustrations to his father’s stories of growing up in Depression-era Prince Edward Island. His most completely realized work to date is It’s a Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken, the story of a cartoonist named Seth who dresses in vintage clothes and tries to track down an obscure Canadian cartoonist who published a gag panel in The New Yorker in the 1950s. Like much of Seth’s work, the plot of It’s a Good Life is nothing more than a framework for his explorations of identity and how a life adds up. It’s also a chance for him to draw his beloved buildings of southern Ontario, each one infused with the shadows and sadness of the story.

  Seth’s oeuvre has earned him a reputation as one of the best narrative cartoonists in the world. For evidence of his stature, look no further than the guest list for his wedding, held two years ago: many of today’s great cartoonists attended, including Dan Clowes, Chris Ware, Chester Brown, and Joe Matt. “I’m hoping that with Seth’s growing success he’ll soon be able to turn down most illustration work,” says Chris Oliveros, Seth’s publisher and the owner of the Montreal firm Drawn & Quarterly, “and concentrate on the work he’ll be known for long after he dies: his comics.”

  Cartoonists tend to be obsessive types. At his house in Guelph, Ontario, Seth is surrounded by what he loves and collects. He rarely leaves. The front room has a comfortable couch, a phone with a loud, rattling bell ringer, and comics everywhere. Bookshelves are stacked with graphic novels and humour collections from the 1930s and ’40s. There is a special case for his collections of the work of obscure caricaturists. He’s even bound some of his own childhood work. The only sound is the whir of an ancient clock with an engraved plaque on it that reads, cryptically, “Presented to Seth as a dreadful reminder of time’s creeping shadow – 1999.”

  There’s almost nothing modern in the room, nothing from IKEA; Seth’s entire aesthetic is “old man.” Modern life is rubbish, Seth believes – at least in terms of art, design, and culture. He’ll concede that not everything was better in 1935, “but I think aesthetically we might have been at a high point for the North American culture. Workmanship and craftsmanship in our pop culture was at a much higher level than it is now,” he says. “So when I see a modern design it really doesn’t appeal to me. Things have gotten cheap. Even the high-end aesthetics. That CD player over there [the lone modern object in the room] is just a box with flashing lights on it to me. It’s just functional. It could be a pacemaker.”

  Seth’s antiquarianism extends to his personal style: he wears glasses with circular frames, and dresses in suits. “I think in the last 10 years I’ve been less concerned with image,” he says. “When I started dressing like the mid-20th century I was very careful about picking the right suits and putting a lot of effort into creating a certain image, but that has all become second nature and uninteresting to me on a certain level. Now I’m just a guy who wears a suit because that’s what I’m used to. I wear suits I find at the Goodwill. They’re not from 1940, they’re from 1980.”

  Guelph has been Seth’s home for only three years, but he has a firm attachment to the house, partly because he moved so much as a child, from one small Ontario town to another – from Clinton, where he was born, to Strathroy to Tillbury. “I hate moving,” he says. “My father was an obsessive mover. We moved almost every year of my childhood. Even in a town of 3,000 people we would just move down the street.”

  It’s a well-known equation: add social awkwardness to constant rootlessness, siblings who are a decade older, parents who believe in a hands-off approach to child-rearing, and you get a kid obsessed with the world of comics. “The superhero character was the main thrust of all comic books while I was growing up,” says Seth. “It was total wish-fulfillment for all us unhappy loser children.” As a child, he created almost a hundred characters, most ripped-off from established heroes, and called his output Cosmic Comics. His father was a shop teacher, so the young Seth had access to piles of mimeograph paper. He worked obsessively, producing hundreds of pages. “It was a way into my fantasy world. The good part is that all that drawing paid off in giving me lots of practice.” If video games had been around, Seth would have emerged from his teenage years with nothing more than oversized thumbs. Instead, his drawing skills flourished.

  After high school, Seth moved to Toronto to attend the Ontario College of Art. Shortly afterward he adopted the “Seth” name (he was born Gregory Gallant) as more fitting of the vaguely gothic persona he was cultivating at that time. The name stuck, and Seth settled into Toronto for the next 20 years, developing a body of work to show that the comic-style format had potential far beyond mere superhero fantasies. Drawn & Quarterly published the first issue of Palookaville in 1991; the early issues featured autobiographical stories which included guest appearances by Seth’s friends, including fellow cartoonist Chester Brown, the author of the recent hit graphic title Louis Riel. But bruised feelings have rarely been an issue. “Other cartoonists I know, like my friend Joe Matt, deal with stuff that could get him in a lot more trouble. It’s a lot more personal,” says Seth. (Seth and Brown also turn up regularly in Matt’s work.)

  Still, Seth has soured on the autobiographical mode. “You get overly concerned with whether you’re making yourself look too good or you’re trying to make yourself look bad in compensation for trying not to look good. That kind of double thinking doesn’t lead to good writing. Even drawing yourself, you get caught up. Am I trying to make myself look nice or am I trying to make myself not look nice for fear of what people will think? When you run into people you know they’re going to say, ‘You’re really making yourself look better than you really are. You’re not that tall.’”

  For the Clyde Fans series, Seth has used two fictional characters that represent both sides of him: the extrovert, Abraham, who’s forced out into the world of sales for his working life; and the introvert, Simon, who prefers to stay home and catalogue his exotic postcard collection. The latter approach echoes Seth’s own loose philosophy of Avoidism, as voiced by one of the characters in It’s a Good Life. Ensconced in his Guelph house, he’s still living by it. “I hardly ever leave this place,” he says. “I mean, I’ll go out to dinner with my wife and we’ll go out on the weekends, but generally I’m in the basement most of the time. I think I would be perfectly happy to keep the world at bay as much as possible. Even though I’m interested in the world and I like to go out and photograph old buildings and drive out in the country, I’d ideally like a solitary existence.”

  In his work, though, Seth is doing anything but avoiding. In small ways, drawn out against the landscape of southwestern Ontario and PEI, he’s confronting subjects prose writers often strive for and miss. His panels can capture the sadness and inevitability of life, the light on buildings, the loneliness of a city, and, at times, even the texture of memory. “I was talking to [Jimmy Corrigan author] Chris Ware,” says Seth. “He said to me, he thought cartooning was all an attempt to correct the errors of your past. And I gave this some real thought. I came around to the idea that the whole process of cartooning is dealing with memory and introspection. Creating comics is a slow process that sits you at a drawing table for hours on end. One part of your brain is focused on drawing out these pictures, but the other part is just floating around thinking. It’s picking over things slowly. It really encourages a certain kind of mental searching. I think a lot of it has to do with an unrelenting quality of memory you’re always going through.”

  Part of becoming a good storyteller is recognizing which of these memories will have impact as a story and which ones are best left off the page. “It has been a particular delight to have watched him develop as a writer and overall cartoonist over the years,” says Oliveros. “His stories have become more ambitious and his narrative approach more subtle and nuanced.” Like his inking style, his use of a minimal colour palette, and even the way he draws buildings, this storytelling nuance is something Seth has had to hone. Over the course of the Palookaville series, he’s gradually left behind the urge to just rehash every funny episode of his life. “Telling anecdotes doesn’t necessarily make a good comic story,” he says. “More interesting is the stuff that’s nebulous, like what you think about, your dreams, your feelings. I think plot is an uninteresting detail generally. It’s what you do with it that makes it interesting.”

• Gothamist - https://gothamist.com/arts-entertainment/seth-graphic-novelist

  Seth, Graphic Novelist
  BY JEN CARLSON
  JUNE 1, 2009 8:30 A.M.

  If you know graphic novels, you probably know Seth (born Gregory Gallant). The comic illustrator and writer's work has been on New Yorker covers, in the complete collection of Charles M. Schulz's classic comic strip Peanuts, on an Aimee Mann cd cover, in the NY Times magazine, and of course in his own works like Palooka-ville. This week Seth and fellow illustrator Adrian Tomine will bring their book tour through New York (Thursday at the Strand and Saturday and Sunday at MoCCA). He recently told us about what he's working on now, spending his last day on earth at the Whitney, and the dangers of changing ones name when going through a goth phase.

  You're about to start a book tour, is there any one thing that fans ask you the most? The number one question I receive is "When is Clyde Fans, Book two" coming out. It is a deeply shaming question because I have been working on this book for years and I still have a couple of years work ahead of me to finish it. It makes me look bad. But honestly—I'm working on it right now!

  ADVERTISEMENT
  Does everyone call you Seth? When/why the name change? Yes, Everyone. I changed my name for the most pretentious of reasons back in the eighties when I was punky/gothy youth and wanted a scary name. I forced everyone to use the new name—even my mother. I would relentlessly correct anyone who accidentally used my real name until it became second nature to everyone.

  I'm not so crazy about the fake name now. Be careful what you wish for because you might get it.

  How do you feel about comics and graphic novels becoming feature films—would you ever experiment with that medium? It's fine with me , but of no more interest that the novel to film path. The only important fact is whether or not it's a good film. Usually they end up as different animals. If someone wanted to film my work I wouldn't be opposed to the idea. Especially if they were a good director or had a lot of cash to give me. I wouldn't want to be much involved myself. I love film but I am not an aspiring filmmaker. I'd rather stay home and work on my comics.

• Lambiek - https://www.lambiek.net/artists/s/seth.htm

  Seth
  Gregory Gallant
  (b. 16 September 1962, Canada) Canada

  Clyde Fans by Seth
  Clyde Fans

  Seth is a Canadian cartoonist, best known for his series 'Palookaville' and his retro drawing style. Born Gregory Gallant in Clinton, Ontario, he studied at the Ontario College of Art in Toronto. He settled in Toronto, where he did his first comic book art for 'Mister X' by Vortex Comics. He then turned to illustrating and had his work featured in such noted publications as The Washington Post, Details, Spin, The New York Times, and Saturday Night.

  By 1990 his comic strips began appearing in the pages of the Montréal-based anthology Drawn & Quarterly, and the following year saw the debut of 'Palooka-Ville', Seth's noted continuing comic book series (and the first to be published by D&Q). The series started as a low-key, though fictional, chronicle of the artist's daily life, collected in the graphic novel 'It's a Good Life, If You Don't Weaken' in 1996. But beginning with issue ten of 'Palooka-Ville', Seth took us into the "Clyde Fans" storefront in Toronto and documented the lives of two brothers who ran the once-successful fan company. The story is structured in two parts, alternating between the present-day reminiscences of the surviving brother, and their lives as young men in the 1950s.

  Palookaville by Seth
  Palookaville #20

  Besides 'Palookaville', Seth also released the short graphic novel 'Wimbledon Green', about an eccentric comic-book collector, in November 2005. From September 2006 to March 2007, Seth serialized his graphic novel 'George Sprott (1894-1975)' in New York Times Magazine. It was published as a book in May 2009. In 2011 he released 'The Great Northern Brotherhood of Canadian Cartoonists', a graphic novel on a fictional Canadian comics organization.

  Great Northern Brotherhood by Seth
  The Great Northern Brotherhood of Canadian Cartoonists

  One of the main representatives of Canadian alternative comics in the 1990s, Seth is especially influenced by pop culture of the mid 20th century, and by the classic illustrators for The New Yorker (for which he has also provided the cover artwork a couple of times). Besides an artist, Seth is also known for his lay-out and design work, like he did for Fantagraphics' 'Complete Peanuts' collection and the Penguin Classics reedition of 'The Portable Dorothy Parker'.

  George Sprott by Seth
  George Sprott

  Artwork © 2020 Seth
  Website © 1994-2020 Lambiek

  Last updated: 2013-02-23

• Believer - https://believermag.com/logger/an-interview-with-seth/

  QUOTE:
  But you won’t find anything sentimental or folksy about Seth’s work. He’s wary of romanticizing earlier eras, in a way that often leaves you pondering the strangeness of reality

  An Interview with Seth
  by Shannon Tien
  October 23rd, 2019
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  https://believermag.com/logger/an-interview-with-seth/

  “ART IS SOMETHING YOU USE TO DEFINE YOURSELF.”
  Things considered “boring” that Seth finds really quite interesting:
  Annuals of the Rose Society of Ontario
  Two old men who sell electric fans
  Anything, if you look at it the right way

  Twenty years ago, everyone was preparing for the end of the world by upgrading their computer software and wearing loose polyester pants that could literally be “torn off” in the event of some pantsless emergency. But Gregory Gallant, the artist known as Seth, was just beginning work on the graphic novel that would eventually become Clyde Fans—an ambitious melancholy, fictional history of a real, family-owned electric fan business. Set mostly in the 1950s, it is narrated by two brothers, the inheritors of the business, who struggle in different ways to make sense of the decline of a specific era of capitalism and, as a result, themselves.

  If you know Seth’s work, it feels nothing other than extremely appropriate that, at a time when everyone was worrying about the future, he was looking towards the past. All of his comics and graphic novels are threaded thickly with nostalgia, from his cartoony 1950s drawing style, to his post-war settings and modernity-resistant characters.

  But you won’t find anything sentimental or folksy about Seth’s work. He’s wary of romanticizing earlier eras, in a way that often leaves you pondering the strangeness of reality. Clyde Fans is no different. It is their very inability to adapt to change that kills the two brothers’ business—and sets at least one of them off on a mystical inward journey of self-discovery.

  In some ways the book is the pinnacle of his thirty-plus year career so far, and contains all the hallmark “Seth” features we’ve come to know and love. Does it interrogate nostalgia? Check. Does it contain lots of Canadian memorabilia? Check. Does it describe the interior life of its characters more than a plot? Check. Does it delight in the mundanity of everyday existence rather than fantastical events? Check. Does it push the limits of what we expect from comics and stories in general? Check.

  After twenty years of working on Clyde Fans on-and-off, however, Seth is embracing change. When talking to him over the phone last week, Seth admitted to me that Clyde Fans marks the end of a phase in his career—and he didn’t sound sad about it. What it means to create comics post-Clyde, he’s not quite sure. But he drops a few hints in our conversation below.

  —Shannon Tien

  I. Canadian Ephemera

  THE BELIEVER: So what is it like to work on a book for twenty years?

  SETH: It’s funny. I didn’t really think about it in those terms while I was working on it. I was certainly aware at some point that it was taking way too long. But initially, it was just a book that was supposed to take about five years. And then because of the way I was working—working on this, working on that, many different projects going—it started to take a lot longer than I anticipated.

  So a couple of points. I felt dread when I looked at how long time had passed and at how much more I still had to do. I was like, “This is going to take a really long time” and I was both embarrassed and horrified that it wasn’t going to get done in any time soon. At around the ten year point I realized I still was barely halfway. So I think my main concern during this time was that I would not quit on it.

  And I did feel that my thinking about how I do my work changed during this period too. Because when I started out, I had the idea that every project would have a deadline of five years or so. And then it would be done and you’d move on to the next one. And there was a kind of schedule the way that periodicals used to exist. But as time went on I started to think of myself more as an artist in the sense that I’m working on a variety of works and they’re a body of work. Not a publication in the true sense. And things will take the time they take.

  So now when I think about Clyde, I realize it took a really long time, but in another way it just felt like a project I was working on while I was working on a lot of other projects.

  BLVR: Do you think of yourself as someone who is committed to finishing what you start always?

  S: Yeah I think so. I think the way my mind works—it might be a problem—is that I always plan things that are too ambitious. If I do a drawing, I think to myself, “I should do fifty of these.” Or I’m doing these paper cutouts I started a few years ago and I said to myself at first, “Oh, I’ll do a few of these and see if I enjoy them.” And then I was like, “Oh I like these. Let’s see if I can do fifty of them.” And then at fifty, which took no time at all, I was putting them into little portfolios, and each portfolio held about fifty drawings, and I said, “Well I’m going to do a hundred of these portfolios.”

  So I’m at about the forty-fifth portfolio right now and I’m like, “I’m getting tired of these.” I think to myself, “Why did I plan that I have to do a hundred portfolios of them?” There’s always something in my mind that makes the project get bigger. So, with everything I’ve worked on, from my cardboard buildings to my comics, I always get a little too ambitious and then set myself up for failure.

  But I do think that ultimately I really don’t like not doing what I planned.

  BLVR: How do you know, generally, when something is finished? When you just feel like you can’t make anymore? Or you’ve done the thing you’ve set out to do?

  S: Sometimes I feel like I’ve wrung everything out of it. That there’s nothing left. I kind of feel that with the paper cutouts at the moment. I kind of feel like I’m just doing the same thing over and over again.

  I worked on this thing a few years ago where I decided to collect a lot of Canadian ephemera—like published pamphlets and books and stuff. And I wanted to study them and figure out what it was about them that appealed to me and what made them Canadian in my mind. So I spent about eight years gathering this stuff up and pasting them into books and writing about them, kind of expecting I would have some big epiphany of what it all meant. And it never really quite happened.

  So, at the eight year point I said to myself, “This is done.” And the reason I knew it was done was just that I had nothing more to think about it. I feel like the last drop of whatever was in it has now been squeezed out.

  BLVR: I like that analogy. So, what are the paper cutouts?

  S: About three years ago I was looking at these paper cutouts of Hans Christian Anderson. When he would tell a story, he would fold a big piece of paper because he often told his stories to a crowd of people or an audience. And he had a big pair of scissors and he would just cut out an elaborate folded paper cutout while he was talking to them. And then at the end of his telling the fairytale, he would open it up, and it would be quite a beautiful and elaborate paper cutout.

  But it was also really interesting because it was really bold and not finicky…It was actually very modern in the way it looked. It was just like “snip, snip, snip,” and then you’d open it up and there would be like–I don’t know—two mermaids and a tree. Very angular.

  So this was very beautiful and I thought to myself, “I wonder how difficult that is.” So I started to take big pieces of paper and try to do essentially the same thing. Not try to be precious. Not plan things out. Just see if I could do like a negative space kind of drawing with cutting out paper.

  What’s been interesting about it is that I think it’s changed my drawing. I think a lot more now in shapes and with negative space than I ever used to—and less with line. They seriously take like 5 or 6 minutes to do one. But it’s funny, I like to see things pile up, too. So it’s been valuable.

  II. “ Even the most prosaic objects have a kind of power to them when you think of how you’ve carted them around for your life.”

  BLVR: Speaking of things piling up and all the Canadian memorabilia that you had collected, one section of Clyde Fans that I found really beautiful was the inventory of all the items in the mother’s bedroom. Can you tell me a little bit more about including those kind of items in your work?

  S: I’ve always been really interested in objects. Sometimes I think I’m more interested in objects than I am in stories. There’s something about the description of things that is extremely appealing to me.

  Eventually the more you write the more you come to question “What is a story?” Around the time I was working on that section of Clyde Fans I became more interested in the idea that a story doesn’t need to be all just about plot or about being concerned with the reader. I thought to myself, “I’d like to just talk about the objects in the room rather than draw them. They would be there anyway, but why not focus on them instead of just having them in the background detail?”

  I thought I would experiment to see—and much of Clyde Fans is like this—how much you can do before the audience stops paying attention. I’ve heard a couple people say they really liked that section and I’ve read a couple people say that it went on two pages too long. So it’s hard to say. I wanted to really get into the idea that a life can be described by the things you own.

  I’ve done this a few times in my work. To be honest I think the next couple of stories I’m going to work on are more description than they are plot.

  BLVR: It’s a really interesting entrance into character, like how to tell the story of someone, or let the audience get to know them a little better—through the objects they collect.

  S: It’s true.

  BLVR: Now I’m just looking around at all the objects in my room. What do they say about me? [Laughing]

  S: Yeah, it’s true. Sometimes I think it would be a perfectly sufficient story to just sit down and describe the things that are around you and where you acquired them. What they mean to you. Why you bothered to get them. I mean some of it would be pretty boring, but even the most prosaic objects have a kind of power to them when you think of how you’ve carted them around for your life.

  BLVR: I used to work for a bookstore that sold weird memorabilia and they had a lot of art catalogs from the 50s. Auction catalogs for Sothebys and Christie’s. And they would sell for quite a lot of money. And I just found them to be a fascinating glimpse into “What were people really into in terms of art back then?” Or rich people, specifically. I’m not sure where I’m going with this, but it reminds me of that phase of my life.

  S: Yeah I know what you mean. I’ve read a couple of books on auction houses and it’s pretty fascinating to see that weird shift of what is considered valuable in art.

  BLVR: Exactly! And you can kind of glean some of that narrative from those catalogs.

  S: For sure. A lot of things that are considered “boring” are really quite interesting. I’ve been looking at these annual books that came out from the Ontario Rose Society. They’re a horticultural society. But the book on the surface looks super boring. It’s just a bunch of pictures of roses and descriptions of meetings and listings of get togethers at nurseries and stuff. But as you read through it, it’s pretty easy to start constructing a whole world out of these speeches that you’re reading or the minutes of the readings. Suddenly characters are forming.

  Clyde Fans I think was an example that I always joke about to people when they asked me what my book was about. I would say it’s about two old men who sell electric fans. That sounds so dull. But anything is interesting if you look at it from the right perspective.

  BLVR: I totally agree. Speaking of Clyde Fans, I read in a couple of other interviews that the story idea also came from the physical world, like these two portraits that you saw inside a shop.

  S: Yes, Clyde Fans really is inspired exactly by the real business Clyde Fans. It did exist in Toronto from the 50s to probably sometime in the 80s. Actually I don’t know the real history of it, but as an aside, I recently got an email from a guy who says he’s researched the company and going to send me all the information on it.

  BLVR: Wow.

  S: I actually kind of avoided learning anything about it while I was working on it, because I didn’t want it to influence the story I was writing. But basically that storefront that I use in the book is exactly like the real storefront. And I used to walk by it all the time.

  But one day when I looked inside and saw the two photographs of two businessmen, black and white 60s portraits I started thinking, “Who were these men?” By the time I was ready to start Clyde Fans I’d pretty much figured out what the whole story was going to be. I certainly didn’t anticipate that I would work on it for decades, but I did have it figured out.

  I wish I could see those portraits again because I’m sure they look nothing like the characters that I came up with.

  BLVR: How are you feeling about finding out the so-called “real” history of Clyde Fans?

  S: At first I almost thought maybe I shouldn’t see it. I wasn’t really 100% sure. But I figured the project is done now. It’s really done. So, I think I would be interested to see it.

  I don’t think I’d be interested to meet anybody from the family or the company though. I think that would be weird. If there’s anybody left. I was always kind of amazed no one ever contacted me.

  BLVR: How much did you have to learn about fans to write the book?

  S: Well actually I only really read one book on electric fans. And that was a pretty minor education in fans. What I really had to learn about was salesmanship.

  I didn’t want my knowledge of sales to be based only on “The Death of a Salesman,” so I bought a lot of books on salesmanship [published] in the 50s and 60s. But the one book that I bought at that time that turned out to be really great had a title like The 40 Best Sales I Ever Made. It was a series of articles by different salesmen telling the story of their most successful sale… and they were good stories, told well, unlike the other sales books which were just techniques on how to sell. And that was a book that I still own and I think I could still reread that just for pleasure.

  BLVR: Nice. Has it ever come in handy to you in your real life? Have you ever had to sell something?

  S: Not much. The funny thing is I don’t think I would enjoy being a salesman. It’s a very tough job. I always feel pity for telemarketers when they call me because I won’t talk to them, of course. That’s the really difficult part of sales is you gotta force people to listen to you and trick them basically.

  I do think it’s a skill. And I’m not sure it is something you can learn. I think you do have to have a natural talent for communicating with people or for manipulating them—might be the better term.

  III. “Language is a very poor way to communicate.”

  BLVR: Do you often write about introverted characters in your work?

  S: Yeah it’s funny, I’m not really an introverted person. I’m more of an extrovert by nature. But I value introversion. Most of my friends have been people who are more on the introvert scale than the extrovert scale. People get along easier in life I think as extraverts. But for myself, I find it one of my least appealing qualities. I much prefer being by myself and I’m less tortured when I’m by myself.

  What I’m really interested in—maybe more than introversion—is actually the interior experience that everybody has, which is such a strange experience when you think about it. That we have an inner life that can’t really be shared with anyone else except through language. And language is a very poor way to communicate. It’s an approximation.

  To some degree we’re so used to having an interior experience that we don’t give it a lot of thought. But, when you spend a lot of time alone, which I do in my studio, it does bring home to you how much of this idea of who you are is an interior construction of some sort. I think most of my work is about trying to write from that experience, to describe what the inner world is like. Or just about the strangeness of real life.

  BLVR: Right, I can see that a lot—what you just described—in Simon’s part of the narrative of Clyde Fans. His inner life was so rich that it overtook the so-called “real world”… I really like that tension in your work because I’m always drawn to genre-bending literature that asks what is fiction and what is not fiction. And why is this a dichotomy that we keep insisting upon?

  S: Yeah I know exactly what you mean.

  BLVR: How do you play with that as an artist?

  S: That’s a good question. So in Clyde I was trying to play with different ways of getting at the interior experience. At the beginning of the book there’s a very long monologue by Abraham and that was one way to try and talk about the interior experience. But later when you move into Chapter 3 with Simon, all the talking is in his head. I think it’s more trustworthy… What we talk about and what we feel, our interior experience and how we describe it, are very different things.

  With Simon I was trying to create this slightly surreal world that he was involved in as well to put an edge on what was reality in the story and what wasn’t. There’s a few places in the book—and I won’t mention them specifically because I’ve left that for the reader—where I’ve made a few decisions that seem to say there is another reality going on in the book, a kind of mystic experience. I think a lot of it could just be Simon is mentally ill or he’s having hallucinations. But there’s another interpretation, which is that this is real.

  So I didn’t want that to be fully determined, but I did want there to be a couple of points where you could point one way or the other to make a decision on it.

  BLVR: Yeah I remember reading [in an online review of Clyde Fans] a description of Simon going through a breakdown by the end of the book and I was surprised. I was like, “That’s not what I thought happened at all!”

  S: Good!

  BLVR: But yeah, I think the set up of a fictional history of a real store is already so interesting and it pushes that idea of what we know to be reality from the start.

  S: Yeah to some degree what was frustrating to me about Clyde was because I was working on it for so long, people had a certain idea of what the book was about and it wasn’t really accurate. And that was kind of my own fault.

  People basically thought the book was about the mundane lives of two old men. And I knew that when I did the last chapter it would finally pull it together to have a much more mystic experience to it.

  BLVR: Do you feel like that perception is changing now that everything is together in one volume?

  S: Yeah I feel like it’s made a tremendous difference. It’s funny. I’d kind of given up on the book myself. When I finally finished it and put the package together of course I was glad it was done and I was proud of it as a book. But I was so used to the fact that no one ever paid any attention to Clyde Fans and hadn’t really talked about it to me in a decade that when it came out I wasn’t expecting anything.

  Then I was a little surprised afterwards for people to start talking to me about it and I’ve done a lot of interviews since then and people have really looked deeply into it. They’ve read it. They’ve understood it. And it’s almost made me feel better about the book itself in the sense that now it’s not just something to cross off the list. I feel like people have paid enough attention now to recognize that it will probably be the biggest and most major book I ever do. I’ve kind of come back around to liking it again.

  BLVR: Wow. How does it feel to be done the most major book you will probably ever do?

  S: Good. There’s a certain sense in which that sounds like everything from here on in I will be less interested in or will be less ambitious. But I did learn working on Clyde that it might be better to focus on books that are only a couple of hundred pages long. And things that I can draw quicker.

  I feel like a phase is over.

  BLVR: If you had to pick, which of your books would you say you’re the most proud of so far?

  S: It’s tough. When I say “proud” it’s like I’m glad I did them and I feel connected to them, but things quickly go into the past for me. So it’s a complicated answer.

  Probably the book that I would put into most people’s hands would be George Sprott because that book is very focused. And I’m happy with how it came together. I don’t know that I would say it’s my best book or anything. I don’t really know what I feel about those kinds of thoughts.

  BLVR: Interesting. That’s always hard to answer. I feel like whenever I’m done with a piece I often don’t like it anymore.

  S: Yeah it’s pretty hard to look at your own work.

  IV. “If anything seems interesting you should pursue it.”

  BLVR: Did you grow up around other artists? How did you become a cartoonist?

  S: No. I don’t think I ever met an artist until I was in art school. I grew up in small towns and my parents were not particularly interested in the arts. We only had a small amount of books and I feel like I grew up mostly interested in pop culture.

  In the 70s when I was growing up there were really only three places where you would go for entertainment and that was television and the library and the news stand where you would buy magazines and comic books.

  But it was sometime in the end of grade school when I became really interested in comic books and decided I’d be a cartoonist. Of course that meant I wanted to draw Spiderman or something like that. So I spent most of my teen years working hard on making my own little amateur comic books that were mostly superheroes and monsters.

  I went to art school because I didn’t even know what to do when I got out of high school. It didn’t cross my mind to go to New York and try and get a job at Marvel Comics or anything. I figured you had to go to school. I really didn’t know much about art at all. And it was really art school that changed my life because in art school, even more than the teachers it was the other students that really changed my life. Going to see foreign films, getting interested in reading literature. Really learning about painting, photography, and all that stuff really changed my life and changed what I thought about comic books.

  In the first year of art school I totally lost interest in the idea of drawing superhero comic books, but I still was interested in the idea of comic books. I was actually completely perplexed on what to do with a comic book if it wasn’t based on fantasy.

  But I was lucky around that time that I discovered the work of R. Crumb and the underground comics and also that I discovered the work of the Hernandez Brothers. Those two influences really showed me that you could do comics about real life. And that really started me on a path towards the kind of cartoonist I eventually ended up as.

  BLVR: Right. So speaking of false dichotomies, is this when you started thinking of comics as art?

  S: Not immediately, but pretty quickly. When I think back on it now it was the beginning of me understanding even what art meant. With all that description of discovering film and literature and stuff, I’m still not sure I even really understood at that young age what I thought the purpose of this kind of work was. But I was responding to it really strongly.

  Ultimately I came to understand the power of trying to use art to communicate what your life is about. And that took a long time to figure out. I came to realize that comics are a really good communicating tool for describing true life experience. And that in some ways they might be the best tools, even better than writing a novel—that combination of words and pictures is extremely powerful.

  I got lucky in being seduced into being a cartoonist because if I’d grown up in a different kind of world I probably would have wanted to be a novelist or a painter or something that was considered more serious to begin with. And I might have missed out on working in such a great medium.

  BLVR: What do you think the purpose of art is then?

  S: Well it’s complicated. I’m not sure that there’s a simple answer to that question. But I do think one of the big powerful elements of it is art is something you use to define yourself.

  It’s a way to express this deep quality of the inner self that is really a hard-to-define-thing, which is why I think it’s much easier to define the self through these indistinct forms than it would be to try to directly use the self as an art form. So by writing stories, by making music, by drawing pictures, we’re somehow taking this totally complicated interior experience and presenting to people through a mask.

  Whenever I’m working on a project I never worry about what it means or what I’m trying to say because I think that just slows you down. That’s something you figure out later. If anything seems interesting you should pursue it. I was just reading a quote from Claes Oldenburg where he said that an artist has to have the confidence to follow a stupid idea to its logical conclusion. I think that’s very true.

  BLVR: Right. Yeah that’s so hard. Coming from an academic background I’m always like, “What does this mean? What am I trying to say?”

  S: No absolutely.

  BLVR: But I agree. You definitely have to let go of it for a moment, at least.

  S: I think so. It’s funny though that like you said academia or art school is like that too. You’re constantly being put in the position of having to explain what it’s all about. And in some ways I think that’s a terrible mistake.

  BLVR: You’ve written compellingly about nostalgia a lot, the dangers of falling into it, not resisting it, etc. Which era would you say you’re most personally nostalgic for?

  S: Well when I was younger I probably would have said that I felt deeply attracted to the mid 20th century, the 40s and the 50s. Maybe even back to the 20s. But as I get older, much like almost anybody, the real nostalgia I feel is for my own childhood era, for the 1970s and the 1960s. Even though I don’t think they’re the most beautiful of eras aesthetically compared to the other eras I was interested in.

  I consciously calculated my drawing style when I was younger and it was mostly based on works from the 1930s to the end of the 1950s. But I’d say the 50s strangely is probably where its clearest where my influence comes from. And I don’t even think about it any longer. When I sit down to draw something I don’t think to myself, “I’m trying to make this look old fashioned.” Now it’s just a drawing style. But I am sometimes aware that I’m not including any contemporary details.

  BLVR: I like that. I’m not not trying to be old fashioned.

• Globe and Mail - https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/canadas-comic-book-hero/article1197338/

  Quote:
  one of the world's most highly regarded and best-loved graphic novelists, illustrators and book designers.
  Canada's comic-book hero
  JAMES ADAMS
  GUELPH, ONT.
  PUBLISHED MAY 8, 2009
  UPDATED MAY 11, 2018
  PUBLISHED MAY 8, 2009
  This article was published more than 10 years ago. Some information in it may no longer be current.

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  "I think I like the idea that the world could be more interesting than it is." - Seth

  You wouldn't notice the three-storey house by the railway viaduct unless you were looking for it. Tucked by the elevated tracks just a few blocks from this small city's downtown, its red-brick exterior is unprepossessing. The confusing confluence of roads and car traffic at its front means a driver's attention is likely going to be elsewhere. Accidents happen here, you think. But for the former Gregory Gallant, Inkwell's End - that's the moniker he has etched into the glass on the front door - is a kind of Shangri-la. Or, as this Citizen Kane fan would likely prefer, Xanadu.

  Inside, it's surprisingly quiet, faintly hermetic. A train goes by five, maybe six times a day, but the vibrations are gentle, almost comforting, and, in tandem with the drowsy demeanour of Orange and Henry, two fat cats who also call Inkwell's End home, they only serve to emphasize the stillness.

  Which is all to the good for the former Gregory Gallant. "I like the sound," he says.

  Let's dispense with Gregory Gallant - he hasn't been called that for more than a quarter-century, and he turns 47 in September. To Tania, his wife of seven years, to his friends, his brothers and sisters, even to his 92-year-old dad, a long-retired high-school shop teacher living in Prince Edward Island, he is Seth. Not Seth Gallant, mind you. Just … Seth.

  "I changed it simply because I was looking for a pretentious-sounding pseudonym," he explained during an interview at Inkwell's End one recent sunny day.

  "In retrospect, I wish I hadn't done it. It's a stupid name." But Seth it is and Seth it shall be, probably even after death hath parted him from Tania and the planet.

  His real name, in fact, "sounds fake" to him now, and besides, it's too late for a Mellencamp/Cougar/Cougar-Mellencamp/Mellencamp switcheroo. Because, well, he's Seth, one of the world's most highly regarded and best-loved graphic novelists, illustrators and book designers.

  He's the guy who's done three covers for The New Yorker; designed all 25 volumes of The Complete Peanuts ; is often spoken of in the same breath as Robert Crumb and Art Spiegelman; has just published, with Montreal's Drawn & Quarterly Press, his latest masterpiece, a $29.95 hardcover "picture novella" called George Sprott, 1894-1975 that The New York Times originally commissioned in 2006 as a 25-part weekly serial for its Sunday magazine.

  Seth probably looked more like a Seth in the early 1980s. This would have been after he busted loose from the Ontario towns of his childhood (Clinton, Strathroy, Tilbury) to attend art college in Toronto and live as "a punky club kid with a scary pre-Goth look" who liked to drink and drug and "wanted a name to go along with all that." Today, he's a decidedly dapper-looking gent - if, that is, you believe the fashions of 1937 represent the sine qua non of male haberdashery.

  STORY CONTINUES BELOW ADVERTISEMENT

  With his dark, brilliantined hair and round, horn-rimmed glasses, Seth clearly does. Shorts, T-shirts, jeans - the staples of casual 21st-century masculinity - are nowhere to be found in Seth's Xanadu. But vintage suits, patterned silk ties, fedoras, topcoats, wingtips and crisp white dress shirts? This is the place.

  Seth easily admits his current look was entirely contrived at first - the result of "a phasing over from being a punk to being kind of a punk in a suit to being a guy listening to old jazz and then being someone who decided he wanted to completely wrap himself up in the world of pre-1940. I've done this several times in my life, made a switch and decided to force it. This time it was, 'Okay, now I'm going to be an old-fashioned guy.'" After a while, it just became second nature to look like a brown-eyed handsome man heading out to the Zoot Suit riots of 1943.

  "I have a hard time believing in things 100 per cent, particularly my own pretensions."

  Seth's home is as carefully curated as his personal appearance, as eccentrically stuffed as Charles Foster Kane's Florida estate in Citizen Kane . While we all have treasures from our past, either self-collected or given by relatives, they're usually few in number and, more often than not, discreetly displayed or boxed in the basement. Seth, however, has them immediately at hand - functioning rotary phones like the kind Bogey dialled in The Big Sleep, a Beaver gumball machine, Ookpik dolls, a working Moffat refrigerator from 1956 in the kitchen, a wall covered with cheap Halloween masks from the early sixties, Mountie bobble-head dolls, Reliable plastic coin banks, a barber's chair circa 1945, figurines of Marvel Comics heroes, a complete kid-size RCMP uniform framed behind glass, old high-school trophies refashioned by Seth as honours to himself from a grateful Old Order of the Grand Portage and the National League of the Brides of the Dominion …

  Seth characterizes his world as both "grandmotherly, in that it's like this desire to create this cozy 1930s, 1940s kind of environment" and "kind of adolescent because the place has a lot of toys. There's something about the teenage boy, trying to create your perfect teenage room.

  "I can't live unless I've got control of the aesthetics," he declares. "If I want a couch, it has to be an old couch - unless it's really successful at pretending to be an old couch."

  Luckily, his wife, a 32-year-old men's hairstylist who met Seth while working as a model in a life-drawing class he was taking, doesn't have strong views on decor (although they did "feud" briefly earlier this year over her wish to put a Sylvania colour TV set in the living room). Lucky, too, that Seth has long-since forsaken his once oft-stated wish to have actually lived in 1937. "That now seems patently stupid," he remarks with a laugh. "I mean, I love 1937 - but would I have loved the actual 1937 if I was black or lower-class or unemployed?"

  Better to have the simulacrum of 1937 in the cocoon of your own home than the messiness of the real thing.

  To Seth devotees, all this whimsy can come as no surprise. Graphic works like It's a Good Life If You Don't Weaken and Clyde Fans - Book 1 and Wimbledon Green: The Greatest Comic Book Collector in the World are rife with reverential representations of the sorts of artifacts found in Seth's home. His stories are about the ignored, the obscure, the vaguely remembered and how the past persists in the present, be it a rundown old building - "I'm interested in the feelings that buildings put out," he says. "Nothing's more appealing to me than an old storefront with an apartment above it" - a shameful or pleasant memory, a weathered tree, or visiting a used bookstore and having one's curiosity piqued by a cartoon in a 1951 issue of The New Yorker.

  George Sprott could almost be called Anatomy of a Has-been, even though its trim size of 35.5 by 30 centimetres seems decidedly heroic, monumental, like a tombstone. It's a documentary of sorts (replete with Citizen Kane -like flashbacks, reminiscences and interviews) of the final hours of a one-time TV celebrity and lecturer in the mythical Ontario city of Dominion, population 300,000. Dominion has been the setting of many Seth yarns, as much a state of mind as a place, although he has built some 50 cardboard models of the buildings he imagines to be (or have been) there, models displayed four years ago at the Art Gallery of Ontario and that are now a touring exhibition.

  Sprott was something of a "star" in the Dominion of the early 1950s, when TV was new and the only station in town was desperate to fill airtime. But by 1975, no one cares any more about Sprott's main claim to fame - nine trips to the Canadian Arctic between 1930 and 1940 - which he parlayed into a long-running show (1,132 episodes and counting, as of Oct. 2, 1975) called Northern Hi-Lights .

  Melancholic to be sure but, as Seth notes, "it's not tragic." Clearly he has an affection for Sprott's obduracy, "but I'm a bit ambivalent toward him and I want the reader to be, too."

  Drawn & Quarterly is putting Seth on the road in support of George Sprott. He's at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival this weekend, then off to New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and other U.S. cities a few weeks later. Of course, as "a very routine-oriented guy" - the kind of guy who, with fedora on head, is at his drafting table in his basement studio each day at 9 a.m., works until 4 p.m., breaks for dinner with his wife, then returns to work until 11 p.m. - he's "dreading it." It will be fine "once it gets going, but I don't really like the experience."

  "Who you are really depends on who you're with." - Seth Still, he doesn't entirely begrudge the attention. Nine or 10 years ago, Seth had pretty much convinced himself that he'd be "broke for the rest of my life." While graphic novels such as Maus, From Hell and The Dark Knight had been critical and commercial triumphs in the eighties and nineties, sales and interest in the genre were flagging, and "it looked like it was all falling apart." Seth was hunkering down in Guelph around this time with his then-girlfriend (they split six months after moving there from Toronto, 100 kilometres to the east). Over coffee with best friend and fellow cartoonist Chester Brown ( Yummy Fur, Louis Riel) , he'd mutter darkly about "going back to Xeroxing my art."

  Then things started to turn around. Seth doesn't know why exactly. Maybe it was the acclaimed film adaptation in 2001 of Dan Clowes's Ghost World comic. Or the 2002 exhibition that another pal, Chris Ware (of Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth fame), had at New York's Whitney Museum of American Art. Whatever the reason, "years of cartoonists doing adult work in obscurity suddenly burst into the mainstream," and Seth was buoyed along with the flow. It's why, just 18 months ago, he and his wife were able to become homeowners for the first time.

  Seth claims to be happy. He loves his wife. ("It's easy to say 'I'm sorry' in this relationship.") He likes growing older and the loss of vanity he believes it entails. He says he's mellowed with age, although not to the point of sappiness. ("Youth culture," he snorts at one point, "bores me now. I'd even say it irritates me. … What people talk about at that age, how they relate to each other, it seems like a nightmare.") And the febrile acquisitiveness he once had - that has made his house what it is today, yet also once "disgusted me because it clearly did seem I was trying to fill a void, trying to make myself happy" - has abated. Now that energy is displaced into "a desire to produce things, to be focused on work."

  Still, he's not entirely sure the good times are here to stay. Which is why he says he's probably working too much now, dreaming up logos; doing commercial work for clients as varied as Penguin, Microsoft and the Wall Street Journal; helping organize the annual Doug Wright Awards honouring the best in Canadian comics and graphic novels; editing and designing books. "Ideally, I would like to work on my comics 24 hours a day, but I feel like I always want that backup … I want it all, that's the problem." Even in Xanadu.

  Seth appears at the 2009 Doug Wright Awards Saturday, 7 to 9 p.m., at the Art Gallery of Ontario's Jackman Hall, 317 Dundas St. W., Toronto. He'll be launching the first volume of a planned two-volume set, The Collected Doug Wright: Canada's Master Cartoonist (1917-1983), which he designed and co-edited with Brad Mackay.

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• Toronto Star - https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/books/2018/12/16/canadian-cartoonist-seth-creates-a-spooky-illustrated-series-of-vintage-christmas-ghost-stories.html

  Canadian cartoonist Seth creates a spooky illustrated series of vintage Christmas ghost stories
  By Sue CarterSpecial to the Star
  Sun., Dec. 16, 2018timer4 min. read
  More than a century before Elf on a Shelf began terrorizing children into behaving during the Christmas season, yuletide spirit came in the form of ghosts. As far back as the 1700s, families would gather around during long winter nights and tell ghost stories by gas or candlelight. The Victorian-era obsession with the paranormal, combined with the rise of periodical publications, created a demand for these chilling tales, which became just as much a part of Christmas as figgy pudding and sleigh rides.

  Those seasonal apparitions have risen once again, thanks to a little conjuring from acclaimed cartoonist Seth and his pocket-sized Christmas Ghost Stories series, published by Windsor, Ont. indie press Biblioasis.

  Seth (the pen name for Gregory Gallant) is internationally recognized for his signature personal and design esthetic, a vintage-inspired but timeless style that hearkens back to the mid-century cartoons of the New Yorker, for which he is also a contributor. While his own serialized cartoons, such as “Palookaville” and “Clyde’s Fans,” reflect on the quiet dignity of overlooked everyday people, Seth has always enjoyed the slow-burning drama of old horror films and ghost stories.

  About 20 years ago, Seth picked up an old anthology of Victorian ghost stories, The Haunted Looking Glass, illustrated by one of his idols, Edward Gorey. He was hooked, and began seeking out more spooky titles from other eras. He doesn’t remember having a conversation with Biblioasis publisher Dan Wells about his fascination before Wells approached him to curate and design a series of collectible Christmas ghost stories, but it’s hard to imagine anyone else giving these relics such a cool but classic treatment.

  The pocket-sized series, which would fit snuggly into a stocking, kicked off in 2015 with The Signalman by Charles Dickens (1866) and One Who Saw by A.M. Burrage (1931). To date, all 11 titles in the collection are by British authors, and not by accident.

  “When I think of cosiness and sitting around in a warm chair by the fireplace with a glass of brandy that seems like a very British idea,” says Seth from Inkwell’s End, his 19th-century brick home in Guelph. “It’s a very middle-class, stuffy old-world British kind of culture, which of course appeals to me tremendously.”

  Some editions feature well-known literary figures such as Edith Wharton and M.R. James, while other authors are more obscure. This year’s additions are Walter de la Mare’s 1929 tale, The Green Room, about a man who discovers a strange annex in the back of an old bookshop; Frank Cowper’s Christmas Eve on a Haunted Hulk, which recalls a spooky encounter with a ghostly shipwreck; and The Red Lodge, a story about a possessed holiday country home by H. Russell Wakefield, who is considered a titan of the haunted-house sub-genre.

  The spirits that float throughout this collection don’t exhibit what we associate with contemporary ghost behaviour. They’re not all menacing creatures, inclined to throw objects across rooms or skulk menacingly around bedposts. In fact, most of the books are safe to read before sleep without fear of nightmares. But what these stories lack in a dramatic boo factor they make up for with chilling ambience.

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  “It’s hard to find a good ghost story that actually scares you unless you read it in just the right circumstances,” Seth says. “But a good writer can create a really excellent atmosphere. And that to me is the key appealing element of the genre.”

  These stories weren’t originally conceived with visuals in mind, and so finding the perfect moment to insert an illustration can sometimes be a challenge. Seth avoids drawing key scenes or trying to replicate action right off the page — a classic error in book illustration, he says — and instead focuses on more ambient shots. “I will draw something that suggests the ghost’s presence in the house or shows the house from a distance. I try not to draw anything that’s too specific.”

  Seth, who is already reading ahead for next year’s selection, has a dream list of titles. Biblioasis looked into purchasing rights for The Inner Room, a 1966 story by Robert Aickman, Seth’s favourite writer in the genre, but it was too expensive for this fun little project. Other stories don’t fit his criteria. Seth avoids supernatural stories where characters are suddenly able to see into the future, for instance. Yet despite his no ghost — no publish restriction, there are endless options for future editions.

  “I’m actually quite surprised how popular the genre was back until about maybe the 1940s, and just how many stories were published,” he says. “It’s always difficult to find just the right one, but there are thousands of them out there.”

• It's Nice That - https://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/seth-1

  Illustration: Comic book king Seth's work is now on show in all its glory
  WordsMaisie Skidmore
  —
  Date
  9 September 2013
  Reading Time
  2 minute read
  Work
  Art
  Illustration
  Gregory Gallant, aka Seth, has an almost mythical status in the minds of comic book aficionados. The Canadian cartoonist has been creating comic books since well before I started eating school dinners, and his strong and very recognisable style harks back to the illustration of years gone by. He’s best known for the excellent series Palookaville and his mock-autobiographical graphic novel It’s a Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken which is the focus of the new exhibition at New York’s Adam Baumgold Gallery.

  The works on show, from covers for various publications to sheets and sheets of panels from It’s a Good Life, are a testament to the career he has built as one of the key comic book artists of contemporary culture, gently critiquing modern society with a wit entirely his own. If you’re able to I’d strongly recommend popping down to the show to get your fill of what Seth has to offer; if you’ve not heard of him, you’ll spend a solid couple of hours nourishing your brain with his exceptional contribution to the genre of graphic fiction in contemporary culture, and if you have, you won’t even know what to do with yourself for excitement at the prospect of submerging yourself in a room papered with his work.

  It’s a Good Life If You Don’t Weaken is at the Adam Baumgold gallery from tomorrow until October 25.

• Publishers Weekly - https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/authors/profiles/article/79680-seth-turns-the-past-into-fiction.html

  Seth Turns the Past into Fiction
  Clyde Fans, a new graphic novel from Seth that was 20 years in the making, is about the decline of a fan company and the brothers who own it
  By Brigid Alverson | Mar 29, 2019
  Comments Click Here

  Photo: David Briggs
  I’m not nostalgic in the true sense,” says Seth, the singly named Canadian cartoonist whose work certainly looks nostalgic at first glance. “I am a nostalgic person, of course, but I can’t imagine myself setting a story in 1950 and writing about it as a golden age that I want to recreate in my work.”

  Though Seth fills his comics with old buildings, vintage logos, and retro-looking toys, all drawn in a deft ink-and-wash style that would be at home in a New Yorker magazine from the 1940s, Seth uses these visual cues to draw the reader into stories that explore richer and deeper territory than mere longing for the past. His latest graphic novel, Clyde Fans, will be published by Montreal-based Drawn & Quarterly in April.

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  Seth’s first graphic novel, It’s a Good Life If You Don’t Weaken, published in 1996, seemed to be a memoir of the author’s attempts to track down a New Yorker cartoonist who had a brief flash of success in the ’40s—but the whole thing was fiction. His subsequent work includes pseudohistorical graphic novels that present fiction as though it is fact: 2005’s Wimbledon Green, the story of an obsessive comics collector; 2009’s George Sprott, the biography of a retired television personality; and 2011’s The Great Northern Brotherhood of Canadian Cartoonists, which features a fictitious cartoonists’ organization.

  “I want to recreate that feeling of something that almost existed or could have existed,” Seth says, speaking of Clyde Fans. “I don’t feel like I’m trying to fool anyone, except with It’s a Good Life, but I do feel like I am trying to create a world that is like a parallel reality.”

  Clyde Fans chronicles the decline of a fan business and the family who owned it, moving between 1957 and 1997 and going even further into the past in flashbacks. Abe Matchcard, the eldest of the two brothers who own the business, is a reluctant extrovert who has memorized entire tracts on how be an effective salesman but misses the rise of the home air conditioner, which ultimately dooms the company. Simon, the younger brother, seldom leaves the family home after one transformative but unsuccessful (at least from Abe’s point of view) attempt at a sales trip. The company fails, and Simon goes on to care for his and Abe’s aging mother and tends to his own obsession: collecting and studying kitschy postcards that show giant fish and fruit next to normal-size fishermen and farmers. The story is narrated in turns by the brothers, and the action takes place in their crumbling home and in coffee shops, hotel rooms, and offices that evoke the ’40s and ’50s, even in scenes that take place much later.

  Clyde Fans was a real business, although everything else in the book is fiction. “It was a storefront in Toronto I used to pass by all the time,” Seth says. “It was already closed by time I noticed it. I looked in the window and I could see on the back wall two portraits of the owners. They were typical midcentury business photos, black-and-white, with the brothers wearing suits—big shots.”

  That quick glance was the launching pad for a deeply personal story. Abe and Simon’s father walked out on the family when they were young, and they react to that trauma in very different ways: Abe takes responsibility for the business and pushes himself outward; Simon retreats inward.

  “The two brothers are two sides of myself,” Seth says. “Abe is a very aggressive, outgoing person—that’s part of my personality. Simon is also part of me—very reclusive, cut off, sort of an anxious person. I’m an outgoing person, but because I spend most of my life in the studio, the quiet side, the side that is just dealing with me, is what I am most comfortable with. I think of myself as an extrovert who values introversion.”

  Seth says he consciously incorporated his own family’s issues into Clyde Fans. “We had a reclusive kind of family life,” he notes. “My mother had mental issues and my father was probably living a double life. He was rarely home. My parents didn’t have any friends. Nobody ever came to our house. My mother had had quite a bit of shock treatment—she was very stunned—and our home life was fairly quiet except when my father was home.”

  The fact that Seth was the youngest of a large family, and that his siblings moved away when he was very young, shaped his aesthetic in a very direct way. “I grew up in a house that was filled with the remnants of an earlier family,” he says. “My house was filled with photos of people and a life that was lived before me. That quality of lingering things from the past is one of the most essential elements of what the work’s about. My childhood was not unhappy, but in retrospect I realize what a strange, closed off kind of childhood it was—how strange my parents were. And I’m always writing about those people. They are gigantic in my brain. It was a complex relationship. I’m not angry, but I think it left a permanent mark on how I think about human interactions.”

  It’s impossible to talk about Seth’s work without mentioning Dominion, the fictitious Canadian city that exists physically as a cardboard model and in his drawings but lives chiefly in his imagination. The 2014 film/live-action documentary Seth’s Dominion shows him working on it, and parts of it have appeared as settings in his graphic novels, including Clyde Fans.

  “When I started Clyde Fans, I set much of the story in the city of Dominion, but Dominion was literally just a name I pulled out of the top of my head—just any city,” Seth says. “After I started Clyde Fans, I was working on another book in my head that would be a series of short stories, and I thought I would put them in the same town. It was then that I developed this city in my mind as a complicated idea. That graphic novel died on the vine 20 years ago, but Dominion carried on and became a project of its own.”

  It’s a project that Seth has been working on ever since. “Most of the work I’m doing on that, nobody has ever seen,” he says. “It’s mostly in notebooks. It fills in the background of my stories, but 99% of that information does not make it into anything I’m working on. Maybe someday this will be used in a book—or maybe the notebooks themselves will be the final work, I don’t know—but it’s kind of an interior space. More than anything, it’s an inner world. I like that whole process of worldbuilding.”

  Seth’s love of worldbuilding extends to his life away from his studio. He wears suits that are tailored to look vintage, and, like a 1950s businessman, he never goes out without a hat. His house is filled with items from the early and mid-20th century, including the appliances (“It’s a choice—and a hassle, if the fridge breaks down,” he says).

  “I’m about defining my life by the things that aesthetically please me,” Seth says. “A lot of my interests are about the past. My house is an art house, not a recreation of the past.”

  The same could be said of Seth’s art. “At a certain age, I was really, really interested in old cartoonists, especially the New Yorker cartoonists of the 1930s and ’40s,” he says. “I studied their work and absorbed a lot. That was what I was doing in the ’80s, and when I look back, it is very ’80s, too. It has an ’80s aesthetic. You can’t help but absorb the time period you are from.”

  As much as Seth enjoys toying with the past, he knows he can never go back—and that’s what makes it so interesting. “The past doesn’t exist, and that’s why there’s an inherent sad quality to it,” he says. “It’s inaccessible. Remembering is pleasurable in itself. My childhood was a complex time period, yet I think about it constantly and I think about it with pleasure—even the unpleasant stuff. I think those two things—that the past is always gone so there’s a lingering sadness to it and that memory itself is a pleasurable activity—are what [my work] is about.”

  Brigid Alverson writes regularly for Publishers Weekly on comics.

  A version of this article appeared in the 04/01/2019 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: The Past Doesn’t Exist

QUOTE:
Seth's masterly two-color graphics, with their thick, expressive brushstrokes, lovingly evoke the brothers' bygone milieu. Seth's masterwork is an eloquent summation of his career-long themes: stultifying nostalgia for an irretrievable past and an equally crippling alienation that leads to tragic isolation.
Clyde Fans.

By Seth. Illus. by the author.

2019.488p. Drawn & Quarterly, $54.95 (9781770463578). 741.5.

Canadian cartoonist Seth began serializing Clyde Fans 20 years ago in the pages of his Palookaville comic book. Finally completed, the finished work is a quietly tragic family saga told with a reflective deliberation befitting its two-decade gestation. It chronicles the rise and fall of a family business that manufactures and sells electric fans through the deteriorating relationship of the two brothers who carried on after their father's desertion. Elder brother Abe, who's been on the road as a reluctant salesman, stepped in to run the business, with the painfully introverted Simon helping out around the office. Following a disastrous, short-lived attempt to go into sales--depicted in excruciating detail--Simon becomes a recluse, retreating to the family home and assuming the care of their elderly mother. Abe fails to adapt as home air conditioning becomes affordable, leading to the firm's inevitable demise. The trajectory of the business over the course of four decades is echoed in the brothers' bitter history, with Abe growing estranged from the world as Simon loses his grasp on reality altogether. Seth's masterly two-color graphics, with their thick, expressive brushstrokes, lovingly evoke the brothers' bygone milieu. Seth's masterwork is an eloquent summation of his career-long themes: stultifying nostalgia for an irretrievable past and an equally crippling alienation that leads to tragic isolation.--Gordon Flagg

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 8th Edition APA 6th Edition Chicago 17th Edition
Flagg, Gordon. "Clyde Fans." Booklist, vol. 115, no. 21, 1 July 2019, p. 37+. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A595705092/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=276738f6. Accessed 9 Mar. 2020.

QUOTE:
In the masterful hands of cartoonist Seth, they become the stuff of quiet, desperate drama." Flagg further commented that the "sequences are marked by skillfully rendered dialogue and elegant silent passages that demand that readers pay attention to Seth's simple yet suave drawings."
Seth. Clyde Fans: v.1. May 2004. 160p. illus. Drawn & Quarterly; dist. by Chronicle, paper, $19.95 (1-896597-84-X). 741.5.

A rambling monologue about the art of salesmanship, delivered by an elderly man puttering around his empty family home, may not seem the most promising material for a compelling graphic novel, and an account of that man's socially maladroit brother's embarrassingly futile attempts to launch a career as a salesman for the family electric-fan business seems nearly as dubious. In the masterful hands of cartoonist Seth, they become the stuff of quiet, desperate drama. The family saga is related through Abe's painful examination of his squandered life from the vantage point of 1997, and the depiction of an excruciating series of cold calls Simon makes in a small town in 1957. Both sequences are marked by skillfully rendered dialogue and elegant silent passages that demand that readers pay attention to Seth's simple yet suave drawings. Telling this kind of story is a departure for Seth, who is known for his navel-gazing autobiographical comics; here he turns outward with equal success, while he continues to delve deeply into his two constant themes: nostalgia and alienation.

Flagg, Gordon

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2004 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 8th Edition APA 6th Edition Chicago 17th Edition
Flagg, Gordon. "Seth. Clyde Fans. Bk.1." Booklist, vol. 100, no. 15, 1 Apr. 2004, p. 1358. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A115564748/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=946a86ca. Accessed 9 Mar. 2020.

QUOTE:
Nostalgia is Seth's stock-in-trade. It is evident in every ink line he draws, an aching for an unreachable yesterday so palpable that it creates a similar longing in the reader. Through this signature nostalgic style, he transports us to the fictional town of Dominion, Ontario, home of the Clyde Fans company."

Seth. Palookaville, Twenty-Two. Montreal. Drawn & Quarterly. 2015. 120 pages.

Abe Matchcard thinks of himself as a "nice, misunderstood, earnest fellow" He believes this "despite all the evidence to the contrary' There is plenty of evidence in "Clyde Fans Part 4," the main story in the newest hardcover Palookaville release by Ontario cartoonist Seth.

Clyde Fans has been serialized in Palookaville for so long now, and Abe and his brother Simon have slowly been revealing their bitter family history for so long, that I forget some of the early details. Abe has lived his sad, salesman life for so long that he, too, has forgotten many important things. He ends up inviting to dinner an old flame whose heart he quite cruelly broke three decades earlier, forgetting the callous end he put to their relationship, having spent the ensuing years focused more on the false, rosy glow of his lying nostalgia for a past that never was.

Nostalgia is Seth's stock-in-trade. It is evident in every ink line he draws, an aching for an unreachable yesterday so palpable that it creates a similar longing in the reader. Through this signature nostalgic style, he transports us to the fictional town of Dominion, Ontario, home of the Clyde Fans company. (Seth has even created a 3D model of the town for his own reference that is so detailed it not only has gone on the road as a museum exhibit but is the subject of a recent documentary film, Seths Dominion. ) This depiction of a time and place that is no longer accessible, if it ever existed at all, paradoxically creates a verisimilitude in almost all of Seths work, and it finds its ideal expression in Clyde Fans. The charming architecture, clever signage, vintage clothing, and classic cars all tell us something about the world in which the Matchcard family was created, nurtured, and ultimately broken. Simon and Abe inhabit their home, their business, and their lives like genteel squatters, refusing to acknowledge the present and bitterly ruminating on old hurts and ancient defeats that they cant--or won't--escape.

The need for Dominion to be mapped out by Seth finally makes sense here, as we see Abe, in flashback, running to one after another of his fathers known haunts ("klop klop") desperately trying to find him on the day he left the family. Desperate not to be left behind, he never finds him, yet he is left behind, by his father, by the world, left to live within the echoes of a different time, when a traveling fan salesman could make a decent living, although in Abes case we wonder to what end.

Does anything we do, good or bad, ultimately mean anything? Does the world remember us? What we remember, as we age, is mostly emotion, attached to memory. Neither are necessarily reliable narrators. Through captions and flashbacks, though, Seth presents us with the truth of Abes life, perhaps more true than Abe himself even sees it. Seth's work is known for its nostalgic warmth, but lying underneath is a razor-sharp honesty. What more could we ask of any art?

Alan David Doane

Glens Falls, New York

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 University of Oklahoma
http://www.worldliteraturetoday.com
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 8th Edition APA 6th Edition Chicago 17th Edition
Doane, Alan David. "Seth. Palookaville, Twenty-Two." World Literature Today, vol. 90, no. 2, 2016, p. 74+. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A444299160/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=63770880. Accessed 9 Mar. 2020.

QUOTE:"Clyde Fans is the standout for which Seth's lush black line work and subtle color tones create the perfect mood foretelling the hostile brothers' encounter at their newly defunct factory."

Seth (text & illus.). Palookaville. Vol. 21. Drawn & Quarterly. 2013. 104p. ISBN 9781770460645. $22.95. LITERARY

Cartoonist Seth (Wimbledon Green) splits the latest volume of his semi-regular autobiographical periodical into three sections, beginning with an installment of his ongoing "Clyde Fans" story, about two brothers and the factory they own. The second section, "Rubber Stamp Diary," relates events from the artist's life, with a combination of hand drawing and rubber stamps. The final section is part one of "Nothing Lasts," about Seth's childhood. Seth has in the past used repetitive page layouts to good effect, but their overuse here makes his recollections of an unexceptional boyhood monotonous. As with "Nothing Lasts," "Rubber Stamp Diary" combines repetitive illustration with bland subject matter and lacks the former's polished, geometric drawings. Combined with the confessional tone of the near-constant narration, the section seems no more memoir than illustrated therapy session.

Verdict Memoir fans will be better served by Seth's It's a Good Life, If You Don't Weaken or Nicole Georges's visually inventive Calling Dr. Laura. "Clyde Fans" is the standout for which Seth's lush black line work and subtle color tones create the perfect mood foretelling the hostile brothers' encounter at their newly defunct factory. However, the middle of a series is nowhere to begin. For new readers, the earlier installments are collected in Clyde Fans, Vol. 1. This title is not recommended.--Robert Mixner, Bartholomew Cty. P.L., Columbus, IN

Mixner, Robert

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 Library Journals, LLC
http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/reviews/xpress/884170-289/xpress_reviews-first_look_at_new.html.csp
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 8th Edition APA 6th Edition Chicago 17th Edition
Mixner, Robert. "Seth (text & illus.). Palookaville." Xpress Reviews, 25 Oct. 2013. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A351263545/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=86181388. Accessed 9 Mar. 2020.

QUOTE:
"this first hardback publication of the long-running Palookaville comic series is captivating for both fans and newbies of Seth's work." Fitzgibbon added: "This periodical style of serial publication is highly satisfying. Finishing the extensive ‘Palookaville’ is analogous to watching DVD extra features of a favorite movie."
Seth. Palookaville #20. Drawn & Quarterly. 2010. 88p. illus. ISBN 9781770460188. $19.95. GRAPHIC NOVEL

A compilation of serial comic, autobiography, sketchbook, and gallery documentation, this first hardback publication of the long-running Palookaville comic series is captivating for both fans and newbies of Seth's work (George Sprott; It's a Good Life, If You Don't Weaken; and Wimbledon Green). An earnest introduction laments the end of a comic book format yet welcomes the opportunity for more comprehensive work. The ongoing series Clyde Fans opens this volume, depicting the decline of the Matchcard's family business through creative, fast-paced memory sequences. Readers are then invited into the author's world, literally, through photographs and an essay describing Seth's art installation Dominion City, a three-dimensional model city designed as a setting for his stories. Following are sketchbook images and an illustrated account of the author's humorous yet angst-filled experience at a book festival. A cartoonist for The New Yorker, Seth offers stylized illustrations that are well rendered and tell compelling stories.

Verdict This periodical style of serial publication is highly satisfying. Finishing the extensive "Palookaville" is analogous to watching DVD extra features of a favorite movie. Highly recommended.--Willow Fitzgibbon, Fayetteville P.L., AR

Fitzgibbon, Willow

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2011 Library Journals, LLC
http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/reviews/xpress/884170-289/xpress_reviews-first_look_at_new.html.csp
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 8th Edition APA 6th Edition Chicago 17th Edition
Fitzgibbon, Willow. "Seth. Palookaville #20." Xpress Reviews, 11 Mar. 2011. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A252450247/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=ae0db607. Accessed 9 Mar. 2020.

Flagg, Gordon. "Clyde Fans." Booklist, vol. 115, no. 21, 1 July 2019, p. 37+. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A595705092/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=276738f6. Accessed 9 Mar. 2020. Flagg, Gordon. "Seth. Clyde Fans. Bk.1." Booklist, vol. 100, no. 15, 1 Apr. 2004, p. 1358. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A115564748/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=946a86ca. Accessed 9 Mar. 2020. Doane, Alan David. "Seth. Palookaville, Twenty-Two." World Literature Today, vol. 90, no. 2, 2016, p. 74+. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A444299160/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=63770880. Accessed 9 Mar. 2020. Mixner, Robert. "Seth (text & illus.). Palookaville." Xpress Reviews, 25 Oct. 2013. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A351263545/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=86181388. Accessed 9 Mar. 2020. Fitzgibbon, Willow. "Seth. Palookaville #20." Xpress Reviews, 11 Mar. 2011. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A252450247/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=ae0db607. Accessed 9 Mar. 2020.

• The Smartset
  https://www.thesmartset.com/making-change/
  Word count: 1180

  QUOTE:
  "there’s something in ... [the book's] haunting reverie and careful consideration of what is gained and lost in our passage to adulthood and the grave that calls to mind the slow obsolescence that surrounds our own little corner of the globe."

  making change
  The awareness of Seth's Clyde Fans
  BY CHRIS MAUTNER

  §
  IN UNCATEGORIZED • 07/29/2019

  hey. Remember that stationary store in your hometown? The one located at the top of the hill on the main drag? It had been around for three generations. You used to go there with your dad on Sunday mornings to pick up the newspapers. If he was in a generous mood he’d get you some gum or a candy bar. Maybe even a comic book. Try to remember the shape of the store. Where was the cash register? What weird things were on sale in the back? No matter, it’s all gone now. Been out of business for years, replaced by chain stores and the internet. Nobody wants mom and pop stationary stores anymore.

  That melancholic tone, reminiscing through hazy, unreliable memories about objects and places that have vanished or are swiftly leaving the public consciousness is a central motif in the work of the Canadian cartoonist known as Seth (real name Gregory Gallant), and one that is central in his latest book, Clyde Fans by Seth.

  It’s very easy to recognize a Seth comic when you see one. He easily has one of the most distinctive art styles going these days, consciously evoking the style of early to mid-20th-century gag cartoonists like Peter Arno and Whitney Darrow Jr. Even his dapper personal attire — fedora, suit and tie, slicked-back hair, and round glasses — suggest someone who has stepped out of a bygone era.

  Yet while Seth has a definitive fondness for the aesthetics of the 1930s and ’40s, he is no simple nostalgist, forever pining for the good old days that he never experienced (though there is a bit of that as well). Rather, Seth’s comics are frequently concerned with the notion of memento mori — a reflection on mortality and the notion that our earthly goods and pursuits are transient. He is more interested in the impulses that lead to nostalgia, especially those moments in history when a new way of life subsumes the old. And the characters who dredge up the past in his stories often recall sharp pain as much as they do joy.

  Clyde Fans itself has been a long time in the making. Seth began it way back in 1998 in the pages of his (still-ongoing) one-man anthology Palookaville, where it has sporadically continued — a chapter here and there — through the ensuing years while working on other graphic novels and assignments (including designing best-selling series like The Complete Peanuts for Fantagraphics).

  Clyde Fans tells the story of two brothers, Abe and Simon Matchcard, who inherit their absent father’s electric fan business. Abe is the businessman, the serious, dedicated one who, while good at his job and sociable, seems to tolerate little in life, his brother least of all. Simon, meanwhile, is the dreamer, a lost soul forever stuck in his head who cannot handle the outside world, especially those that involve dealing with other people.

  The book jumps around in time, beginning at first with an elderly Abe in 1997 traversing the family home and storefront of his now-defunct business, directly addressing the reader about the ins and outs of his business and the art of selling. It’s a fantastic sequence, not just because of the way it blatantly breaks the traditional “show don’t tell” rule, but also for the way it maps out that building for us — a structure we will be returning to again and again throughout the book.

  Then, we are taken back to 1957 as Simon decides against his brother’s better judgment to take a stab at being a traveling salesman. His trip is ostensibly a cringe-inducing failure until a worn down and rattled Simon experiences a mystical vision that leads him to a life of seclusion in the family home, taking care of his ailing mother, collecting postcards and talking to the odd assortment of knick-knacks that decorate his room. Abe, meanwhile, is also in a stasis of sorts, seemingly unaware of (or perhaps deliberately ignoring) changing technology and market forces — namely air conditioning — until it’s too late.

  What we come to understand is that Abe, who eventually learns to embrace his brother’s solitude (or perhaps succumbs to it), is not as far removed from his recluse brother (or his runaway father) as he would like to admit. At the end, both brothers end up in the same place. Simon for not trying lest he lose his grip on his magical vision. Abe for trying too hard lest he fall victim to rumination.

  Having been assembled over the course of two decades, one of the most interesting things about Clyde Fans is how much Seth’s drawing style has changed over the decades. Originally whisper-thin, his line has become thicker, bolder, more confident and more cartoonish (look at the elderly Simon’s forehead in the last third of the book if you don’t believe me). Thus, Clyde Fans itself becomes a physical manifestation of the impermanence of things.

  Seth gets raked over the coals a lot for his “old-fashioned” aesthetic, stylized design and wistful melancholia as Seth himself has frequently acknowledged (he is not devoid of a certain amount of self-awareness). The collected edition of Clyde Fans certainly doubles down on these traits, packaged as it is in a hard-cased slipcover that bears either stylized lettering or cartoon imagery evocative of early to mid-20th century advertising on every side. The spine also contains an “index” listing everything from “appleyard” to “ukulele”, least you have problems locating those objects in the comic.

  And yet there’s something fascinating in how a book about remembrance, longing, and the elastic nature of time comes in a package that so demonstrably calls attention to itself. In an era where we still worry about the physical book disappearing from the world seemingly dominated by e-readers and streaming media. Here is a work that refuses to be anything other than a tangible object, designed to call attention to its very physicality.

  Clyde Fans is not Seth’s best book (that would be George Sprott, which deals with similar themes but in a much sharper and shorter manner) but there’s something in its haunting reverie and careful consideration of what is gained and lost in our passage to adulthood and the grave that calls to mind the slow obsolescence that surrounds our own little corner of the globe. How’s the stationery store in your neck of the woods holding up? •

  All images provided by the author.

  Images edited by Barbara Chernyavsky.

• Guelph Memory Tribune
  https://www.guelphmercury.com/opinion-story/9351184-guelph-cartoonist-seth-explores-time-and-memory-in-latest-clyde-fans/
  Word count: 886

  QUOTE:
  "In a manner very typical of Seth’s work, the story takes these seemingly mundane elements — a small company that sells fans and a man who collects novelty postcards — and expresses through them a disarming human complexity."
  Guelph cartoonist Seth explores time and memory in latest, Clyde Fans
  The Guelph graphic novelist will be presenting his work May 15 at eBar, writes Jeremy Luke Hill
  OPINION May 13, 2019 by Jeremy Luke Hill Guelph Mercury
  EMMA:54374719
  Seth, 57, started working on Clyde Fans in his 30s. - Nigel Dickson photo

  EMMA:43812395
  Jeremy Luke Hill once unwittingly ran into Seth, Guelph's own internationally recognized cartoonist. - Chris Seto, Mercury Tribune

  1 / 2
  I once unwittingly ran into Gregory Gallant — better know as Seth — Guelph's own internationally recognized cartoonist. I had heard of him, of course, and even read some of his work, but I head no idea what he looked like. To me he was just a well-if-somewhat-eccentrically-dressed man having dinner with a woman in a restaurant.

  I was there with my book, reading as I ate, finding some solitude after a long day, but when Seth’s date went to the washroom, he and I struck up a conversation that continued long after she returned and ended with me none the wiser about who he was. It wasn’t until some months later, when I first saw his picture, that I realized his identity.

  I relate this anecdote because I think it speaks to what Seth still is to most people. Despite everything that he’s achieved (and he’s certainly produced a substantial and influential body of cartoons and graphic novels, not to mention the huge mural that currently decorates the exterior wall of The Bookshelf), he remains largely anonymous to the general public. He can still walk down the street, sit in a restaurant, have a conversation, without most people ever recognizing him, even in his hometown.

  There are probably a number of reasons for this, but one of them is certainly the fact that Seth’s chosen art form, the cartoon, has only recently begun receiving greater attention as “serious” literature. There are still a great many people who consider cartoons and graphic novels to be juvenile and frivolous, despite what is now a long tradition of important graphic literature.

  Which is why Seth’s newest book, Clyde Fans, should be taken as another opportunity for the reading public, especially in his hometown, to get to know both him and the art he practises. The book is beautifully produced by Drawn & Quarterly — hard covered with a colour interior and its own slip-case — a substantial and attractive volume.

  The art, having been drawn over something like 20 years, is almost a retrospective of how Seth’s classic-cartoon influenced style has grown and developed over time. In a note to the reader, Seth describes being unsatisfied with how much his style changes from the beginning of the project to the end, so much so that he was tempted (for a moment) to redraw some of the earlier sections, but I’m glad he decided to leave it as it is.

  Not only does the developing style serve as an interesting visual layer to a story that explores questions of time and memory, but it also offers a unique introduction to the trajectory of Seth’s artistic approach.

  The story itself is a patient and subtle exploration of time and nostalgia, family and isolation, memory and dementia. It’s two central figures, sons of the man who founded Clyde Fans as a small family business, both struggle (though in very different ways) with the burden of family inheritance and legacy. In a manner very typical of Seth’s work, the story takes these seemingly mundane elements — a small company that sells fans and a man who collects novelty postcards — and expresses through them a disarming human complexity.

  We are drawn into an unassuming narrative, and then suddenly realize that we’re being implicated in the questions of our own humanity through a medium as unexpected as a fan salesperson and his reclusive brother.

  All of which is to say, if you haven’t yet gotten to know Seth’s work, or if you’re one of those readers who’s still suspicious about the literary merits of graphic novels, Clyde Fans is an excellent introduction to both the author and the genre.

  And if you’re interested to have a look, Seth is launching the new book on Wednesday, May 15, 7 p.m., at the eBar. The evening will include an AV presentation, followed by a moderated Q-and-A with the author.

  Admission is $10, and your ticket will also act as a coupon for $10 off of Clyde Fans at the event.

  So come on out, hear what Seth has to say about his new book, and get him to sign your copy. At the very least, you’ll now recognize him when he’s sitting at the table next to you.

  Jeremy Luke Hill is a publisher at Gordon Hill Press. He writes a monthly column for the Mercury Tribune called Reading Guelph.

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