News Briefs featuring Seth ( back ) SETH, SIKORYAK, WRIGHT, TATSUMI, BELL, and BROWN make the Torontoist 2009 best of list Updated February 9, 2010 Warning: Graphic Content by Dave Howard It’s late December. You haven’t done your holiday shopping and you’re surrounded by happy loved ones you’d like to indulge with a gift. You’d like to get them a book they would really enjoy but probably never think to buy for themselves. A little surprise that is indulgent, luxurious and even a little decadent. A gift that gives them permission to spend a little time on themselves, and when they’re done, have the option to re-gift…I mean…share with others. You’re in luck. You’ve just fallen into the world of the graphic novel. The form’s non-verbal, dreamlike-yet-self-aware text most closely imitates cognition, and can hold moments indefinitely – ready to be revisited again and again. Lovely. But which ones to choose? And for whom? Fortunately for you, 2009 was a stellar year for comics publishing. Let’s start. Absolutely Brilliant Graphic Novels To Impress The Hell Out Of People George Sprott 1894-1975, Seth This is certainly the best book yet in the internationally revered Canadian artist’s career – and that’s saying a lot. Collecting Seth’s existential strip, which appeared in New York Times Magazine in 2006, George Sprott is a serendipitous depiction of a small town celebrity filled with Canadiana both sad and unsentimental, accessible and far-reaching, a fun light read and a poignant tolling of the bell. It is also a simply beautiful book: oversized, hard cover with silver foil lettering, colour glossy pages, and gorgeously designed endpapers. The Book of Genesis, Illustrated by Robert Crumb Probably the most anticipated book to come out this year, the irreverent, controversial, neurotic grandfather of underground comix has given the first book of the Bible an unexpectedly straight treatment with his mighty pen – and to the surprise of all, it really works. It turns out the Bible has enough racy story material that can be told without embellishment and still satisfy the aesthetic of an artist credited for defining the comics underground. Asterios Polyp, David Mazzucchelli The author of probably the second most anticipated book for this year, David Mazzucchelli is half the genius behind Batman: Year One, one of the key books to revive the Batman franchise and the basis for the Batman Begins movie. Mazzucchelli dropped out of superhero comics and famously re-emerged to translate Paul Auster’s City of Glass into comics, garnering widespread critical and literary acclaim just before he disappeared from comics for a while. Asterios Polyp marks his long-awaited return. An examination of meaning and identity, it is simply a beautiful book, rich in formalist comics language experimentation that would make even Scott McCloud blush. Luba, Gilbert Hernandez Hernandez is one of the brothers behind Love and Rockets, the complex, beautifully drawn and multi-storied anti-middle-American soap opera rooted in Latino California. Luba is one of the vast cast’s matriarchs – a force to be reckoned with – and this book collects her stories in one enormous volume. Very much worth it. Masterpiece Comics, R. Sikoryak An artist who can trace his roots way back to Art Spiegelman’s RAW, R. Sikoryak has achieved the near impossible: mashed famous literary works with superhero tropes to create an enormously clever reductionist viewpoing that makes us re-examine our feelings of both genres. With mock covers like “Action Camus,” the work is laugh-out-loud funny. Gifts For Your Sometimes Angst-Ridden Young Adult/Older Teen Skim, Mariko Tamaki/Jillian Tamaki This is a beautifully drawn piece of work that I highly recommend, told through the eyes of Skim, a teenage girl struggling with her own identity as she works though the rituals and limitations imposed upon her by her friends and peers and herself. Drawn in a lovely familiar pencil line that feels like it could have come out of a diary. The Complete Essex County, Jeff Lemire Winner of many awards, including a 2008 Joe Shuster Award for Outstanding Canadian Comic Book Cartoonist and a 2008 Doug Wright Award for Best Emerging Talent, Lemire pays homage to his southern Ontario upbringing with this critically acclaimed farmland tale. Over the years a community is forced to deal with a damaging and long-standing deception – and to try to heal from the fall out. GoGo Monster, Taiyo Matsumoto Originally released in Japanese, this much-lauded story dabbles in magic realism – a new student sees ‘monsters’ wherever he goes and his new friend must decide if they are a figment of his imagination or a real force to be reckoned with. Emotionally resonate, sometimes sinister, and ultimately adventurous. Far Arden, Kevin Cannon A great deal of fun, Far Arden is Cannon’s tale of a noble young man who sails into the Canadian Artic to find the utopian tropical island of Far Arden, only to be thwarted by one after another ridiculously impossible set of people and circumstances. Clever and funny – very much like life, yes? Scott Pilgrim Vol 1-5, Bryan Lee O’Malley Young Canadian cartoonist star and Doug Wright Award winner Brian Lee O’Malley continues to unravel his charming, autobiographical coming-of-age story set in Toronto. Addictive and very likeable – also soon to be a major motion picture, shot in Toronto. True Loves, Jason Turner and Manien Bothma Set in Vancouver, True Loves is a light-hearted romantic comedy about True and Zander, by one of my favourite underground Canadian cartoonists. The Complete Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi This now famous two-book collection of a girl’s emigration from Iran to France to escape the oncoming cultural revolution has been repackaged into one set. A not-atypical Middle-East-meets-West conundrum showing a family’s high expectation and a girl’s rebellion as she is lured by a once-alien culture she has been sent into for her protection. Gifts To Intimidate the Budding Cartoonist The Collected Doug Wright 1, Doug Wright One of the Canadian grandfathers of the cartoon form in the 1950s and 60’s, Doug Wright was once a household name. Now gone, he is the person behind the prestigious cartoonist award that bears his name. Drawn and Quarterly has done well to collect this master’s work. Lynda Johnson says “I don’t think I’d have had the basics needed to do a syndicated comic strip had it not been for Doug Wright.” Yoshihro Tatsumi’s A Drifting Life Tatsumi is well regarded as the grandfather of alternative manga for adults – the precursor to the “graphic novel.” This enormous tome is a fantastic autobiography that has taken 11 years to create. It is indulgent and illuminating, both in terms of his life, and in terms of Japanese comics history. The Art of Osamu Tezuka: God of Manga, Helen McCarthy The Japanese creator of Astro Boy has had an enormous impact on manga and comics the world over. His life and work are collected here in this lavish biography for new readers and those familiar with his work. Hot Potatoe: Fine Ahtwerks, Marc Bell Canada’s own Marc Bell has earned a reputation for groundbreaking work, effectively blurring the distinctions between art and craft, of unique art object and print piece, of comics and fine art, of associative and linear narrative. Here his labyrinth-like creations are bound in a single beautiful book. The Complete Calvin and Hobbes (Calvin & Hobbes) (v. 1, 2, 3), Bill Watterson This box set is the last appearance of Watterson’s comic and it contains the whole strip in it’s entirety. For those who are fans of the strip, this is a real find. You can cast off all you dog-eared, incomplete collections of the strip, and keep this one on the bookshelf. Finally. Sundays with Walt and Skeezix, Frank O. King (Author), Peter Maresca (Editor), Chris Ware (Editor) This oversized book reproduces the legendary Sunday pages of Frank King’s “Gasoline Alley” in it’s heyday, the 1920s and 30’s, in their original newspaper broadsheet size. Certainly the book and art are absolutely beautiful – large and lush – but they are difficult to handle. I was worried the book would become ruined or worse – forgotten. To my surprise, it became one of my eight-year-old’s favourite books: she lays it out on the floor and pores over every corner. Now what parent in the world would stop their child from reading? Walt and Skeezix: Books One, Two and Three These are beautiful and well crafted hardcover editions of Frank King’s “Gasoline Alley.” After reading a few strips you realize they are more than simple jokes or gags, they create a complete quiet, poetic world, against which you may see reflections of your own. These are when the dailies were at their height. Gifts For Impressionable Kids BONE, Jeff Smith Every kid I’ve known who started to read this series could not put it down. Now colourized beautifully, the book is at times slapstick, funny, poetic, poignant – it is the rare breed of comic that is not full of superhero power fantasies that still holds your seven- to eleven-year-old’s attention. Oh, and it’s Canadian. The Toon Treasury of Classic Children’s Comics, Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly These are the classics from the masters of the 1940s and 50’s – those who laid the brickwork down for the graphic space we now inhabit. Chosen by New Yorker art director Mouly and her Pulitzer Prize-winning husband, the legendary Art Spiegelman, in one book you have the best of the best of the cream of the crop, of the silliest, funniest, craziest kids’ comics ever made from the Golden Age. Jellaby, Kean Soo When Toronto’s Kean Soo showed preliminary samples from Jellaby around, the work was quickly snatched up by Disney’s graphic novel imprint Hyperion, and for good reason. I often read comics and books to my daughter, and this is one of the few she really took to and really wanted to read again and again. Try it out. Historical, Journalistic, Biographical Footnotes in Gaza, Joe Sacco Joe Sacco’s Palestine and Safe Area Gorazde pretty much defined comics journalism as a complete, legitimate, and independent genre. His latest work looks at the history of Gaza and the notorious massacre in 1955 of 111 Palestinians by Israeli soldiers. By placing this in context to events since then, we are reminded how precious life is, and how easy it is for people to become statistics. Drop-In, Dave Lapp Dave Lapp splits his time between teaching art to kids in drop-in centres in some of the most dangerous neighbourhoods in Toronto and relentlessly pursuing his dream to create great comics stories. With Drop-In, Lapp has found a way to combine the two: a series of unflinching short stories unfettered by judgment or useless commentary about some of the most damaged people living in some of the worst situations you can imagine. You think you know Toronto? Not for the light hearted, but still recommended reading. Louis Riel, Chester Brown Chester Brown created this biography of Louis Riel many years ago yet it still shows up on Canadian bestseller lists. Why? Because its the kind of timeless book you can refer to again and again. Consider Canadian history’s treatment of this enigmatic personality, as well as how our government treated an “unwanted” people. Now – compare that treatment to today.   click here to read more Featured artists Seth R. Sikoryak Doug Wright            Featured products George Sprott: (1894-1975) The Collected Doug Wright Volume One   The Comics Journal deems GEORGE SPROTT: Updated February 9, 2010 Rich Kreiner’s Yearlong Best of 5 A book that’s sure to be on many “Best of 2009” lists is Seth’s George Sprott: 1894- 1975. This volume represents a significant, sensitive enlargement of a story Seth originally composed for weekly, single-page installments in The New York Times Magazine when that publication was flirting with comics. George Sprott was undoubtedly one of the more satisfying and successful serials the magazine ran and the collected book expands and enhances the narrative in just about every any way you’d care to name. Start with something as obvious as physical size. This volume inflates page dimensions beyond those of the magazine, to a whopping 12” x 14”. Yeah, it’s a relatively superficial quality and a scale rarely exploited by Seth, but he plays it like a maestro. With this extra room the reprinted pages get the titles they look like they always deserved. Edge-to-edge graphic devices become full-fledged artistic Statements. Double-page tableaux become sprawling visions more perfectly fit to and more evocative of their theme. Ice fields, seas of floating bergs, moonlit panoramas of broad, frozen expanses roll out in gestural, painterly, thick lines. In technique and subject they are a kind of Expressionistic Minimalism, tastefully marrying a stark, restrained representation of the emotional terrain with a steely concentration on the contextual matters at hand. The numerous other slight and noteworthy alterations in this text could occupy students of the form for quite a while. The occasional face is refined toward the more overtly cartoonish. Colors are uniformly more worn, faded, outmoded. There’s a more natural place for cussing; ditto nipples on figurines. Given Seth’s skill and discernment, none of the changes can be considered casual. And of course there is that generous addition of new pages. By and large, these take two forms. The first are those great, barren visions. As a category, these would include a pair of opposing, double-page fold-outs that represent Seth’s version of the life-flashing-in-front-of-you experience alleged to unspool at the moment of death. More telling still, the second group of added pages is new comic episodes revealing pivotal moments in the life of Sprott. These go rather directly to fleshing out the portrait of a man relative to his time, an identity cast as a dichotomy on the edition’s paper sleeve: “arctic explorer, television host, raconteur, beloved uncle? Or opportunist, philanderer, deadbeat father, self-centered bore?” This book’s depiction of Sprott’s existence sharpens and deepens that question, even as it makes the answer more self-evident and humane (it doesn’t take a close reading to notice that there’s very little mutually exclusive or inherently contradictory between the two sets of Sprott’s possible roles). But beyond that, this expanded work more carefully sets Sprott’s life within a broader history, a grander portrait of people, place and, especially, time. It harkens back to when television could be imagined as a local industry, when it spoke of, rather than dictated, communal interests … hell, back to when “community” was the relevant unit of diversion and culture. Back, too, to when the snowfields to the north were exotic, humbling vastnesses instead of shrinking, besieged environmental bellwethers. George Sprott is a moving, understated elegy to the disappearance of such an era and such a world. It successfully stirs a nostalgic ache that haunts even as we acknowledge that such a time and place never existed outside the artist’s mind, never apart from the realized object we hold in our hands. With all due respect to Crumb’s Book of Genesis and Mazzucchelli’s Asteros Polyp (and foreseen for Campbell’s promised Alec: The Years Have Pants), George Sprott: 1894- 1975 is the “comic of the year” that I could most readily hand to an adult without either introduction or proviso. click here to read more Featured artist Seth            Featured product George Sprott: (1894-1975) The Newspaper interviews SETH Updated February 9, 2010 Drawn together: Seth and the newspaper by Amy Stupavsky Seth, a.k.a. Gregory Gallant, a.k.a. my hero, has been a mainstay of the indie comics scene for over a decade as a graphic novelist, cartoonist, and illustrator. His most recent book, George Sprott: 1894-1975, is a series of reminiscences about a TV host woven together from the unreliable, contradictory memories of those who knew him. Seth dropped the newspaper a line to talk about his love for the past, the art of cartooning, and unfortunate name choices. the newspaper: A lot of people sit down with a graphic novel and expect the pace and style of a comic book. Your books, however, are more about inaction and reaction than the action itself. The characters seem to internalize a lot more than in comic books, where emotions are readily apparent on the surface. Is there a common thread among your works as far as character development? What kinds of messages are you hoping to convey through your characters? Seth: A long time ago I decided that I was more interested in portraying the interior world of an experience than the exterior one. That is a bit misleading because as a cartoonist you are always drawing the outside of things; you can only hint at the inside of experience. That said, I try to keep my comic books quiet. I'm attracted to things that are slow and contemplative. To be honest, I am attracted to a lot of things that are downright boring. I know that my work is always teetering on the edge of that kind of boredom. I try to keep it from being boring, but I don't worry too much about it. I can only hope that what I find interesting will interest some readers as well. Most comic books are about action because of their pulp origins. That approach has defined the medium. I don't think regular life is much about "action". Quite the opposite, really. Most people's lives are slow in pace. I'm trying to get some of that into the work. All my work is about this is some manner. I'm especially concerned with that profound schism between our inner lives and our outer lives. I don't have any "messages" in my work, but I am trying to convey some sense of "being alive." Disappointment, sadness, regret, and death figure prominently in my stories, but that's probably because I tend to write about old people. I'm a pretty melancholic person, but I'm also generally a very happy person. I don't think sadness and happiness cancel each other out. They complement each other. Depression is another story. That cancels happiness. tn: How did George Sprott come about? S: It came about simply because The New York Times called me up and asked me if I would do a "graphic novel" to serialize in their magazine. I was really trying to finish up my Clyde Fans story, but I couldn't turn them down. I gave them three possible choices for a story. Choice number one was to continue and finish a story I had begun in Toro Magazine but had left unfinished due to an editorial conflict. Choice number two (my favorite at the time) was a quiet, meditative study on a block of abandoned buildings. I looked over my first two choices and instantly knew that I needed to give them a third. It was pure strategic thinking. They were not going to pick number one; they wouldn't want to continue something begun elsewhere. Number two was a shot in the dark, but probably too "poetic" for them. Too artsy. It seemed obvious that there had to be a third option that was a more traditional story and had some human characters in it. Sprott - a rather unformed idea at that point - was what was currently floating around in the back of my brain, and Sprott it was. I figured they would pick it, but I was still hoping against hope that they would go for the second option. In the end, they were correct. Working on Sprott was the more challenging choice, and ultimately the more rewarding for me. I had no specific plans to turn this serialized piece into a book, but when Drawn & Quarterly asked me what I was planning to do with the work, I decided to expand on it and make it into its present form. This was another lucky accident. Expanding the work deepened it to some degree. I like the strip much better in its final form than in the original magazine run. tn: Many of your works (Palookaville and It’s a Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken) seem autobiographical, or at least semi-autobiographical. Is the Seth in your books the Seth from real life? How are you the same and how do you differ? S: Well, the easy answer is no. The character in the strips isn't really like me, mostly because it's difficult to create a reasonable facsimile of yourself without putting more effort or time into it. When I use myself in a comic strip, it is usually for a straightforward purpose: to capture some moment or to relate some thought. There's not usually enough complexity to the character to really transmit my personality. The Seth in the comics is probably a lot more one-note than I am in real life (I hope). Lately, I've been working on some strips in my sketchbook in which I've been trying to write a memoir of sorts. I'm hoping to dig a little deeper into my own character, but it's hard to say. It's pretty impossible to present an objective view of yourself. Just trying to know yourself is difficult enough, but to put it down on paper accurately is a daunting task. The character of Seth that shows up in my strips certainly represents aspects of my personality. He is just a little more consistent in his behaviour than I am. Real human beings have more contradictions. tn: Your characters are obsessed with the past, reaching back to days gone by in a search for meaning. Your own dress sense and style of drawing are also quite anachronistic. Why do you continually revisit that theme in your works? Why is it important? S: Mostly, it's the aesthetics of that period. I am very drawn to the look and design of the early twentieth century. It was an era - say, 1890 to 1950 - when things were designed with a great deal of care. You can look at almost any common item from that time and see that it is superior to an equal item from today. In the fifties our culture started a downhill slide into cheapness. The current North American landscape is shoddy and ugly. This is the direct result of a culture that has consistently undermined the value of beauty. I am not saying that nothing of beauty is created today, but it is the exception, not the rule. In that earlier period, the ratio was better. I am also not saying that 1920 was a superior time to live in than 2010. That would be an impossible statement to make. The changes are too complicated, some good and some not so good. On a sheer level of aesthetics, however, this time period loses. I'm drawn to the beauty of what was left behind. It almost seems as if that time never even existed, like a dream world. It seems utterly unconnected with today's world. I also find the past fascinating for the simple reason that it no longer exists. There is something about the process of the present fading into the past that is profound and sad... and strange. I think about it constantly. I feel hyperaware that I am moving through time, and that as I pass from one moment to the next those experiences have become inaccessible to me. In some ways I cannot really accept that the past is gone. I feel like it still lives on somewhere, and that I could step into it again if I could just turn the right corner or put certain objects into the right arrangement. There is something about the early twentieth century that has a fetishistic quality for me. Whenever I hear any date from the 1920s or 30s, I get a little thrill. It probably comes from growing up with old parents. tn: My childhood died a little bit when the ROM renovated its dinosaur exhibit. I kept thinking of the scene in It’s a Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken when your character visits the museum. I have to ask: what was your reaction to the ROM’s alterations? How do you feel about the changing face of Toronto? S: I felt that way as well. I actually haven't been back to the ROM since they changed it. It depressed me tremendously. I think the new exterior is an absolute abomination: the typical, ham-fisted, shoddy show-offishness of certain kinds of modern architecture. A sad piece of work. I have a lot of fond feelings for Toronto because I lived there for 20 years - 20 formative and important years in my life. That said, I don't think of Toronto as a very beautiful city. So much of what was wonderful was knocked down before I even moved there in 1980. It's a city with little interest in its history or the charm of the past. Toronto is about the present, always trying to be "world class." I always found that kind of embarrassing. Still, everytime I go back I feel a mixture of joy and sadness when I look around. Joy when I notice some restaurant or shop that I use to love that is still in business, or sadness when I see just the opposite: some well-remembered place that is gone. I think this is pretty normal for people as they grow older. They watch the landscape of their lives vanish. Bit by bit the city they knew becomes a city of memory, existing only inside the body. It can be depressing. It really causes an ache when you think that the Dinosaur Room from the ROM isn't there any longer, that it's only there in your mind. I can see it so perfectly in my memory. I would like to believe that it still exists somewhere in a concrete form, but you simply cannot get there. tn: Has your fan base changed since you started writing? S: It's hard to tell for sure since I don't have that much contact with them. I suspect my readers have grown older along with me. In the earlier part of my "career," my core audience was made up of young hipsters. But that was back when comics were more "underground" or "alternative." They've been "mainstreamed" in the last decade. I write a lot about older people, and I suspect that a 20-year-old might not be all that interested in a story about an old fat man rambling on about his life. Who knows, though. Very young people still come up to me at book signings. When I was 20, I was interested in such topics, so maybe I am selling 20-year-olds short. tn: Who is your biggest inspiration? S: That changes from year to year. When I was in my early twenties, I would have said Robert Crumb, Woody Allen, and J.D. Salinger. Out of that group, only Crumb would still make a top ten today. He's still a powerful inspiration. In recent years, I've been influenced by the Canadian book designer and illustrator Thoreau MacDonald. Alain Resnais's film Last Year at Marienbad has left a tremendous impression on me. Nabokov has also been in my thoughts lately. In cartooning, Chris Ware and Ben Katchor are artists I enjoy and learn from. Both these men have opened my eyes in ways I can't even begin to describe. I am a cultural sponge, taking in great amounts of influence from other artists and writers. Some influences are short-lived while others remain active for decades. tn: Do you find it easier to draw or write? What is the process of crafting a book like for you? S: Drawing is easier. It uses a different part of the brain than writing. Writing requires a kind of laser-like focus. I can do several things while I am drawing. I like the process of drawing because it is busy work. It keeps me busy all day long and gives my life focus. That's one of the pleasant things about cartooning. The "writing" period, where you work out the content and storytelling of a strip, is relatively short. Then you have a long period where you draw it. This long period is mostly made up of drudgery. It's not taxing in the same way that writing is. I am grateful I am not a "real" writer. I would not like concentrating like that every hour of the day. It's stressful. Putting together a book is a joy. It's all aesthetics, pure beauty. Yes, ideas are behind every choice, but the main point of it is to create something of beauty. I love books, and juggling the various elements that make up a book design is a pleasant task. The actual process changes from book to book, but there is no mystery to it. It's a simple job of taking the subject matter of the book (say, a poetry book) and finding the visual key that describes it (say, landscape) and then building an aesthetic framework for the text to sit inside. Every decision (What will the endpapers look like? Are there illustrations in the book? Is there a dust jacket?) is then made toward making that framework appropriate and as beautiful as possible. tn: What are the freedoms and constraints of working within your medium compared to prose novels and conventional comic books? S: That is a very complicated question. It could take hours of talk to answer. Let me simplify by saying that comics and prose have similar abilities to capture life, but different tools. The main difference between the two is, of course, the drawings. In comics, the drawings supply all the description you would find in a novel. In some ways the drawings are superior to description because it can be a subtler way of presenting information. You don't have to tell the reader that a character is wearing a red sweater, you simply see it. However, the drawing style of the cartoonist can be a drawback. A cartoonist must render the world, and a prose writer can allow his reader to visualize his own reality. In some ways the prose writer has a more direct access to "reality" since the cartoonist can only present visual symbols for the reader to translate into real objects. The drawings are a plus and a minus. I will say this for comics: They are one of the only mediums that cannot be experienced by a group. Comics are an entirely singular experience, meant to be read alone. The words and pictures can only come together in the mind of a solitary reader. Prose can be read aloud to an audience. Doing this with a comic just emphasizes how fragmented its various elements are. Comics are meant to be experienced inside the body. As for mainstream comics, I think they serve a different goal than mine. I am aiming to describe the real world in some manner. Mainstream comics are about escapism and genre thrills. We use some of the same cartooning language. As I grow older, I see that there is less and less common ground between these two worlds. tn: Chester Brown figured prominently in It’s a Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken. Are you friends in real life? Is there a rivalry between the two of you? Are you planning any collaborations? S: Chester is my best friend and has been for years. I have learned a lot from him over the years. He's a real inspiration, a great cartoonist. There is a real rivalry between us, especially because we are both pretty competitive. Especially Chet!! We rarely collaborate. I'm not a collaborator. I like to work alone. We have been doing a long "jam-strip" for a few years in a sketchbook, but I have let it languish over the last year. It is sitting on a shelf growing dusty. I should get back to that. tn: Why did you choose Seth as a nom de plume? S: It's a boring story. It goes back to my youthful days as a punk. I wanted a scary pseudonym and I made of list of names. I picked Seth. I shudder to imagine what else was on that list. Thank God that Seth is, at least, a real name. It could have been much worse. tn: If you were a character in a book, who would you be and why? S: That's a tough question. I'm not too sure I would want to be in many of the books I read. I love The Stone Angel, but I wouldn't wish to be the central character. I recently read Nabokov's Pnin, and again, I do not wish to be Pnin. I am probably thinking of the wrong books. I wouldn't mind being Badger from The Wind in the Willows. He has a nice home: secluded, quiet, and comfortable. Plus, he is sensible and wise. Or perhaps Charlotte from Charlotte's Web. She was smart, kind, a good friend, and a good writer. tn: How do your graphic novels reflect the style of the prose novelists who’ve influenced you? S: I am a great fan of Alice Munro, but I doubt that I have taken much stylistically from her. I don't think you can. It's easier to take stylistic influence in drawing. However, I think I have learned a tremendous amount from her about characterization. You can't absorb another writer's insights, but you can learn where to look inside yourself for such insight. I have been reading Nabokov lately and I am really responding to the cleverness of his narrative structures. Great writers offer something to aim for, even if it is beyond your reach. tn: You’ve done a lot of design and illustration work for various books and publications (artwork for The New Yorker, Mark Kingwell and Joshua Glenn’s The Idler’s Glossary, the cover art for The Portable Dorothy Parker reissue). How do you choose your commercial projects? S: They usually choose me. I can think of a million books I would love to design, but the problem is that it isn't up to me. I'd love to do a deluxe edition of Margaret Laurence's The Stone Angel. I love that book, but no publisher is calling me about it. That kind of leaves me out in the cold. Truthfully, I pick the work that comes to me. That's not to say I will do just anything; I have to feel some affinity for the subject. A lot of the time people come to me to supply some sort of whimsy or urbanity to a project. I don't mind that. It's an element of my work, but I prefer to be offered something where I might be able to go a little deeper. It's a tightrope walk between surface style and deeper content. I like it when both elements come together in a project. That's the kind of job I leap at. Just recently I designed the package for the Criterion reissue of Leo McCarey's wonderful thirties film Make Way for Tomorrow. A perfect job: wonderful, moving content and a 1930s context for the design. Heaven!   click here to read more Featured artist Seth            Featured products It’s A Good Life If You Don’t Weaken (PB) George Sprott: (1894-1975)   The Telegraph-Journal shows that GEORGE SPROTT is loved by all ages Updated February 2, 2010 Young readers as literary critics Books: Frye Festival event sees Moncton jury debate two Canadian novels tonight by Mike Landry Forget boring book reports - Moncton-area teens are making fiction fight. First in the ring are Douglas Coupland's The Gum Thief and Hadassa by Myriam Beaudoin. A jury of 18 young readers from six regional anglophone and francophone high schools will discuss the books in a roundtable debate this evening at the Aberdeen Cultural Centre café in Moncton. Organized by the Frye Festival's school youth program, the event is part of the inaugural Frye Academy Award. After a second roundtable in March, featuring Tarmac by Nicolas Dickner and George Sprott (1894-1975) by Seth, the jury will select a winning author from the four contemporary Canadian novels. The competing books are notable in how hip they are. They are not young adult fiction. They're cool books any adult would read. "Sometimes we might not give teenagers enough credit. It doesn't necessarily need to be a book about teens, or with teen-specific themes, to interest them," says Roxanne Richard, assistant director for the Frye Festival. "They're mostly Grade 12 students, so they're just one year away from either entering the workforce, moving out of home or pursuing their studies. So it's not unusual to have them reading books that adults would be reading." But cartoonist/author Seth found it was unusual to have his book included in the competition. George Sprott (1894-1975) first appeared as a serial comic in the New Yorker, and examines the life of a "charming, foolish old man." "I hadn't really given any thought while working on it to any young people reading it, to tell you the truth. It's so clearly about an old man," says Seth from his home in Guelph, Ont. "I'm curious how young people will even read it." Douglas Coupland is pleased to see The Gum Thief included. "I love The Gum Thief very much. I was glad to see others were liking it, too," writes Coupland, who's on holiday in Palm Springs. "It's set in the current world, so there'll be an immediacy to it they might click with." Financed by Canadian Heritage's official languages program, the two English and French books were selected by a volunteer committee of university students and post-grad readers last summer. Richard specifically wanted them to choose books that you normally wouldn't see in a class curriculum. "As much as all those classics have their merit and they should be read in schools, we wanted to do something different," she says. Recruiting was done by teachers at selected high schools the festival had worked with in the past, but they're looking to expand to other regions in the future. The selected jurors this year all share a love of reading and an excitement to be part of the new project. "My teacher had confronted two of my friends first. So I thought, why not join them," says Anna Nunokawa, from Moncton High School. "We're enthusiastic about reading. We discuss books. If we do it on our time, why not do it with other students?" Nunokawa was only aware of Seth's book before becoming a juror. She had never read any of the battling authors, and enjoyed branching out. The competing books offered a "fresh perspective" to reading beyond deciphering universal themes in school books like Wuthering Heights. "It's an easier read to get started and dive right in, enjoy it and have a more visceral response to the reading rather than having to analyze and find themes. I really like that." Samir Farhloul, who attends Mathieu-Martin High School in Dieppe and also plays football, basketball and volleyball, is one of the few male jurors. Although the festival is going to up its recruiting efforts to get more boys, Farhloul says he doesn't mind the gender split. It's the books that are important. "Reading is one of my favourite pastimes," says Farhloul. "I'm doing myself a favour by reading more books that I haven't read before, and would have never read if I hadn't joined the jury." More important than gender, Farhloul liked that students from both English and French schools were on the jury. He hopes it will help clear up any misunderstanding that comes when you're not reading in your first language. Annie Crawford LeBlanc, from Harrison Trimble High School, is ashamed to admit it, but she was surprised French books could be as, if not more, interesting than English ones. A voracious reader, Crawford LeBlanc counts Oscar Wilde, J.D. Salinger and F. Scott Fitzgerald as her favourites. She's also read lots of Coupland, and is "super excited to discuss him further, in detail." Since finishing the book she's been passing it around to her friends and suggesting they read Haddas as well. "I think it's quite an honour to be chosen," she says. "To be part of something where people are valuing my opinion to the extent that it is a key element in a reason why a book would be set above others because I feel the author is superior. It's such a great thing to be a part of." click here to read more Featured artist Seth            Featured product George Sprott: (1894-1975) WHAT IT IS and GEORGE SPROTT are comics of the decade says Omnivoracious Updated January 19, 2010 Graphic Novel Friday: Comics of the Decade by Alex Carr After a few years on the wagon during school, I came back to comics in 2000 and returned to my long-boxes just in time to witness a tipping point in the industry. In the 1990s, the top billing generally went to artists working with mainstream superheroes (and occasionally moonlighting as spokesmen for button-fly jeans), but in the past ten years, the industry made a marked shift in its spotlight on talent. This isn't to say that comics artistry has declined in importance--of course, where would comics be without pencils and inks?--but a balance has returned, and writers are once again held in as high of esteem. And this leveling of talent and emphasis allowed for the advancement of more personal storytelling both in and outside of DC and Marvel, producing some of the most literary projects yet in the medium. Add to these works the box office domination of capes and cowls, and all of sudden comics are reviewed on NPR, and no one bats an eye when the medium has a New York Times Bestseller List devoted to it. For our picks for Comics of the Decade, we tried to find a similar balance between indie and mainstream, superheroes and comics lit--and a few cases where it all blended together. We narrowed this list by naming titles that set the bar for the next decade. Black Hole by Charles Burns Jimmy Corrigan by Chris Ware Promethea by Alan Moore and J.H. Williams III David Boring by Daniel Clowes Fun Home by Alison Bechdel Planetary by Warren Ellis and John Cassaday Bottomless Belly Button by Dash Shaw Y: the Last Man by Brian K. Vaughan, Pia Guerra, Jose Marzan, et al. New X-Men by Grant Morrison, Frank Quitely, et al. What It Is by Lynda Barry But not all that is great about comics is necessarily new, and there's no doubt that this decade saw a vast improvement in archival and collected editions. There was so much material that we had to break these objets d'art into their own separate category. Below are our picks for Comics Archives and Anthologies of the Decade: Complete Peanuts (Fantagraphics) Love and Rockets Library (Fantagraphics) DC Comics's Absolute Editions (Sandman, Watchmen, Crisis on Infinite Earths) The Complete Calvin and Hobbes (Andrews McMeel) An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, and True Stories: Vol. 1 and Vol. 2. (Yale University Press) Creepy and Eerie Archives (Dark Horse) The Best American Comics (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) Bone: The Complete Cartoon Epic in One Volume (Cartoon Books) McSweeney's Issue 13 (McSweeney's) MOME (Fantagraphics) And just so I can sleep tonight, here's what the rest of the comics list would have looked like if this were a Top 25: All Star Superman by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely Asterios Polyp by David Mazzucchelli Astonishing X-Men by Joss Whedon and John Cassaday Blankets by Craig Thompson Clumsy by Jeffrey Brown Criminal by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips Daredevil by Brian Michael Bendis and Alex Maleev Eightball #23 by Daniel Clowes Fables by Bill Willingham, Mark Buckingham, Lan Medina, et al. George Sprott: (1894-1975) by Seth Hellboy by Mike Mignola, et al. Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi Scott Pilgrim by Bryan Lee O'Malley Stitches: A Memoir by David Small The Ultimates by Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch The Umbrella Academy by Gerard Way and Gabriel Bá Ok, that's more like a Top 26, but we had to cut the list somewhere. Here's to another ten years of remarkable comics. Up, up, and away.   click here to read more Featured artists Seth Lynda Barry            Featured products What It Is George Sprott: (1894-1975)   GEORGE SPROTT makes CBR's Top 100 Comics of 2009 list Updated January 19, 2010 CBR'S TOP 100 COMICS OF 2009, #100-76 by Kiel Phegley Each year, CBR wraps its coverage of the comics industry with a virtual nerd cage match to determine the very best comics of the year. Every single CBR staffer – from our news team to our all-star columnists, from CBR's many bloggers to our legion of reviewers – had the chance to chip in their favorite books of the year with only the highest vote-getters ranking up on our massive top 100 comics list, and this year neither the staff nor the comics disappointed. 2009 was a year bursting at the seams with big names, big releases and big news. Though the economy's been down and the business of comics has been changing, there was still an abundance of great comics last year to choose from, from the top flight superhero and genre periodicals of the direct market to the astonishingly varied manga and graphic novels ruling book store sales to the oh so independent comics of the festival circuit and the web. And while it's nearly impossible for even the combined staff of CBR to have read every single ongoing series, miniseries, one-shot, graphic novel and web comic published in and throughout 2009, we are confident that you'll find no better indicator of the breadth and quality of the industry as it stands today than right here. So read on to see who ranked in spots 100 through 76, and head back each day this week for more of the Best 100 Comics of 2009! #97. George Sprott Written & Illustrated By: Seth Published By: Drawn and Quarterly Sad yes, but lyrical and lovely, and much more of a critique against nostalgia and its trappings than some critics would like to think. – Robot 6 Contributor Chris Mautner click here to read more Featured artist Seth            Featured product George Sprott: (1894-1975) SETH interviewed in The Link Updated January 5, 2010 Northern nostalgia Comic book artist Seth on old age, biography and Canadiana by Madeline Coleman To hear comic book artist Seth tell it, writing fiction might be the most revealing thing a person can do. “I think it’s important to dig deeper when you’re writing. I’m not sure whether it’s important it be autobiographical when you put the material out,” he said. “I’m not sure why honesty is important, but it feels important.” Seth, born Gregory Gallant, is the author of George Sprott, a fictional biography that questions the honesty of both the writer and his subject. The book begins as the protagonist, a fading television personality, unknowingly enters his last earthly hours. Brief snatches of Sprott’s life provide the tenuous framework for a biography that Seth says is as much about what we know as what we assume. The Guelph-based artist questioned biographers’ ability to truly understand their subjects’ internal lives. “It would be nice sometimes if [biographers] would admit they’re interpreting,” he said of the oft-unrealistic level of detail in most biographies. “I guess that’s one of the secrets of good biography: if you can get the reader on side with you, then they stop challenging where you’re getting your information from.” Seth first garnered attention in the early ‘90s with a comic series called Palookaville, following with the graphic novel It’s a Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken, a fictional work that was widely mistook for autobiography. George Sprott, released last May, was originally serialized in The New York Times Magazine. Sprott echoes the themes explored in the two books that preceded it, Clyde Fans: Book One and Wimbledon Green. All three star men well into the latter halves of their lives. Seth’s interest in elderly protagonists hits close to home. He grew up with older parents that he called “very story-oriented.” “I always knew I was very involved in them and very interested in them, but I didn’t realize that involvement was a primary thing,” he said. “Now when I think, ‘What’s an interesting story?’ I immediately start thinking about an old person talking about their life.” His penchant for the past has earned Seth the label “nostalgic.” He recently brought his images of early 20th century architecture off the page in the form of a model city he calls Dominion, which he said he imagines to be “somewhere in northern Ontario,” and which may soon make an appearance at Montreal’s Canadian Centre for Architecture. Seth may be interested in the days of yore, but he is far from faithful to it. Although George Sprott is primarily set in 1975, the year of Sprott’s death, Seth happily omitted bad suits and mutton chops from his drawings. “It’s almost like it was not the same 1975 I was in, because in a way it was like just a strange little rarefied George Sprott world,” said the artist, who was born in 1962. “George is very isolated as a figure, so I almost made it point to keep his world always a bit dated, even for 1975. When you see him, it still feels like 1960.” Sprott spends his early years undertaking—and filming—multiple arctic expeditions, something which later becomes the basis for his television show. Northern Highlights, as it’s called, is entirely based upon watching and discussing these films, reliving past glories over and over again. His image of himself as a “gentleman explorer” and his purported connection to the Great White North is, said Seth, based on figures who went north with what he calls “a kind of foolish imperialism.” It is also a direct reflection of the myths inherent in Canadian identity. “We feel like we’re a country of the land, but we’re really a land of urban experience now,” Seth concluded. “In the ‘50s and ‘60s, all that kind of imagery of Canada—of the lumberjacks and the Mounties and the frontier, it all got modernized into a pop culture image. I think the imagery we have about Canada now is all souvenir images. We think of it all as something that could go on the back of a sweater. It doesn’t really have a meaning to us anymore.”   click here to read more Featured artist Seth            Featured product George Sprott: (1894-1975)   Fast Forward Weekly talks to SETH about GEORGE SPROTT Updated January 5, 2010 Melancholic mining of the past Seth collects the life of George Sprott into one beautiful book by Bryn Evans Seth is one of Canada’s most acclaimed cartoonists, with works like Palooka-Ville and Wimbledon Green part of the modern cartoon cannon. His latest, George Sprott, is one of his best. It’s a biographical tale, peeking into the life of its titular antihero — TV talk show host, deadbeat dad, Arctic explorer and unrepentant curmudgeon. The book is an expanded version of a series of strips that originally ran in The New York Times Magazine. “[Editor] Sheila Glaser offered the spot to me and I said, ‘Yes,’” says Seth. “I was very busy when she called and had sworn to myself that I would devote the next year to working on my book Clyde Fans, but the offer was too tempting to turn down. I’m glad I didn't, or George Sprott probably never would have been drawn.” The serialized nature of the work presented some challenges for Seth, the worst of which, he says, was working on a strict deadline. “They asked me for three proposed ideas, and George was definitely the thinnest. However, after they expressed interest in it I had to resolve that situation — so I went out to a hotel with a typewriter and a pack of cigarettes and just hashed it out.” He then took the idea of the fragmentation resulting from a weekly publication schedule and built it into the book. “I wanted George to be a bit of a mystery to the reader. By breaking the narrative into a bunch of small pieces and allowing the reader to assemble it in their own minds, I hoped to create a fuller picture of a human being by actually giving them less information.” Like most of Seth’s works, Sprott is a melancholic tale, though its preoccupation with the big questions (death, eternity) is buoyed by digressions on everything from the history of Canadian broadcasting to book publishing. “I think all my stories are kind of the same,” says Seth, who’s real name is Gregory Gallant and who currently lives with his wife and two cats in Guelph, Ont. “I always want to write about older people looking back at their lives. To me, this is the basic idea of a story. I don't know why — it probably comes from having grown up with older parents who talked a lot about their pasts.” He says stories of romance and modern exploits don’t interest him. “I'm always drawn to the idea of looking back. I guess I feel that death and old age are what add ‘flavour’ to life. They hang around in the background of our thinking, making everything sad, sweet or tragic. It's certainly not an original insight but I think it’s a true one.” Additionally, the collected version of George Sprott is bursting with different visual styles, from newspaper strips to portraiture, landscapes and even photos of cardboard models Seth created to show George’s favourite haunts. It’s a wonderful blend of his unique mix of ’50s flair, commercial art and bouncy classic cartoon style. Seth says that in his early cartooning days, stretching back to the ’80s, he made a conscious effort to study certain cartoonists as a way of decoding their secrets. “At this point in my career, the influences and styles that are evident in my work have been absorbed long ago,” he says. “The newspaper strips or the magazine cartoonists that inform my drawing are so fully integrated that I no longer even think about them when I am working.” Sprott also allows Seth to digress on one of his favourite topics: collecting. Along with cartoonist pals Chester Brown and Joe Matt, he has been collecting classic strips and books for years. “I am a collector by nature — there’s no doubt about it,” he says. “I go through phases of what I collect but the collecting is a constant. Looking for old things is my idea of fun — antique stores and junk shops are like museums of the mundane. I am always fascinated (and sometimes touched) to paw through the scattered remainders of other people’s lives. I am very aware that my own things will find their way to these spots as well.” “As an artist you are tying to leave something permanent behind you — to explain how you felt when you were alive — but it’s a hopeless task,” he adds. “At some point in the future all record of your existence will vanish. I've often thought it would be an interesting story to follow all the fragments of a person's life into the future until that moment — 1,000 years hence when the very last fragment proving they were here finally disappears.” click here to read more Featured artist Seth            Featured product George Sprott: (1894-1975) Spotlight on SETH in the Calgary Herald Updated January 5, 2010 Graphic novelist seth finds nostalgic look at Canada through multilayered character by Nancy Tousley A sure sign that the graphic novel had arrived was the cover story on The New York Times Magazine of July 11, 2004, which was promoted with the tag line How Cool is Comics Lit? The simple fact of its existence answered the question: very cool. The story, Not Funnies by Charles McGrath, turned the spotlight on the top practitioners of the genre in North America, among them Art Spielgelman, Chris Ware, Daniel Clowes, Adrian Tomine, Joe Sacco and two Canadians, Chester Brown and Seth. Seth's next memorable appearance in the Times magazine was in The Funny Pages, where his latest book George Sprott 1894-1975, first appeared as a serial that ran on 25 consecutive Sundays from Sept. 26, 2006, to March 25, 2007. Following the inimitable Chris Ware and Jaime Hernandez, the 47-year-old Canadian, based in Guelph, Ont., was the third cartoonist to appear on The Funny Pages, which actually is given over to just one page. Because of the limits set by its publication in a newspaper magazine, the serial strip with its staccato rhythms is one of Seth's most comic-like works. His favoured form is the graphic novel, which George Sprott 1894-1975 gradually added up to. True to this genre of comics-like books, which is written for adults and has serious themes, Seth's picture novella is not a funny book, though it will provoke wry smiles from the conjunction of words and pictures, which in Seth's work often follow two different trains of thought. "Basically the strength of the graphic novel in my mind is that you are working with visual language," says Seth in an interactive New York Times feature. "It allows you to sort of set up symbols that you work on the page that represent other things. You are not actually drawing a teapot, for example, you are drawing a symbol that represents a teapot. It's much like the way that letters in the alphabet are put together to form more complicated thoughts that the reader interprets. I think that's the way the graphic novel works, too." Ideally, he says, the graphic novel is a distilled combination of poetry and graphic design. George Sprott 1894-1975, the picture novella published by Drawn &Quarterly, is an "expanded and remastered" version of the Funny Pages serial. The story relates Sprott's life from conception to death from the perspective of 1975, the year in which he dies at age 81. Seth tells his story though a series of fragments, using the device of the unreliable narrator who fumbles and has to start again, Sprott's memories of the past, and interviews conducted after he dies, which are the recollections of people who knew him. Given the fact that the narrator is not so omniscient and that people remember Sprott differently, the picture of him that emerges is multilayered and ambiguous. Was this former Arctic adventurer who became the TV host of Northern Hi-Lites and a lecturer on the North a failed seminarian, an opportunistic cad, philanderer and self-centred bore? Or is he a significant explorer, raconteur, beloved TV celebrity and loving uncle? Even as the countdown to Sprott's demise ticks by in hours and minutes, the jury remains out on his measure as a man. Seth's reputation as one of our great cartoonists rests as soundly on the complexities he is able to bring to the genre as it does on his abilities as a designer of exquisite panels, strips and pages, rendered in his characteristic chiaroscuro. The artist creates a convincing, detailed world with rich textures and rhythmic pacing on pages that appear to emit their own light. He adjusts the pace of the brilliantly designed folio-size novella with the "long notes" of double spreads of cold, silent Arctic landscapes that recall Lawren Harris and the Group of Seven and pop Arctic imagery. These spreads, which reflect the place of the North in the Canadian imagination, create pauses for reflection in the story. Single full-page photographs of cardboard models of three buildings from Seth's fictional town of Dominion, punctuate the flat pages with cartoon-like, three-dimensional objects. Present time in the book, the mid 1970s, is the period in which Seth, who was born Gregory Gerrard in Clinton, Ont., was growing up in small town Ontario. Sprott is a compilation of several real people Seth encountered, who include a TV host whose Arctic shows Seth watched as a 10-year-old boy, Pierre Berton, Seth's father and even bits of himself. "The texture of the time I grew up with is engraved on my mind," says Seth, who chose his nom de plume during his heavy-metal goth days later on in Toronto, where he lived for 20 years before moving to Guelph in 1999. The elegiac tone of George Sprott 1894-1975 is set as much for the passing of an era in Canadian culture as it is for the passing of the novella's aged and rotund protagonist, who falls asleep during his own TV show. The book charts Sprott's decline with the decline of his world, a time in the late 1960s and 1970s when, Seth says, "the idea of Canada and the pop culture of it was very strong."   click here to read more Featured artist Seth            Featured product George Sprott: (1894-1975)   GEORGE SPROTT review in the Calgary Herald Updated December 14, 2009 Graphic Novels by Nancy Tousley 32 STORIES: THE COMPLETE OPTIC NERVE MINI-COMICS Adrian Tomine Adrian Tomine (Summer Blonde, Shortcomings) started drawing credible mini-comics so early that this boxed set of eight booklets -- an introduction and seven facsimile issues of Optic Nerve -- could almost be considered juvenilia. He was 17 when he published No. 1, and graduated from high school and left home between No. 4 and No. 5. By No. 7, he was well on the way to developing the distinctive linear style and subject matter that have made him one of the top graphic novelists in North America. Watching him do it is cool. GEORGE SPROTT 1894-1975 Seth Few artists deliver as much complexity and artistry to a graphic novel as Seth. This stately, beautifully designed picture novella is the "remastered" version of Seth's serial of the same name, which appeared in the New York Times Sunday Magazine in 2006-07. The melancholic, bittersweet story of a not altogether likable man, it is also the evocation of a golden era in Canada's recent past, whose passage is marked by the passages of Sprott's life. Only Chris Ware lends as much feeling and atmosphere to a graphic story. AD: NEW ORLEANS AFTER THE DELUGE Josh Neufeld This gripping book about hurricane Katrina is a non-fiction account of the storm and the life-altering experiences of seven diverse New Orleanians, gleaned from interviews, media reports, blogs and Neufield's experience in the storm's aftermath as a Red Cross volunteer. The story, which begins one week before the storm, captures horrors of the disaster along with the character of New Orleans. The doctor, who lives in the French Quarter, throws a hurricane party before the flooding begins, then helps everyone in the neighbourhood he can. AD: After the Deluge began as a webcomic at www.smith-mag. net/afterthedeluge/ that expands the story into a hypertext with a number of interesting links. RED: A HAIDA MANGA Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas Red represents a new form of graphic storytelling, Haida manga, invented by Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas. The British Columbia artist melds a traditional Haida tale about Red, a leader obsessed with avenging his sister's kidnapping, and traditional Haida imagery, with graphic and mass-circulation aspects of Japanese manga. This beautiful, fullcolour book is read page by page, but the four-metre-wide assemblage of original watercolours, from which the book's pages are printed, becomes a rich overall image in which black Haida form lines connect to superimpose three symbolic figures over the whole. This view is printed on the inside of the dust cover. The artist advises you to buy two books and take them apart to arrange the big picture. TALKING LINES: THE GRAPHIC STORIES OF R.O. BLECHMAN The wiggly, broken, space-making lines, the well-honed wit and the wry ironies of R.O. Blechman's single panel cartoons are well known to readers of The New Yorker. But this great veteran innovator has done longer works, too, from one to several pages in length. They are compiled here and many several have not been published before. Among the latter is Magicat (1972), whose attempts to make gold with butter and heavy cream land him in a discussion of ethics and politics with his sidekick, Cornelius, a cockroach. Sounds like many a New York kitchen. MOOMIN: THE COMPLETE TOVE JANSSON COMIC STRIP, VOL. 4 What seems at first like food for an acquired taste blooms on the palate with repeated exposure. Finnish writer and illustrator Tove Jansson has a fey sense of humour and gentle satire that relishes absurdities. Only the heartless could not fall for Moomin, Snorkmaiden, Mymble, Snufkin, and Moomin Pappa and Mamma. Jansson's wit and sophistication make Moomin a delightful read for children and adults. A delicious offering from Vol. 4, of an eventual set of five: Snorkmaiden Goes Rococo. THE COLLECTED DOUG WRIGHT: CANADA'S MASTER CARTOONIST Seth and Brad MacKay More than a collected works, this oversized book with a candy-apple red foil cover is an all-out tribute to Doug Wright (1917-1983), who was the best loved and most widely read Canadian cartoonist of the 1950s and '60s. Wright's creation, a rambunctious little boy called Nipper, predates Charlie Brown and Dennis the Menace. Drawn in elegant verticals with innovative use of spot colour, Wright's strip about family life in the 1950s and '60s was frequently hilarious, and often fraught, and had a realistic ring. click here to read more Featured artist Seth            Featured product George Sprott: (1894-1975) The Uniter interviews SETH Updated December 14, 2009 Memory and looking back Canadian cartoonist Seth reflects on his work and what makes comics art by C. Jordan Crosthwaite He is largely regarded as one of the best and most innovative cartoonists at work today, and he goes by one name only: Seth. Known to his mother as Gregory Gallant, Seth has several volumes of his own work and has also edited an anthology of Doug Wright cartoons called Doug Wright: Canada’s Master Cartoonist. His most recent original work is George Sprott: 1894-1975. The cartoonist, who lives in Guelph, Ont., was at the University of Winnipeg on Tuesday, Oct. 20 to give a lecture at the University of Winnipeg. Seth has dedicated his life to the medium of cartoons, comics and graphic novels. He’s as much an artist as he is a comic historian and collector. “The funny thing about collecting is that it has almost been indivisible from comic books and that I think has a lot to do with the fact that you had to collect things. Especially as a cartoonist, you had to collect things, if you wanted to discover the origins of your own medium,” the 47-year-old said during a wide-ranging interview at the Inn at the Forks, a few hours after his appearance at the U of W. When Seth was coming into his own artistic practice and digging deep into the history of comics, he was forced to become an authority on comics as he dug a niche into the comic world. “To find the history of your medium, there might have been only one or two reference books. And I know now they are full of inaccuracies. It meant comic book shops and second-hand bookstores,” he said. Seth is turning his wealth of personal knowledge into a more solidified record of comics and cartooning. He is partially laying down a history of comics, as seen in his history of Doug Wright. “I like the idea of bringing these things back into the world in concrete form. I like the idea of artists of the past getting their dues now. I have a real respect in the artists that came before me and a real interest in what they did.” If there is anyone left in the world that doesn’t recognize comics as a legitimate art form, Seth gives an excellent defense. As comics have been celebrated in film, in the university and by literary and art critics, it’s hard to let them slide by as an inconsequential medium. “I began to believe comics were art when I began to see they could really talk about the human condition,” he said. Seth’s criteria are a result of the relatively recent development of the language used to discuss comics. “I think a lot of other art forms have stopped worrying about whether the works are meaningful or whether they talk about human life. But comics are really behind. The best artworks really try to tell you what it feels like for that particular person in the world. It’s a limited definition, but when I see that in comics it’s proof that they can be art.” Seth’s latest book, George Sprott, tells the story of the titular character in the final moments of his life. The book is full of his memories, his looking back and taking stock of his life. It’s a sad book, and George isn’t the most likeable character, either. The story is told in a series of short, disconnected episodes that build to a robust character profile of George. I’m drawn to write about sadness. I’m so interested in the past, it always comes out as the sadness that is connected to the passing of time. “George Sprott is really about fragmentation. At every stage I tried to make things more fragmented, so it was really up to the reader to recognize gaps and fill them in themselves. I wanted the reader to make their own decision about what they thought of George,” Seth said. Seth himself is a reflective person and many of his books are about the process of remembering. The work is generally sad, as characters watch the past slip away from them. “I’m drawn to write about sadness. I’m so interested in the past, it always comes out as the sadness that is connected to the passing of time. If I was more interested in human relationships it would be the sadness of loneliness. Sadness and loneliness are very distinct,” he said. “A lot of my work is basically analogy. I feel human life has a sad basis, not that it is inherently sad, but it feels sad. The minute I am away from other people I am sad. The only thing that keeps me from being sad is the distraction of interacting with others,” said Seth. For Seth, recollecting the past, and the sadness of remembering a life gone by, is very distinct from nostalgia. He said that nostalgia is often a derogatory term, used to label anything with content about the past. “I don’t like the word nostalgia,” he said. “I’m trying to be aware of looking back - a character like George is actually not reflective enough to know why he is looking back.” Seth quotes artist Thoreau McDonald on the subject: “As you get older, the world is not your own.”   click here to read more Featured artist Seth            Featured product George Sprott: (1894-1975)   Word Balloons includes GEORGE SPROTT and A DRIFTING LIFE on their Best graphic novels of '09 list Updated December 14, 2009 Word Balloons: Best graphic novels of ’09 are innovators by Mathew Price The explosion in quality graphic novels continued in 2009. This longer format continues to innovate; any one of these 10 graphic novels might have been the best of the year 10 years ago. This week, Word Balloons will look at the best graphic-novel format comics released for the first time in the United States in 2009; next week, we’ll look at the best periodical comic-book releases. 1. "Asterios Polyp”: David Mazzuchelli moved from literate superhero crowd-pleasers ("Batman: Year One,” "Daredevil: Born Again”) to more personal independent work ("Rubber Blanket”) and adaptations ("City of Glass”). Now, Mazzuchelli has released perhaps his finest work, a tale of an architect forced to change his world view. Asterios is a "paper architect,” creating brilliant constructions that can never be built. His hubris leads to his fall in a book that can be seen as an updated Greek tragedy. Each character in the novel has his or her own particular illustrative style and color scheme; Mazzuchelli is using color to convey ideas in a way not attempted by most graphic novelists. The book is all about style, design and visual language, and Mazzuchelli is moving the discussion of all of these forward with "Asterios Polyp.” 2. "George Sprott (1894-1975) ”: Cartoonist Seth is a master of creating nostalgic longings, often for things that didn’t really exist. His examination of the (fictional) life of Canadian broadcaster George Sprott does so, even while exploring the many not-so-great legacies of his title character. 3. "A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge”: Nonfiction comics writer/artist Josh Neufeld follows the lives of six Hurricane Katrina survivors before, during and after the storm. 4. "Parker: The Hunter”: Darwyn Cooke ("The New Frontier”) adapts the first of Donald Westlake’s "Parker” novels, which he wrote under the name Richard Stark. The double-crossed small-time hood Parker is out to get revenge on those who did him wrong, and he does so with explosive consequences. Cooke is the perfect artist to adapt this 60s-era hard-boiled tale. 5. "The Big Kahn”: Writer Neil Kleid and artist Nicolas Cinquegrani create a book that explores identity and second chances. At the funeral of esteemed Rabbi David Kahn, his family discovers he was never Jewish, but an Irish con man. The rabbi’s wife and children must deal with the aftermath and find out what this deception will mean to the family’s legacy. 6. "Scott Pilgrim Vol. 5: Scott Pilgrim vs. The Universe”: Slacker 24-year-old Scott Pilgrim continues to battle the evil exes of his new girlfriend, Ramona Flowers, in pitched, video-game-style battles. But he also has to face up to his own insecurities and relationship difficulties. Writer-artist Bryan O’Malley’s anime-influenced art continues to improve, and "Scott Pilgrim” maintains its humor in this penultimate volume. 7. "High Moon”: Former Oklahoma resident David Gallaher and artist Steve Ellis created this werewolf Western that was one of the first Zuda.com contest winners. Now available in print, "High Moon” Volume 1 collects the first three Web storylines. 8. "Stitches”: Children’s book illustrator David Small’s memoir covers his difficult childhood, where excessive X-rays from his radiologist father led to the young man getting cancer of the throat. 9. "A Drifting Life”: Yoshihiro Tatsumi ("Abandon the Old in Tokyo”) details his post-World War II life in this graphic novel, published for the first time in the U.S. this year, by Drawn and Quarterly. 10. "The Photographer”: This graphic novel pairs Didier Lefevre’s photography with the artwork of Emmanuel Guibert ("Alan’s War”) to tell the story of Lefevre’s journey to Afghanistan in 1986 with Doctors Without Borders. Read more: http://www.newsok.com/best-graphic-novels-of-09-are-innovators/article/3424054?custom_click=columnist#ixzz0Zg9GzJTW click here to read more Featured artists Seth Yoshihiro Tatsumi            Featured products George Sprott: (1894-1975) A Drifting Life Politics and Prose include SETH and ABOUET & OUBRERIE on their "Favorites" list! Updated December 14, 2009 Favorite Graphic Literature of the Year, p.1 For the Literary reader: A plethora of choices, from one part of the world to another, graphic storytelling of all sorts... Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow? By Fies, Brian, Fies, Brian WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE WORLD OF TOMORROW? one of the most unique and effective graphic novels I’ve ever read. Brian Fies draws himself as a kid, giddy and amazed when, with his father, he visits the World’s Fair in New York in 1939. His excitement about the future reflects the world in which he grew up. As he gets older, attitudes around him change. Issues of “Space Age Adventures,” a golden-era style comic book Fies created, are inserted throughout and make you feel like you are rummaging through old comic books. Thad Ellerbe George Sprott: (1894-1975) By Seth Originally serialized in the New York Times Magazine, GEORGE SPROTT is a masterly accomplished work of literary graphic fiction. Quite simply the life and death of George Sprott - adventurer, lecturer, and T.V. personality, it provides what many timeless works of fiction do: offering the reader a fleeting glimpse of a time past, while simultaneously stricken with the incongruities of life. Filled with subtle humor, short “interviews” with old friends and acquaintances, and the clean, well-wrought panel work of Seth, George Sprott is a must read for anyone concerned with serious, literary work, be it in graphic form or not. Adam Waterreus Aya: The Secrets Come Out: Volume Three is the third volume of stories by writer Marguerite Abouet and illustrator Clément Oubrerie about three girlfriends in 1970s Abidjan during a short-lived, “golden era” in Ivory Coast. Aya introduced us to the friends and family of Aya, Bintou and Adjoua, caught up in teenage romances. Aya of Yop City continued the girls’ stories and solves some mysteries about paternity. Aya: The Secrets Come Out raises the possibilities of faraway Paris. Abouet’s narratives are charming, and grounded in detail: we get an insider’s view on family, class, and the tensions between city and village lifestyles. Oubrerie’s richly colored pen-and-ink drawings bring the homes, night clubs, and streets of Abidjan to life. Each book has sweet bonuses: glossaries, proverbs, interviews, recipes, and even instructions on how to tie a pagne (with and without a baby on your back). András Goldinger The Squirrel Machine By Groth, Gary, Rickheit, Hans, Covey, Jacob Every few years a graphic novel comes around that is so good you have to stop reading for a while, because if you read anything else you’d only be disappointed. A few years ago this happened to me with Tony Millionaire's Billy Hazelnuts. THE SQUIRREL MACHINE is a lot like Billy Hazelnuts, but surprisingly Hans Rickheit's work leaves Millionaire in the dust. This is a masterpiece of comic fantasy. When I finished this book, I immediately returned to the introduction and read the whole book again, and again. Read this book to see what heights serial art can achieve in narrative and in the creation of worlds that exist in one character's mind. Read it if you think you can handle it, for it abandons the typical narrative structure and accomplishes its ends as only serial art of the highest quality can. This is a fine, gut-wrenching book, written and drawn by a true master. Thad Ellerbe West Coast Blues By Manchette, Jean-Patrick, Tardi, Jacques This graphic adaptation of Peter Manchette’s savage noir thriller of the same name, WEST COAST BLUES is a later work by Jacques Tardi. Especially when one compares it with You Are There, the looseness in this work is apparent and this quality perfectly compliments the gritty tale, lending his art brutality and malevolence. From the two assassins' hunt for George Gerfaut to the revenge he wreaks in the end, West Coast Blues is an unflinching story, perfect for any fan of the thriller. Adam Waterreus A Good and Decent Man By Tyler, C. C. Tyler’s YOU'LL NEVER KNOW: A Graphic Memoir - Book One: A Good and Decent Man is a homage to Tyler’s father and his time in World War II, about which Tyler longs to discover the hidden details. But the book is also an impressive and beautiful history of the era; Tyler creates a panorama of images that sweep across the page as she documents her father’s childhood, her parent’s engagement, and her own young life. Her pen, ink, and color transform her creative panels (at times evoking a scrapbook) into vibrant memories intertwined by her restless imagination. Adam Waterreus Batman: Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader? Deluxe Edition By Gaiman, Neil, Kubert, Andy Neil Gaiman’s beautifully written BATMAN: Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader? is an ode to Batman and a capstone to the incredible events at the conclusion of Final Crisis. Bruce Wayne is dead, so what will happen to the figure known as Batman? Recounting past exploits, romances, near death experiences, and the extremely important part Batman has played in the DC universe, Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusaderis a wonderfully conducted eulogy to this iconic hero. Adam Waterreus The Wonderful Wizard of Oz By Shanower, Eric, Young, Skottie L. Frank Baum’s original tale finds its way to Marvel readers through the artful simplicity of Eric Shanower’s adaptation which follows Dorothy and her friends as they travel all over Oz in their search for the Wizard. The imaginative visualizations by Skottie Young are sure to appeal to young and old alike. This edition of THE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ includes alternate cover designs for the book and varying ideas for character representations. Meghan Tucker   click here to read more Featured artists Seth Abouet & Oubrerie            Featured product George Sprott: (1894-1975)   CECIL AND JORDAN IN NEW YORK and GEORGE SPROTT in The New York Times: Sunday Book Review Updated December 9, 2009 HOLIDAY BOOKS Comics by Douglas Wolk The style and tone of Gabrielle Bell’s comics are at the opposite end of the spectrum from Baker’s — flat, dry and understated — but they allow her, too, to get away with just about anything. The brief title piece of her collection CECIL AND JORDAN IN NEW YORK: Stories (Drawn & Quarterly, $19.95) is narrated by a young woman who’s just moved to the city with her filmmaker boyfriend; it’s a clear-cut tale of impecunious 20-something artists until halfway through, when the narrator abruptly transforms herself into a chair, gets taken home by someone who finds her on the sidewalk and decides that her old life won’t miss her. The engine of these mercilessly observed stories is squirminess: emotional awkwardness so intense that it can erupt into magic or just knot itself into scars. The chubby, self-important protagonist of the Canadian cartoonist Seth’s GEORGE SPROTT, 1894-1975 (Drawn & Quarterly, $24.95) is the host of a local TV show built around documentary footage from his trips to the Arctic in the 1930s, which is to say that he’s the kind of person who’s been made extinct by modernity. Expanded from the much shorter version serialized a few years ago in The New York Times Magazine, this oversize, exquisitely designed volume is part scrapbook, part documentary about its fictional subject’s life and death. It approaches its subject from dozens of angles, from “interviews” with his intimates to immense, silent drawings of ice floes, all rendered in the painstakingly simple, bold brush strokes of midcentury illustration — a style of which Seth is the chief contemporary caretaker. As with most of his work, it’s a memorial to a lost age of localism and craft, even as it’s painfully alert to the dangerous allure of nostalgia. click here to read more Featured artists Seth Gabrielle Bell            Featured products Cecil and Jordan in New York: Stories by Gabrielle Bell George Sprott: (1894-1975) SETH, halloween, and the New York Times! Updated November 3, 2009 Published: October 30, 2009 OP-ART | LIZZY RATNER AND SETH Nightmare on Your Street Even in this cheek-by-jowl town, the realm of other people’s apartments remains resolutely mysterious. Sure, New Yorkers share walls, overhear fights, inhale the sweet-spiced victories (and, all too often, failures) of sundry kitchen experiments. But the odd, unholy secrets of our neighbors’ homes remain hidden — and some of these secrets are very odd indeed. Voices whisper, spirits hover, stereos scream and stuffed animals rearrange themselves on beds. While we enjoy cozy, sleep-filled nights in our shoebox-sized sanctuaries, our neighbors toss and turn in the Gotham equivalent of Whaley House or Bly. And why not? New York is a city built on the dead, on mass graves and potter’s fields, old battlefields and spiffed-up shooting galleries. Surely some spirits are hanging around. So this Halloween, when your neighbors open their doors for a quick trick-or-treat, take a peek inside, listen closely. They might just have a ghost story for you. — LIZZY RATNER Click the link below to see Seth's accompanying artwork!   click here to read more Featured artist Seth              SETH reveals his writing process to The Star! Updated November 2, 2009 How the writer's write: Seth by Geoff Pevere Star book critic Geoff Pevere asks authors at the International Festival of Authors about the creative process. Guelph illustrator, designer and graphic novelist Seth, whose most recent title is George Sprott (1894-1975), will be interviewed with fellow cartoonist R.O. Blechman Saturday at noon in Harbourfront Centre's Brigantine Room. How do you get started writing? Being a cartoonist (or to use the dressed-up term, "graphic novelist") is slightly different from being a prose writer. A lot of your "writing" is actually done with a pencil and a pad, working out little thumbnail breakdowns of panel arrangements with jots of dialogue in the borders. However, there are also lots of times when you need to just sit down and pound out a script, especially if there are a lot of narration boxes in the comic. I have no fancy starting method. I just pull out the typewriter (yes, an old typewriter is still often employed) and get to it, though it is rarely a blank slate I am starting from – usually there are years worth of notes to work from. How do you avoid getting started writing? I can avoid it for a long time simply by drawing. Again, more than half my job isn't writing at all in the traditional sense, so there is lots of procrastination-drawing that can be done to keep you away from the "writing." There are sketchbooks to be drawn in, commercial illustrations to be finished, graphic design stuff to design and comic strips to finish drawing (ones you've already previously worked out the writing). There can seriously be months of this sort of procrastination before you get back to the "writing." Where do you write? In the past few years, I have found that going to a hotel room is a good way to get away from my studio. The problem with writing in the studio is that there are always lots of visual art chores that need to be done (see question above). When I seriously have to write, it is a nice luxury to go to that hotel room and just get it done! What is the optimal creative atmosphere? Autumn. Rainy and grey day. Quiet. No outside pressures (horrible deadlines or impending travel). A genuine enthusiasm for the particular story at hand. Inner peace. Do you have any writing idiosyncrasies? Well, I guess still using a typewriter for anything counts as an idiosyncrasy nowadays. I do write on the computer more than I did a couple of years ago, but generally that's more article-type writing. When I go to the hotel, I don't have a laptop so that's out, right there. I just take my old portable. I must admit though, I worry a bit that the typewriter is too loud for modern folk. Those keys make a lot of noise. The hotel I frequent is an old joint though, and in the smoking wing I don't think anyone cares about noise. Oh yeah – I often let myself fall off the no-smoking wagon if I have to do some real writing. Usually just for a day though, so it's no big deal. No worry of getting hooked again. Do you actually like writing? No, not straight prose-type writing. It requires too much concentration. That sounds odd (or maybe lazy), but cartooning is a very different mental process. When you are drawing you use a different part of the brain and it does not require the rigid mental discipline that prose writing does. Your mind is free to wander. It's a state open to digression and reverie. It leads to a lot of interesting meandering of thought, which often finds its way into the work at hand (or the next one). Writing a graphic novel does take real writerly focus (just like the prose writers), but you tend to do this kind of writing in short doses. The long stretches spent in making comics is always devoted to the drawing. A long laborious process. Featured artist Seth            Featured product George Sprott: (1894-1975) SETH in Montreal Mirror Updated November 2, 2009 Seth and Sprott by Stacey Dewolfe “Cartooning is not drawing,” explains Canadian graphic novelist Seth in a recent Q&A with The Walrus, “it’s representational, but… the action of cartooning [is] intricately woven with the process of how the memory works.” That the artist’s work has long been informed by a love affair with the past will come as no surprise to his many fans, especially those familiar with the artist’s wire glasses and Bogart-esque attire. Those new to the graphic novel may have inadvertently seen Seth’s work, as his cartoons have graced the cover of The New Yorker, and his newest book, the picture novella George Sprott, was recently serialized in the New York Times Magazine. The poster for the slide show and book signing, entitled Brief Stories About Cartooning—which takes place at Drawn & Quarterly (211 Bernard W.) this Tuesday, Nov. 3 at 7 p.m.—makes reference to the greatest names in the history of the medium: Spiegelman, Crumb and Ware, to name just a few. But look at the fine print, and the wit which characterizes the artist’s work becomes clear; “Note: none of the cartoonists listed above may be discussed in any way—subjects vary.”   click here to read more Featured artist Seth            Featured product George Sprott: (1894-1975)   SETH among CanLit's Who's Who says Guelph Mercury Updated October 28, 2009 Guelph’s Seth settles in among CanLit’s Who’s Who by Greg Mercer GUELPH – Off all the literary heavyweights who will crowd Toronto for the International Festival of Authors this week, there’s probably only one who keeps a wall of fake trophies and Ookpik dolls in his living room. He’s easy to spot on the list of CanLit’s Who’s Who—j ust look for the guy without a last name. There’s no doubting Seth, creator of Clyde Fans; It’s a Good Life, if You Don’t Weaken and the Wimbledon Green graphic novels sees himself as set apart from Canada’s contemporary storytellers. Five minutes with the illustrator inside his time-trapped Guelph home will tell you that. He’s dressed, as always, in a tailored 1930s-era suit. You’re surrounded by ancient furniture, vintage appliances and pawnshop trophies from imaginary groups like the Great Northern Brotherhood of Canadian Cartoonists. When his rotary phone rings, he answers it with a declarative “Seth!” But with growing book sales, critical praise and high-profile jobs like editing a 25-book retrospective of the comic strip Peanuts, the 47-year-old is having a hard time remaining an obscure, eccentric outsider. His appearance at the authors’ festival, which runs until Saturday, says a lot about how far the genre of graphic novels has come as serious literature. “I think we’ve finally raised ourselves away from the superhero comics and into the edge of the literary world,” Seth said, in a recent interview at his home. “It’s a better place to be.” Not so long ago, the man born Gregory Gallant, but who insists on using his pen name, was drawing for an obscure Canadian comic book publisher called Vortex Comics, eking out a living doing commercial illustrations on the side. Today, he’s an author, billed by festival organizers among bestsellers like Margaret Atwood, Garrison Keillor and Alice Munro. Seth’s work may still be called alternative cartoons, but he’s very much a part of the mainstream. He doesn’t need to sell his work through comic book stores anymore, where most buyers tended to be after something more Superman-esque than the broken, nostalgic characters he created. Now Seth’s work appears in national bookstore chains and in the pages of New Yorker and the New York Times, on the covers of Stuart McLean books and in dozens of commercial designs. Sales, of course, are much better. His latest book, the story of fictional Canadian TV personality George Sprott first serialized in the New York Times Magazine, further cemented Seth’s place as one of the genre’s masters. Earlier this summer, the book cracked the Top 10 on amazon.ca’s bestseller list. In that sense, life is good for Seth, though he remains decidedly melancholy. He can afford to be picky about which projects he wants to do—but can stick to his oddball instincts, like building a parade float for the Niagara Wine and Grape Festival inspired by the cardboard model of the fictional town in his basement. That’s a luxury he didn’t have for so many years, when Seth would snap up any illustrating job he could just to pay the bills. But at some point along the way, those who toil in front of blank sketch pads in basements began to be held in the same regard as novelists and non-fiction writers. For Seth, all the attention was good for income but awkward for the artist, who feels most at home working out of sight. “It’s kind of embarrassing. I don’t really like the personal attention,” he said. At first, Seth felt the attention graphic artists were getting as serious storytellers was a passing fad. “Five years ago, I was feeling like it might just be a passing bubble,” he said. “But I feel secure now, as if the world of cartooning has entered the mainstream.” He should feel secure. Graphic novels remain one of the fastest-growing segments of the book world, with more authors and publishers flooding in all the time. It’s now a $425-million market in Canada and the United States, according to Publishers Weekly. In March, the New York Times introduced a bestseller list exclusively for graphic novels, a sign the genre has finally arrived. For Seth, all this new-found attention has got the cartoonist thinking about something that plagues many serious writers—the question of legacy. In that sense, you wonder if he worries about himself becoming a bit like the characters he creates for his stories: aging white guys bothered by nostalgic memories of the good old days. “I think a lot about the passage of time, how everything is always moving out of reach,” he said. “Of course you want your work to survive . . . but at least I had my moment in the sun.” Seth will appear at the International Festival of Authors in Toronto on Saturday at 1 p.m. He and American illustrator and graphic novelist R.O. Blechman will be interviewed on stage by Sean Rogers of The Walrus. click here to read more Featured artist Seth            Featured products Clyde Fans; Book One Wimbledon Green George Sprott: (1894-1975) GEORGE SPROTT on the Omnivoracious Top 100! Updated October 28, 2009 Best Books of the Year Countdown: 80 to 61 by Tom Welcome back to the show. What have we seen so far in our preview of our 2009 editors' Top 100? Three books by National Book Award-winning meganovelists that aren't meganovels. A collection of starkly beautiful photographs of mental hospitals in disrepair. A rare success at turning a blog into a book. A charming picture book full of warnings about dangerous animals. A celebrity memoir that's better than any celebrity memoir deserves to be. A history of the mob that upends most every mob cliche. And, yes, a novel composed entirely of questions. What's next?: 80. Ad Hoc at Home, Thomas Keller 79. Toby Alone, Timothee de Fombelle 78. Robert Altman: The Oral Biography by Mitchell Zuckoff 77. Her Fearful Symmetry, Audrey Niffenegger 76. The Myth of the Rational Market, Justin Fox 75. George Sprott: 1894-1975, Seth 74. Juliet, Naked, Nick Hornby 73. Tears in the Darkness: The Story of the Bataan Death March and Its Aftermath, Michael and Elizabeth Norman 72. The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Vol. 1, 1929-1940, Samuel Beckett 71. Green Metropolis, David Owen 70. Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City, Eric W. Sanderson 69. Columbine, Dave Cullen 68. A New Literary History of America, edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors 67. Asterios Polyp, David Mazzucchelli 66. Await Your Reply, Dan Chaon 65. The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America, Douglas Brinkley 64. Lowboy, John Wray 63. Everything Matters!, Ron Currie Jr. 62. Shiver, Maggie Stiefvater 61. Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking, Michael Ruhlman   click here to read more Featured artist Seth            Featured product George Sprott: (1894-1975)   R.O. BLECHMAN and SETH at the IFOA Updated October 26, 2009 International Festival of Authors: Broken Social Scene, the Future of Cycling, Michael Ignatieff, the New Yorker and a Peep Show by Maria Cortelluci Writers from around the world have swung into town for the return of The International Festival of Authors, which once again brings an impressive array of all things literary to Toronto. This year's festival -- which started yesterday and runs until November 3rd -- jumps on the rebrand-wagon with a new sobriquet in celebration of its 30th anniversary: "IFOA XXX." ...Um, I'd be careful when you google that. Pretty sure it's NSFW. Opening IFOA XXX at the Fleck Dance Theatre last night was the much lauded Canadian short story writer Alice Munro in conversation with the renowned publisher Diana Athill. And, no doubt, that was a wonderful way to inaugurate the festival (especially if you're an English teacher!). But if you missed this event, not to worry -- there's plenty of others to excite your inner reader. It seems as if IFOA XXX wants to spice up it's image this year. In addition to the usual round of events -- including readings by Scotiabank Giller Prize, Governor General's Literary Award and Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize finalists -- this year's fest is introducing licensed happenings that start at 10 p.m. WOOOT, alcohol! This Friday evening, for example, I'm checking out Toronto writer Hal Niedzviecki explore the pervasiveness of "peep culture" in an interactive social media extravaganza called the Peep Show. I'll probably stick around afterward, when Toronto's own dirty disco rockers Foxfire hit the Brigantine Room's stage. The next night, I'm planning to catch pop culture columnist Stuart Berman talk about his novel, This Book is Broken: A Broken Social Scene Story, with actual members of the city's darling indie collective. The Toronto Star's music critic, Ben Rayner, will act as moderator and Jason Collett is also going to perform. Cycling enthusiasts will find Cities, Bicycles and the Future of Getting Around worth checking out on Saturday October 24, at 1 p.m in the Fleck Dance Theatre. Now's your chance to ask former Talking Heads frontman-turned-author David Byrne, NDP leader Jack Layton, urban theorist Ken Greenberg and local bicycle advocate Yvonne Bambrick for advice regarding Toronto's bike lanes...or lack thereof. I'm looking forward to talking more politics with Liberal party leader and smarty pants author Michael Ignatieff as he reads from his new non-fiction offering, True Patriot Love, on Sunday, October 25 (also in the Fleck Dance Theatre). Following the reading, the editor of The Walrus , John Mcfarlane will interview him, hopefully with questions more substantial then "how do you pronounce your last name?" While I feel it necessary to let you know that "I-knew-graphic-novels-were-cool-before-they-became-blockbuster-movie-fodder," it's important to note that so did IOAF. The fest has been using graphic novelists in its program since 2004. Check out this interview of famous New Yorker cover creator R.O. Blechman & Palookaville comic book series cartoonist Seth (yes, in the vein of Cher, Madonna and God, that's one name only) by Seth Rogers on Saturday, October 31 at 12 p.m. in the Brigantine Room. Bonus: it's hosted by Peter Birkemoe, co-owner of my favourite "alternative" comic book store in the Annex, The Beguiling. There's so much more to discuss, including a mini Ontario touring programme, a piping good tribute to Scottish authors, and a young authors fest. But you can find out for yourself by checking out the schedule. (Don't forget to pay mind to the random visual art exhibits set up in the York Quay Centre depicting less racy IFOA's of the past.) click here to read more Featured artists Seth R.O. Blechman            Featured product Palooka-Ville #01 Nigel Beales interviews Brad Mackay about THE COLLECTED DOUG WRIGHT VOLUME ONE Updated October 21, 2009 Audeo Interview with Comics historian Brad Mackay: Cartoonists, Illustrators and the Graphic Novel by Nigel Beale Writer, journalist, comic reader, intermittent blogger, and over-tired family man Brad Mackay is the author most recently of a biographical essay which appears in The Collected Doug Wright Volume One (Drawn and Quarterly, 2009). First of a two-volume set, the book – designed by well known Canadian cartoonist Seth - presents a comprehensive look at the life and career of one of the most-read, best-loved cartoonists of the 1960s. The work draws from thousands of pieces of art, pictures, and letters, plus the artist’s own journals, and provides a picture of the British-born Wright as both cartoonist and human being. It follows his artistic development from earliest unpublished works through to the introduction of his most enduring comic strip, Nipper. First published in 1949, a full year before the debut of Peanuts, it memorably captured both the humorous and frustrating side of parenting. I spoke with Brad recently in Ottawa. We use Wright as a wedge to delve into the history of illustration, comics and graphic novels. Toward the end of our discussion Brad provides some tips for those interested in collecting comics and graphic novels on how best they might start their journey. Please Click the link below to hear the interview:   click here to read more Featured artist Seth            Featured product The Collected Doug Wright Volume One   GEORGE SPROTT reviewed by Comic Mix News Updated October 20, 2009 Review: George Sprott: 1894-1975 by Seth by Andrew Wheeler Comics very, very rarely tell stories about old, fat, boring men, which most people probably don’t think is a problem. But no art form can ever become mature if it ignores large swaths of the world, and it’s indisputable that our world is filled with men who are old, or fat, or boring, or (even worse) all three at once. Maybe none of us would ever want comics to be only about the Sprotts among us, but the fact that there’s now room for comics about them is a good sign. George Sprott: 1894-1975 is an expanded version of a story that originally appeared from late 2006 through March of 2007 in single-page installments in the New York Times Magazine’s “Funny Pages” section. (Which, by the way, seems to have quietly ended with Gene Luen Yang’s story “Prime Baby” a few months back.) In the Times serialization, each installment of Sprott was a single large page, essentially a chapter of the longer work. Those pages appear here, in the same sequence and not apparently changed, but they’re surrounded by new work – both Seth’s usually impeccable (if chilly, and in his typical blue tones) book design, with illustrations and decorations, and some new comics stories to expand that original story. Primary among the new work is a sequence of eight stories – each one three pages long, and each taking place on one particular day, in a different decade over Sprott’s long life, arranged from 1906 through 1971 as the book goes on. There’s also an impressive six-page fold-out, near the end of the book, that looks to depict Sprott’s scattered thoughts as he died. On top of those, there are short introductory and ending pieces: the first is thematically interesting, if mostly wheel-spinning, while the new two-page “Sign Off” from the fictional TV station that Sprott worked for is another slab of very provincial Canadian bacon added to a plate already swimming in maple flavoring and Timbits. The story of George Sprott is slow and quiet, focusing primarily on his death and old age – Sprott himself had been a TV host and lecture speaker for about forty years at that point, roughly half of his life. His TV show and lectures were all based on a series of scientifically dubious trips Sprott had made to the Arctic during the ‘30s, primarily as a money-making scheme to exploit boys willing to part with their nickels to get crudely hectographed dispatches from the frozen north. But those lectures and TV shows aren’t shown in the book directly – we hear about them, and are told how dull and tedious they had become by 1975 (and decide, perhaps, that they were never all that interesting to begin with), and we occasionally see Sprott introduce them, but the core of his late professional life remains off the page. George Sprott isn’t essentially about George Sprott the individual; he stands in for all of us, for anyone who accomplished something in his life (if not what he expected, or really wanted to) and is looking back at that life, or having someone else look back after his death. What makes that work is the fussy, ruminative tone Seth takes in the ever-present narration; we can never forget that we’re looking at the last hours of an old man, and looking back on his life from long afterward. It’s true that no life can take its real shape until it’s done, but Seth also deliberately confuses the matter in some of the early pages, throwing out red herrings and suppositions to leave those essential questions – who is George Sprott? What did he do? – as murky and unknowable as possible. Sprott’s life, as I’ve alluded, is very Canadian, in that low-key, minor-league kind of Canadian-ness that Seth excels at depicting: Sprott went North…but for commercial reasons. Those trips made him successful…but only much later, and almost incidentally. He was a big star…for a while, on a small, minor TV station, doing something that became blander and less interesting to his audience as his life went on. Seth’s books are all about that kind of Canadian success – success at something almost not worth doing, or forgotten, or just far over at the margins where no one notices. By those lights, Sprott is the great Canadian success story, and so he’s forgotten almost as soon as he dies. George Sprott can’t quite achieve the unity of effect and purpose of Seth’s great graphic novel It’s a Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken, due to its original publication constraints, but it substitutes a whirling, holistic view of its main character for the tight, unadorned narrative of Good Life. The large pages of George Sprott also give Seth’s creations more room to breathe and spread out, particularly in that fold-out section near the end. Sprott might end up being Seth’s second-best book to date – and I’m not entirely sure of that judgment, so soon – but it’s easily one of the best books of this year. click here to read more Featured artist Seth            Featured product George Sprott: (1894-1975) GEORGE SPROTT given stunning review by PopMatters! Updated October 20, 2009 George Sprott: 1894-1971, A Picture Novella by the Cartoonist Seth by Oliver Ho Raymond Souster could be a creation of Seth. A prolific and enigmatic Canadian poet (who really does exist), Souster seems to share with Seth several key themes and motifs that he returns to constantly and obsessively throughout his work. These include observations and studies of people living on the margins, life during WWII, and musings about life, love and Canada (especially small-town Ontario, and Toronto). This is Souster’s poem, “Mike White at the Westover”, from his 2000 collection, Of Time and Toronto: “Honest to God, one night with a final, rousing trumpet chorus, he lifted the hair-piece of a guy clean off— some boozer at a table real close to the bandstand. “But don’t get me wrong, he could lay down a ballad like “I’m Through with Love,” or maybe even “Sugar,” with such a velvet-soft touch that he reached the toughest heart, “and each time it happened in that crummy place it got so quiet you could hear the damn flies buzzing overhead.” Reading Souster’s work, it’s easy to imagine the character of the poet, like one of Seth’s characters, walking the streets of his beloved city (which also manages to frustrate, puzzle and sadden him), and being overtaken with introspection. Despite their 41-year age difference (Souster was born in 1921, Seth in 1962), there’s a strong sense of kinship in the works of these two Canadian artists. All of this comes to mind when reading Seth’s latest work, George Sprott, the publication of which provides an opportunity to review the work not just on its own, but also in the context of Seth’s other work over the past 15-plus years. Many of Seth’s common themes and motifs seem to be pushed and expanded in George Sprott, and when placed in the context of his other work, this work seems to highlight well Seth’s representations of oppositions in pop culture, notably Canadian vs. American productions, and past vs. present pop culture artifacts. An almost overwhelmingly beautiful book-as-art-object, George Sprott also tells an intriguing story with an intense and pervasive mix of melancholy, nostalgia, introspection and gags. Using as a narrative frame the final hours leading up to the death of the titular character, on October 2, 1971, the story attempts to tell the character’s life story, using interviews with other character’s (reminiscent of Citizen Kane), dream sequences, scrapbook fragments and more. It’s a gently non-linear technique that Seth has employed frequently in his work. It’s cinematic and poetic, and unmistakably work by Seth. For more than 20 years, George Sprott hosted 1,132 episodes of Northern Hi-Lights, a local television show on CKCK-TV in the fictional town of Dominion, Ontario. Each show would focus on George’s time in the Arctic: he would talk about his adventures there, and show the silent documentary films he made over the course of nine trips there between 1930 and 1940. As one character says, when George became older, sometimes he would run out of things to say, so the television crew would point the camera at “this terrible Eskimo painting” until he thought of something else to say. George was also famous (possibly even more so) for falling asleep on camera. Along with his TV show, George spoke every Thursday from 1941 to 1975 at the local lecture hall, also about his time in the arctic, to an ever-dwindling audience, the core of which remained loyal to the end. “I’m so terribly sorry”: Throughout the story, there’s an unseen narrator who addresses the reader, often to apologize about how little information he is imparting, and recognizing his own limitations in revealing George’s character. “As your narrator, however, I must admit I have done a rather poor job of ‘setting things up’. I failed to tell you almost anything about the man. I apologize,” the narrator says at one point. At another point, the narrator interrupts to say: “And he… damn! This is no good! I’ve entirely failed to give you any of the flavour of these events. I’m sorry. And once again, I’ve imparted nothing ‘real’ about the man himself. I’m so terribly sorry.” “I am not entirely sure that the narrator of the strips is me. It might be someone else,” Seth says. “Whoever it is – the narrator was included because I liked the idea that the story was being told to the reader by someone who didn’t have all the facts.” Interspersed through the story are interviews with friends, colleagues, family, fans, and these often reveal as much about the subjects as they do about George Sprott. A memorable early one takes place with a character known as “Sir Grisly Gruesome,” who had his own show on CKCK-TV. “Sometimes you’ll be surprised if you take a closer look at a fellow,” Sir Grisly says, speaking about himself, at an interview conducted during a sci-fi/comic convention. Despite the narrator’s protests, we do learn an awful lot about George: He attended seminary school, leaving to become a “gentleman adventurer”; During his trips to the Canadian Arctic, he fathered an illegitimate daughter; He appears to be haunted by regrets and memories, especially over his philandering and his love for his wife, Helen; For the last ten years of his life, Sprott lived in three rooms on the top floor of the Radio Hotel, amassing a roomful of personal (and suggestive) souvenirs and mementos, most of which are thrown out within a week of his death; We’re even given direct interviews with George, where he reveals his thoughts (aphoristically, as a public persona and character, in the format of “George Sprott on…”) about various topics, including youth, fame, regret, loneliness and death; We’re given scenes from George’s life, from childhood through teens and adulthood, into old age, and we’re privy to some of his dreams and nightmares. At the same time that these personal details are given, there’s also a sense of the reader being held at a distance, mainly through the narrator’s voice telling us what he doesn’t know, and also what he simply refuses to show us. It’s an odd mixture: the interior views of a person’s life versus that sense of narrative distance). At times, the story seems to suggest there’s a mystery at play, along the lines of, “who was George Sprott?” Except it’s not clear why it’s so important to know. “I wanted to hold George himself at some distance. I imagined that seen from the outside George might look bad but I also suspected that the reader wouldn’t be entirely sure what to make of him. I liked the ambiguity. I deliberately chose not to go “inside” him too much,” Seth says. The Book as “Art Deco Cheese Plate”: The events surrounding the creation of George Sprott (namely the tight deadlines and the physical format of the medium) may have pushed Seth as an artist and storyteller to stretch his familiar themes and motifs The comics were serialized in The New York Times Magazine from September 2006 to March 2007 (see the original versions in PDF format here), and the process seems to have caused an unusual amount of stress on the artist: “I enjoyed having a serialized story and I would do it again. However, I would never do it as a permanent position. It’s too stressful for producing ‘real’ work. You don’t have enough time to take a breather and really consider just what it is you are doing,” he says. “After the strip started running I struggled to keep ahead of the deadline – penciling the next strip and sending it off to them for editing while I inked the previous one. It was close to the edge. Following its magazine run, Seth added many new elements to the work before publishing it as a book. In doing so, he’s created an entirely new story, one that expands on the original serialized version. “Making it into a book was an interesting process,” he says. “I approached it as an editor and a designer and really tried to figure out what could be added to make this material into a ‘real’ book. What was needed? How it had to be arranged and juggled. How could I make this pile of separate ‘things’ flow and read properly. How to make it ‘feel’ complete.” And the end result is a glorious product. Before even starting to consider the artwork or the narrative, the reader encounters the massive dimensions of the book: 14 x 12 inches (or 35.6 x 30.5 centimetres in Canada). The size is so startling, one critic has even gone on to suggest “8 Practical Uses For The Giant Graphic Novel ‘George Sprott, 1894-1975’,” which include “Owl-Swatter” (#4), and “Art Deco Cheese Plate” (#5). Seth’s Search for Meaning: Many of Seth’s stories seem to be about searching for someone’s life story, looking for the key to solving the mystery of a person’s life, but never finding it (or realizing that the perceived mystery doesn’t exist). His work raises questions about how much we can ever know about someone’s life, and even if we had all of the “facts” would we still know anything about a person’s true self, and for that matter, after a lifetime of introspection, would the person know anything about himself? “Searching for things is such a direct metaphor for searching for meaning… and that is just so clearly what most of my stories (most stories, in general, really) are about,” Seth says. The nostalgic, meditative, musing, and reflective nature of Seth’s stories is also at work in George Sprott. Other family themes and motifs that recur throughout his work include: Characters who collect, and who amass facts and artifacts on niche subjects; Photo albums and scrapbooks; A love of architecture from the 1920s-1940s, particularly in Toronto and small-town Ontario; Telling stories from multiple viewpoints, especially through the use of interviews, either directly with a character, documentary-style, or by having one character deliberately interview another. For example, in Seth’s Clyde Fans: Book 1, Simon Matchcard collects and obsesses over “novelty freak cards,” even going so far as to spend years researching and writing a book about them, only to be beaten to the punch and crushed when someone else publishes a similar book first. In Clyde Fans, Simon appears to be defeated by the expectations he and his brother Abraham (and others) set for him to be a success. “Collectors are interesting because they seek out things that no one cares about and find out the vital information regarding those items,” Seth says. Seth’s It’s a Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken uses the technique of reconstructing a person’s life story based on stories of other people, and the work that person left behind. The main character, Seth, tries to learn about a cartoonist for the New Yorker, Kalo. This also brings the main character to reflect on pop culture in Canada and the U.S., and the long tradition of Canadians seeking work and career significance south of the border. Seth (the character) collects old comics, and waxes philosophic about his sense of nostalgia, among many other things. “I’m immersed in my past—wallowing in it,” he says at one point. “I look at my childhood like it’s some kind of golden key. If I just ponder it, sift through it, pick at it enough, I feel like I’ll find the answer to every goddamn thing that’s wrong with me now.” Throughout his work, Seth as character/author always analyzes and questions his own obsessions, and what his thinks they may reveal about him, not only to himself but in terms of anyone else’s perception of him. “Expectations and disappointments. If it’s obvious to me, I’m sure it’s obvious to everyone. This is what life’s all about,” he says. “I thought I was a man in step with my times,” Abraham Matchcard confesses to the reader in Clyde Fans. “I didn’t realize I was looking backward.” In It’s a Good Life, Seth manages to interview Kalo’s mother, who tells him what Kalo told her about giving up his career as an artist: “A little misery is good for the soul.” It’s a sad bit of truth that could apply to all of Seth’s work. Supporting material at the end of the book include examples of Kalo’s work, and a black and white photo of him. Combined with the main character being named Seth, and the first-person confessional voice, this creates the feeling that the work is autobiographical. Alas, Kalo’s not real, but the effect remains just as strong without that knowledge. A similar blending of the real and fictional takes place in George Sprott: “There was a particular host [on Detroit television] of a travel show named George Pierrot that was the direct inspiration for George Sprott,” Seth says. “Some of his surface characteristics are similar – though none of the personal ones are. George Pierrot was famous for falling asleep on the air.” In It’s a Good Life, as in George Sprott, there’s the question about how much anyone can ever truly be known and understood in the world. When Seth (the character) tries to reconstruct Kalo’s life, he says: “Piece it all together and it’s barely a quarter of the puzzle…just empty facts.” These melancholy truths seem to resonate with Souster’s poem “All I’ve Really Learned So Far,” from his 1993 collection, Old Bank Notes: All I’ve really learned so far is that in the beginning it’s a struggle to be born, and then at the end a worse struggle for all but the lucky few. In between there’s the unequal fight to stay alive, with always two questions left unanswered: “All for what?” and “How many did I maim or destroy in my blindness?” The hope that more clues may fall on us like a blessing, seems to be the only reason so many keep getting up every morning with the sun. “Self-Deluded Fops” Strangely, the story in Seth’s oeuvre that may have the most direct similarity to George Sprott may also be the one Seth considers to be the most tossed-off, Wimbledon Green: The Greatest Comic Book Collector in the World. Published in 2005 (seemingly on a whim from his sketchbooks), the story and narrative structure seem like precursors to the one used in George Sprott, namely: telling the story through the use of several smaller narratives. “I had been particularly interested in a certain kind of storytelling,” Seth writes in his introduction to Wimbledon Green. “It’s an approach wherein you tell a longer story through a variety of shorter, unconnected comic strips. Cumulatively, they add up to a bigger picture.” Despite the similarities in structure between George Sprott and Wimbledon Green, there’s one interesting difference: there are direct mysteries to be solved in this story, among them: was Wimbledon Green really Don Green, and whatever happened to him/them? The puzzles that are hinted at create a drive that helps propel the reader through the book (and inspire much flipping back and forth through the pages to see if there are clues). A similar effect takes place in the story of George Sprott, but the narrative drive is distinctly toned down. In Wimbledon Green, the supporting character of Jonah may be a stand-in for Seth himself (he looks like a caricature of the cartoonist), giving him an opportunity to poke fun at his own public persona. Another character describes Jonah: “These self-deluded fops are pining for a time before they were even born.” And another: “He made an open display of his ‘eccentricities.’...This was just a pathetic bid for attention. Even this interest in the past was shallow—a reflection of his narcissism.” Compare this with Seth’s weary-sounding self-awareness in interviews: “I’m not really a nostalgic type so much as a melancholic. I spend a lot of time alone, and most of it is spent in a fog of self-pitying melancholy. It sounds pathetic, but it is so true,” he says. Born Gregory Gallant in 1962, he described his name-change in the author’s biography included in It’s A Good Life in this way:“In the 1980s he changed it to his current nom-de-plume. Looking back, this may have been a youthful error…however, little can be done about it now.” Known for dressing like a character from a 1940s film noir, Seth is often portrayed as someone who pines days long gone, although (as seen in his self-awareness both in interviews and in his work), this seems to oversimplify his persona. “I have no illusions about the superiority of the past. People have always been miserable and life has always been difficult. However, I can honestly say that I don’t think much of this present time,” he says. Along with the architecture and generally superior quality of goods produced in the past, Seth often returns to Canadian popular culture, especially from the 1950s. The character of George Sprott is a broadcaster, filmmaker and journalist of sorts, and the book is saturated with references to a seemingly lost era of Canadian broadcasting. “Canada, as a nation, doesn’t seem very interested in its popular culture,” Seth writes in his forward to Invaders from the North: How Canada Conquered the Comic Book Universe. “[But] if you actually take the time to look back over the interesting pile of magazines, television shows, movies, records, comic books, et cetera, that Canadians have produced in the past hundred years, you’ll find there is a surprising amount of striking material—a real mix of the great, the clever, the beautiful, and the odd.” In It’s a Good Life, the character of Seth muses that “Somehow or other the ‘50’s always seem very ‘Canadian’ to me. When I think of the States, I think the ‘40’s—but Canada—the ‘50’s. Why is that? I guess it could be all the CBC television I watched as a kid. Diefenbaker, Don Messer, Wayne & Shuster…so much of that footage appeared to be from the ‘50’s. These associations—they govern so much of our thinking.” This love of regionalism is another quality Seth shares with Raymond Souster. “I suppose I am truly an unrepentant regionalist,” Souster writes in 15 Canadian Poets X2. “As Emile Zola put it to Aul Bourget: ‘Why should we be everlastingly wanting to escape to lands of romance? Our streets are full of tragedy and full of beauty; they should be enough for any poet.’ All the experiences one is likely to encounter in Paris can be found in this city. Toronto has a flavour all its own…My roots are here, this is the place that tugs at my heart when I leave it and fills me with quiet relief when I return to it.” The poetic element in Seth’s work is often brought up by critics. “Among graphic novelists, Seth has emerged as a poet of the dispossessed, a man who brings an adolescent fervour to the attenuating joys of the old and disappointed and infirm, to the plight of the hapless and bewildered young,” one critic writes. Compare this description of Raymond Souster by Gary Geddes in 15 Canadian Poets X2: “He searches out pockets of beauty and spontaneity in the rubbish heap of the century.” Seth also refers to poetry when talking about his work, and comics in general: “Cartoon storytelling is all about rhythm (much like poetry),” he says. “You are not writing poetry in the traditional sense, but the way the writing is broken down in the panels and then how it is run through a page—the way it is paced in general—it is just all about how it sounds in the mind,” he says. “The brevity, the rhythm, the breaks for silence. These are elements that probably have more to do with free verse than they do with the traditional novel.” Among those rhythmical elements in George Sprott, Seth includes photos of his absolutely charming sculptures, which depict buildings and streets of the fictional town of Dominion, Ontario, where George Sprott and Clyde Fans take place. In 2005, the Art Gallery of Ontario featured the sculptures in the exhibition Present Tense: Seth. Made from cardboard and lovingly detailed, the sculptures seem to reflect the “austere” boxes of Seth’s comics, as he describes here: “There is something very lovely about the stillness of a comic book page. That austere stacked grid of boxes. The little people trapped in time. Its frozen and silent nature acting almost as a counterpoint to the raucous vulgarity of the modern aesthetic. Of course, the drawings aren’t really frozen. When we look at them, we immediately invest them with life,” he says. In writing about Raymond Souster, Gary Geddes seems to describe a similar disdain for the “vulgar” modern buildings: “At times he displays a gentle nostalgia for the innocence and good times of the past, lamenting the passing of friends and shared interests and the disappearance of familiar landscapes under a jungle of concrete and cereal-box architecture.” George Sprott as a character, story, and art-book conveys a love and melancholy that fits well alongside many of Raymond Souster’s poems. This excerpt, from “St. Catherine Street East” could be a description of Seth’s Dominion: “Every face in every window of each building watching as we go down the steaming pavement, on, out of this jungle where the dead are never buried by the living, but crowd onto buses, sit late at bar stools, or wait in the darkness of always airless rooms.”   click here to read more Featured artist Seth            Featured products It's A Good Life If You Don't Weaken (HC) Clyde Fans; Book One George Sprott: (1894-1975)   Seth on Tour! Updated October 16, 2009 Calgary Saturday, 10/17/09 3:30 PM WORDFEST Art Gallery of Calgary (with Stitches author David Small) Slide show and signing Winnipeg Tuesday, 10/20/09 11:30 AM University of Winnipeg, Manitoba Hall Slide show and signing Vancouver Thursday, 10/22/09 8:00 PM Vancouver Intl Writers Fest, Waterfront Theater "The Look of the Book" panel with Robert Bringhurst, Audrey Niffenegger & Anik See Vancouver Friday, 10/23/09 7:00 PM Vancouver Intl Writes Fest Waterfront Theater Slide Show and conversation with Douglas Coupland SOLD OUT! Toronto Saturday, 10/31/09 12:00 PM IFOA Brigatine Room Conversation with R.O. Blechman and Sean Rogers of the Walrus Montreal Tuesday, 11/3/09 7:00 PM D+Q Librairie Slide show and signing Featured artist Seth            Featured products George Sprott: (1894-1975) The Collected Doug Wright Volume One GEORGE SPROTT reviewed by The North Adams Transcript Updated September 4, 2009 "George Sprott 1894-1975" by Seth (Drawn and Quarterly) As a meditation on loneliness -- and the inevitable decay of legacy as time moves on -- "George Sprott 1894-1975," which originally appeared serialized in the New York Times Magazine, might focus on one fictitious man, but the story it tells and the ground it covers includes eras and cultures long gone. George Sprott is low level Canadian television personality who spends his later years as a fading non-star on his curiously outdated talk show. Sprott is a man who lives on a legend that he created for himself -- so-called explorations of the Canadian arctic that are far less spectacular in the reality of his memory than they are in his presentations on television. Behind Sprott is not only a long line of other lives, local legends and personal haunts, but the spotty biographies that everyone boasts. Can we ever really know someone? Seth’s omniscient narrator appears to believe that impossible, so much so that slices of Sprott’s life are expressed as missing within the narrative and with no chance of inclusion. Sprott himself, even in a revealing examination such as this, clings to the meaning of his actions and turns a blind eye to what his dreams reveal. Like any one of us -- and like any portion of the culture to which we belong -- nothing is solid, everything operates with a varied, ethereal quality. What is corporeal to some will be faded, hard to grasp to others -- and the truth of it is so elusive that we may never be able to hold it as something of form that we can describe with surety. As George’s story jumps back and forth in his life -- and includes slices of moments from his seminary days, his career as a boy’s adventure magazine editor, his love affairs and loveless marriage, his later dependency on his adoring niece, his ineffectual local celebrity -- Seth also covers a world that has disappeared as well. The quaint stories behind local television personalities, the way the public looked at the world of entertainment so long ago, our vision of outdoorsmen and explorers, it’s a more innocent age when depravity lurks only behind closed doors. If George Sprott is a life lost, his story encompasses an entire world that has gone with him, and one that is as alien to the children of the digital age as the Victorian era -- the tail end of which George was born in -- is to baby boomers. Told in disjointed, episodic fashion, author Seth unfolds Sprott’s life in a series of interviews with his former associates that are interspersed with the histories of the locales he frequented, biographical rundowns of periods in his life, intimate glimpses of personal moments with Sprott and a graphic design that creates isolated imagery that functions as a mood in the atmosphere that will rest on your shoulders and heart as the biography unfolds. In pondering the mysteries of George Sprott’s life -- and concluding he is, in essence, a summation of all the mysteries around him -- Seth achieves a profundity that will not please those who seek easy answers to the way people are. Seth seems to have a more nuanced understanding of our movements through time and "George Sprott 1894 - 1975" is a testament to the mastery of words and graphics working together to express something which can neither be said or shown, merely understood.   click here to read more Featured artist Seth            Featured product George Sprott: (1894-1975)   GEORGE SPROTT on Barnes and Noble's Long List Updated September 4, 2009 click here to read more Featured artist Seth            Featured product George Sprott: (1894-1975) CECIL AND JORDAN, 32 STORIES AND GEORGE SPROTT reviewed by the Star Tribune Updated September 1, 2009 Masters of melancholy ; Three new graphic novels to make you laugh, cry and feel everything in between. 23 August 2009 Loneliness, sorrow and sadness never looked this good. In the hands of the comic-book world's top cartoonists, doomed relationships and daily doldrums are a sight to behold. Seth, Adrian Tomine and Gabrielle Bell do not disappoint with their latest collections from powerhouse publisher Drawn & Quarterly. . "George Sprott: (1894-1975)," by Seth. (Drawn & Quarterly, 96 pages, $24.95.) The characters who inhabit Seth's stories are never terribly interesting. Typically, they are aging white guys plagued by nostalgic memories of the good old days. Even so, Seth (the pen name of Gregory Gallant) is one of the medium's best. For him, it's the way you tell the story. And his latest graphic novel might be his most ambitious yet. First off, it's huge. Measuring 12 by 14 inches, the hardcover barely fits in your lap. Over 96 full-color pages, Seth tells the life and death of fictional Canadian TV personality George Sprott, an oaf of a man who once fashioned himself an Arctic explorer. The dimensions of the book are an essential part of telling this story. The traditional comic-book page contains no more than nine panels. Here, Seth sometimes packs in 30 panels to a page. Many of these pages feature interviews with people who loved and loathed George -- echoing "Citizen Kane." Most panels simply capture their changing facial expressions as they ramble on about the George they knew -- lover, cheater, idol, absentee father. "George Sprott" was first serialized in the New York Times magazine. There, Seth's overstuffed panels let him tell a single, contained thread in one page. Now collected (and with added material), Seth's technique feels cinematic -- if at times, overwhelming. At the very least, this is a sad story about a selfish man. At its best, it is a story about how comic-book stories are told. . "32 Stories: The Complete Optic Nerve Mini-Comics," by Adrian Tomine. (Drawn & Quarterly, 104 pages, $19.95.) "The book you hold in your hands would not exist had high school been a pleasant experience for me." So begins Adrian Tomine's introduction -- one of two included in this collection of short stories. Today, Tomine is one of the biggest names in comics. His illustrations regularly appear in the New Yorker, and his 2007 graphic novel, "Shortcomings," solidified his place as one of the medium's most gifted storytellers. That 108-page story -- about a young man struggling with his Asian-American identity -- was a masterpiece of nuanced pacing and clean, realistic pencils. "32 Stories" is a "special edition" of a collection first published in 1995. It collects Tomine's eight "Optic Nerve" mini-comics, which he self-published while still in high school. Drawn & Quarterly has manufactured replicas of those rare mini-comics and packaged them in a fancy box. These old stories are a fascinating look at the roots of Tomine's obsession with everyday dejection. His stories are brief, just two to four pages, and often revolve around the daily miseries of ordinary people. They're also quite funny. For Tomine, even a trip to the barber can go awry. His black ink artwork was messy, but drawn with purpose. These 32 tales are a far cry from the craftsmanship of "Shortcomings," but they give a unique glimpse at the genesis of a major talent. . "Cecil and Jordan in New York: Stories," by Gabrielle Bell. (Drawn & Quarterly, 112 pages, $19.95.) In comics, the best art is sometimes the simplest. Gabrielle Bell's minimalist pencils work wonders in her latest collection of short stories about youthful malaise. Bell rarely frames her characters in close-up. Rather we observe from afar. It's an appropriate distance, because many of the situations Bell creates for her characters sting with the tension and awkwardness of real-life relationships. Emotional truth is her objective. In "One Afternoon," a young woman learns that her husband has died in a plane crash. At first she is sad, but then quietly elated -- she's finally free of a relationship that bottomed out long ago. Days later her husband returns very much alive. He says he was bumped to another flight, when in fact he hadn't flown anywhere -- he was with his mistress. The two are once again stuck together, lying to each other. These stories are all slices of life, but a couple wander off course into surrealism. Cecil (of the title) feels unappreciated by her boyfriend. Out on the street she transforms into a chair. She's picked up and brought into a stranger's apartment, where she concludes, "I've never felt so useful." These dreamy pieces seem out of place among the rest of Bell's stories. But they still illustrate what is most interesting to her -- that we either triumph over daily rejection, or we allow it to consume us. Tom Horgen   Featured artists Seth Adrian Tomine Gabrielle Bell            Featured products Cecil and Jordan in New York: Stories by Gabrielle Bell George Sprott: (1894-1975) 32 Stories: Special Edition Box Set   GEORGE SPROTT reviewed by The Globe and Mail Updated August 27, 2009 The Globe and Mail Books Reviewed by Nathalie Atkinson Last updated on Wednesday, Aug. 12, 2009 02:46AM EDT According to the cartoonist Seth, the golden age of Canadian television lies between the Second World War and the 1980s, before airtime was centralized and homogenized with U.S. content. Regional programming loomed large and every Canadian town had an outsize local television personality whose fame extended just as far as the city limits, and for as long as they were on the air. In the fictional town of Lakeside, the faded celebrity at CKCK (“Channel 10 on your dial”) is George Sprott: raconteur, some-time editor of Junior Woodsman, gentleman explorer, self-styled Arctic expert and erstwhile ladies man who dies shortly after the 1,132th episode of his show “Northern Hi-Lights”. “Cooking shows, kiddie shows, dance, curling, movie hosts, polka bands... you name it. Where else could a figure like George Sprott have thrived?” asks the narrator of George Sprott: 1894-1975. The graphic novel builds on the material of Seth's fictional biography of Sprott, a local TV host past his prime, which was originally serialized in the New York Times Magazine's Funny Pages in 2006. Within the constraints of that assignment, each one-page instalment functioned as a self-contained story; now collected and expanded, the chapters of the character study add up to a sprawling, unsentimental exploration of memory. How much of one's identity is made up of other people's perceptions and memories, however flawed? Many voices flesh out Sprott's life through a variety of local histories, testimonials and reminiscences (from friends, family, fans).The voluble host's own contemplative flashbacks are interspersed but he is mainly conjured in documentary-style conversations with other people and through tangents, like the illustrated CKCK viewer's guide for programming on Sprott's last day, October 9, 1975 (which offers a wink to the CBC: the national news anchor of the era is Nash Nolton). The frequent shifts in point of view play with pacing. An interview with campy “Friday Fright Night” host Sir Grisly Gruesome distills their 12-year working relationship in a single page while the facing sequence uses the same economy of panels to linger on the small details of Sprott's final hour. Other chapters offer a glimpse into Sprott's mind through the elliptical images of his many dozing-off dreams – his first love, the mother he neglected, the daughter he never knew, the wife he betrayed. They hint at self-awareness and something approaching regret, if not remorse. Hadrian Dingle, a young bellhop at the time, recalls how after Sprott's death he entered the man's suite of rooms at the Radio Hotel to take in the surroundings (and steal some of his papers). In his unsparing eyes, Sprott's precious mementos like a childhood stuffed bear and a heartfelt birthday card are no different than the discarded Flexi-Truss girdle and congealed cup of coffee nearby – all merely the detritus of a life lived and soon to be forgotten. Another interview, with long-time “Northern Hi-Lights” viewer Violet Glow, includes a sequence of Sprott giving his signature farewell (“May the sun never melt your igloo”). Here, limited space inspires creative composition. Seth depicts the passage of time through the evolution of TV set model design from panel to panel and within each screen, Sprott mouthing the words while growing fatter, balder, older. Though imaginary, Sprott's world is so fully realized that small-town settings occupy three-dimensions, sometimes literally. Photographs of Seth's painstakingly constructed cardboard maquettes of the narrative's important buildings are inserted, like pauses, throughout the story: the CKCK building, the Radio Hotel, the Melody Grill (once the stomping ground for the entertainers of the day) and Coronet Hall, home of Sprott's weekly lecture series. Later, the slow decay of this last architectural landmark as it passes from stately hall to strip palace, to inevitable dollar store then vacant lot, is accomplished in a succinct series of panels that are as emotionally affecting as the death of the title character. As with all Seth's books, design elements are chosen with care, from the visual balance of Sprott's name and his rotund silhouette (recalling the cameo-prone Alfred Hitchcock) to the symmetry of the station's call letters. And not least the slim oversized album itself – matte battleship grey embossed with metallic stepped Art Deco lines and a made-up crest (because Sprott's grandiose “Institute of Polar Studies” would surely have its own heraldry). The novella begins with an illustrated group portrait of CKCK's Stars of 1966 and ends with the station's elaborate broadcast sign-off, but most apt is its final image. The book's endpapers are of the one thing that outlives both bygone local personalities and future reality stars: the vertical colour bars of a TV test pattern signal. In the Northern Ontario town where Toronto writer Nathalie Atkinson grew up, the local radio-TV station CFCL perched mythically on a hill overlooking the city, like the temple at Mount Olympus. * George Sprott: 1894-1975, by Seth, Drawn & Quarterly, $29.95 click here to read more Featured artist Seth            Featured product George Sprott: (1894-1975) Seth interviewed by The Daily Cross Hatch Updated August 12, 2009 Over the past half-dozen years, Seth has become nearly ubiquitous—as a cartoonist, as an illustrator, as a designer, his work has seeped into nearly ever aspect of the nebulous publishing world, from a his cover art to Fantagraphics’ Complete Peanuts, to his New Yorker covers, to serials for The New York Times Magazine. In terms of shear presence, his output is perhaps only rivaled by the likes of Chris Ware and Dan Clowes. He’s been popping up a lot lately at comic conventions as well. Sitting at the Drawn & Quarterly booth in a vintage suit and pre-war style spectacles, he manages to stand out amongst the crowds of storm troopers and Jokers and Klingons all vying for the limited attention spans of over stimulated show goers. “I look for old things,” he’ll tells me later, as we conduct our interview on a subterranean flight of stairs out in front of the San Diego Convention Center—a momentary reprieve from the maddening, sweaty crowd. As anyone even remotely familiar with his work can tell you, it’s the artist’s worst-kept secret. Seth wears a certain disdain from the trappings of the modern world on his sleeve—both figuratively and literally. The more we speak, the more it becomes clear that the Canadian artist’s first book, It’s a Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken, is, in certain respects, not so much a graphic novel as a lesson in his personal philosophy. But while Seth’s work is something of a perpetual homage to the works of Schulz and a string of illustrators who have worshipped at the alter of Eustace Tilley, it’s hardly bound by the past. 2005’s Wimbledon Green, which was born as an experiment in one of his sketchbooks, soon grew into a fascinating exploration of non-linear storyteller later perfected in his most recent work, George Sprott. Through his work Seth has managed the rare feat of straddling the thin line between constantly looking back and perpetually moving forward. Do you enjoy coming out these sorts of shows? Not really. I think I used to like it more when it was more about looking for old comics, but I don’t even have time to do that at these kinds of shows. I can’t find an hour to look around. Do you still buy a lot of comics? Certain stuff I’m chasing. Mostly I’m buying old horror comics at the moment. Stuff that probably isn’t really here for the most part. Yeah—well, actually, I just found a stack. [It’s a Good Life If You Don’t Weaken] is based around digging up old books. Oh yes. I’m a collector, pure and simple. That’s one of the main things I do for fun. I look for old things. So in that sense, I like to come to conventions, but this doesn’t seem to be about that much anymore. The comics section of this convention seems to be getting smaller and smaller like a collapsing star. A black hole. Yeah, there doesn’t seem to be much of a place for this, unless you’re pitching a movie. Yeah. I don’t imagine you’re optioning anything for a movie right now, are you? No, I’m not. I could see a movie being made of some of my stuff, but it would probably have to be an independent film. I could see Wimbledon Green being turned into a movie. Yeah, I think Wimbledon Green is the one thing I’ve done that I could see working as an animated film. If anyone came to me to do an animation based on one of my other books , I would likely say, “no,” because I don’t want my work to be perceived as ‘comic booky.’ They’re meant to be stories about “real life”–set in the “real world”–not a comic book world. I generally dislike films made from comics that make it a point to give it a stylized comic-y look. And I’m not too fond of the supposed connection between comics and animation either. They are always linked together simply because both are drawn–but honestly, what two mediums could be more different? That said, Wimbledon Green is the one thing I could see working as an animated feature, and I would like to do it– probably. It could be fun. You don’t strike me as somebody who would be comfortable letting someone take over something you created. No, I would. I would totally just hand it over to the right people, if they were willing to pay me enough money. Because what I really don’t want to do is be involved in a project that uses up all of my time–time I need to put into my drawing. I love film, but I wouldn’t want to make a movie. Even if someone came along and asked me to direct a movie, I’d probably say, “no” because I’m interested in doing comics. But I would take the money from a film adaptation, and put it back into making comics. If the movie stank, well, that’s life. The book exists. And hopefully, because of the money made, another one exists as well. And you’ve already removed yourself from it. Yeah, It’s not your fault if it’s bad. I mean, It would be terrific if it was a great movie. I’d try not to have that sort of propriety feeling where you think, ‘I can’t allow them to wreck it.’ I hope I could be fairly flexible. As long as you had some sort of say. Yeah, I would hope it would be someone copacetic. I wouldn’t just hand it off to anyone. Have you had offers? Not in any serious way. I’ve had small offers — options. Never much money involved. Nothing that made me—like I know that Charles Burns has Black Hole optioned, which is seriously on its way to being made into a movie. And that seems like a good arrangement that he’s worked out there. From what little I know, It seems like he’s going to make a good amount of money off of it, the film may very well turn out to be good, and he doesn’t seem to be doing much work connected to it–I don’t think he’s writing the screenplay or anything like that. Do you envision your books cinematically, when you’re working on them? Do you think like that? Not generally. Some of my stuff is cinematic in the way the “camera”—if you want to call it that—follows the characters around. I call that naturalistic storytelling. Of course I don’t really think of it as a camera. I actually envision it as the reader following the character around, as if you’re a disembodied head. In Clyde Fans, you’re following the character walking through the house. I think of that as how you experience the world through your eyes. Above shots, close-ups etc. They are film terms but I think of them as simply techniques to mirror how we experience vision. Film, being the more popular, has created the vocabulary to label these things but they are not purely actions of a camera. It’s more about vision in general. In George Sprott, I use a more fragmented way of telling a story. It’s not naturalistic. You don’t necessarily follow the characters around. It jumps around more than that. Time is less smooth. It seemed like it was Wimbledon Green that really started you along that path. For sure. And you didn’t really expect that to work out as a book, initially. Yeah, it was just an experiment in my sketchbook—an experiment I was really enjoying. At a certain point, I recognized that it would probably be published. Though, pretty much right up until the end, I just figured I would publish it in my next sketchbook collection. It was only when I reached the very end that I thought, ‘maybe I should make it a book of it on its own.’ And that’s sort of when it became a singular thing for me–a complete thing–not just a section of a sketchbook. Is that why it’s more cartoony than your other work? Because you didn’t expect to see it published? Yeah, I think so. I actually did an 80 page story before Wimbledon that was about similar material. I kind of stopped on page 80 and started Wimbledon, because I didn’t like the structure of that story. And that freedom to just quit is why working in the sketchbook is so freeing. You don’t have to publish anything you’re doing. If it fails, no one need see it but yourself. Strangely, that usually makes the work better then the stuff you are carefully planning. It’s less uptight. My other books have been more calculatingly “serious.” Wimbledon was allowed to simply be for fun. You’ve since done work in that structure for The New York Times Magazine. It works really well in serialized form. Yeah, it does. This particular kind of story structure works really well in serialized form. It’s a method that I’m more and more attracted to. It helps you control the way you distribute the information into nice, easy chunks, rather than having to worry about creating a certain kind of flow for everything. Clyde Fans, which I’m back working on right now, is all about flow. Each scene has to flow into the next scene. It’s concerned with mood and atmosphere. But with that more fragmented approach, I can just have a little chunk that’s about a dream he had, and then cut to the next one is about, say, going to work. I don’t need to worry about make that transition from the dream–making it smooth. You know, showing the dream and then the character waking up, getting ready, catching the bus… You do create atmosphere, though. George Sprott has definite elements of that—he travels to the arctic— Sure, but I do it in a different manner. I want to say that I do it a bit more through design than through storytelling. By using those large spreads of landscape drawings etc. Is that why you chose the arctic? So you could explore the tundra? Yeah, exactly. I didn’t want to bombard the reader with symbols, but it was important that George have a certain kind of journey in his life where there was this expanse in his youth, and the rest of his life was in the little box of a city, and a television box. [Continued in Part Two.] –Brian Heater   click here to read more Featured artist Seth            Featured product George Sprott: (1894-1975)   GEORGE SPROTT reviewed by The National Post Updated August 12, 2009 Remembrance of things never passed The art of Seth evinces a nostalgia for the non-existent Robert Fulford, National Post Published: Tuesday, August 04, 2009 George Sprott, a tired old fraud who habitually falls asleep even when hosting his own TV show, seems an unlikely hero for an ambitious graphic novel. But Seth, the prince of Canadian cartoonists and a storyteller like no other, has a way of surprising his admirers by pushing his art towards awkward subjects. He gives fresh proof of his talents in George Sprott (1894-1975): A Picture Novella (Drawn and Quarterly Publishers). It began life as a series for The New York Times Sunday magazine in 2006 and 2007, but Seth has since greatly expanded both story and format. It's now a handsomely produced $29.95 volume with an Art Deco cover, larger than most art books. Seth has always exhibited intense nostalgia for places he's never been. John Cheever said something like that about himself, but Seth goes a stage further: He's also nostalgic for places no one has ever been, because Seth invented them. For years he's been creating a Canadian past all his own. He goes so far as to build his imagined world literally, in three dimensions, by making detailed models of small-town buildings that echo mid-20th-century styles. The new book has photos that are said to be five buildings intimately associated with the fictional George Sprott. They are obviously cardboard models, but when presented as authentic documents from the past they give the story an extra charge of realism. For Seth, buildings are characters. His models have been shown at the Art Gallery of Ontario and other museums. He's constructed George Sprott (1894-1975) as a fictional version of a TV documentary. We learn that George was once a famous reporter in the Arctic, a successful lecturer and eventually the star of a TV show, Northern Hi-Lights. But by the time the documentary is made he's forgotten. One man interviewed for the program is a TV memorabilia collector who tells us that George's reputation has suffered a cruel, 21st-century fate: "I Googled George the other day and got only one hit." George worked happily in a small-city private TV station, CKCK. A photograph of the station's stars as they were in 1960 (actually, one of Seth's beautiful, evocative drawings) depicts an accordion player, a puppeteer, a clown, a country singer and Sir Grisly Gruesome, host of the horror movies. Of course there never was such a station. Small-town stations always had tiny staffs and few original programs. But Seth, who loves local talent, believes such a station should have existed and now, thanks to him, it did, or does, in the alternate Sethian universe. Viewers of SCTV may notice that CKCK slightly resembles the Melonville station, another fantasy of small-town media life, where stars like John Candy and Martin Short parodied TV stereotypes. Seth cites another source, a Detroit station he watched in his Western Ontario youth. (He was born Gregory Gallant, his pre-Seth name, in Clinton in 1962.) A man running a travel show on Detroit TV, George Pierrot, eventually inspired George Sprott. The Detroit George was also famous for falling asleep on air. Sprott's life story appears in words that accompany Seth's drawings, but it's not clear who is responsible for these words. Seth? He's not sure himself. Apparently he's invented this offscreen voice to distance himself from the story. Whoever he is, the narrator apologizes for gaps in his knowledge. "Truthfully," he says at one point, "there are whole areas of George's life of which I know nothing. What can I say? I can work with only what I have at hand." He does add, however, that "In the time I've spent studying George, I've grown fond of him." We learn that George was born in Chatham, Ont., and studied for the Anglican priesthood before becoming a journalist. After making his reputation in the Arctic he seems to have spent 35 years talking about what he did there, and showing his old films. Late in life he began calling his one-man office the Institute of Polar Studies. As other witnesses appear, we realize there's more honesty here than in the usual TV biography. We learn that George once considered himself a good son to his widowed mother but realized, too late, that he neglected her. He was an unfaithful husband, and in fact an unfaithful lover too, as one of his mistresses proved when she caught him visiting another. His wife believed she never knew him but concluded that "He was so deeply afraid. He pushed his troubles away -- hoping they would vanish if he didn't look." In the Arctic in 1930 he hired an Inuit woman of 18 as a translator and guide, left her pregnant and never saw her again. In a 2006 interview we meet their daughter, understandably bitter. We meet an artist who accompanied George in the North; Seth, a devotee of cartoon history, has named him Jimmy Freeze, in honour of the real Jimmy Frise (1891-1948), a cartoonist for the Star Weekly. Freeze remembers George as pompous and vain. Fred Kennedy, another CKCK host, a drinking companion of George's, says: "I hate to say it but George was a crashing bore." On the last night of his life, before the sudden heart attack hit, George planned to lecture at the Coronet Hall. Once he attracted big crowds but now only half a dozen people show up, usually the same half dozen. We learn the Coronet will soon become a strip palace and then a dollar store before being torn down and replaced by a discount computer outlet. Before his lecture, George goes to the Melody Grill, once the hangout for stars like him but now the kind of place where no one can any longer recognize the names of the celebrities whose pictures hang on the wall. The Melody Grill, like George, is close to death. Seth sees George's faults, but sympathizes with him. Among the many poignant lines in the book is George's reflection on his age, 81: "The saddest thing about getting old is how much you look forward to lunch." But I found the most melancholy of George's phrases the sign-off he delivered proudly when closing every one of the 1,132 TV shows he made in his lifetime: "I wish you good health and joy ... and may the sun never melt your igloo." click here to read more Featured artist Seth            Featured product George Sprott: (1894-1975) 32 Stories, Cecil and Jordan in New York and George Sprott reviewed by The Montreal Gazette Updated July 27, 2009 Graphic Lit: Get Used To It By Ian McGillis 07-19-2009 COMMENTS(1) Narratives Filed under: Pavement, George Sprott, Adrian Tomine, comics, graphic novels, Chris Ware, Clyde Fans, comix, Kaya Oakes, Seth, Gabrielle Bell, Quarterly, Drawn & I was drawn to Kaya Oakes’s Slanted and Enchanted: The Evolution of Indie Culture because of the title’s shout-out to Pavement’s debut album, a work that hogged my Walkman circa 1992-93 to the point where I’ll probably never need to listen to those songs again. (And I mean that in the kindest of possible ways.) But I’m glad Oakes pulled me in, because among her book’s many astringent perspectives on all things indie is a chapter that helped me crystallize why I’ve been feeling so evangelical about the increasingly ubiquitous but still frequently misunderstood corner of the literary marketplace tagged variously as comics/comix/graphic literature. Tracing the form from its early-20th-century stirrings, Oakes eventually identifies the point where comics publishers (Fantagraphics being at the forefront) twigged that a whole new market could be opened up with a simple repackaging expedient: gathering serial comics into single-volume collections “that could be sold in any respectable bookstore.” That use of “respectable” is of course laced with deliberate irony on Oakes’s part, acknowledging as it does the long and tangled history of the form’s stepchild status within the wider literary world. Sometimes, as Oakes astutely points out, it’s a mere matter of labeling: “Calling comics ‘graphic novels’ also opened them up to an audience that accepted the idea of comics as ‘real’ literature more easily than it swallowed the concept of a comic book, which can carry an air of disposability except for an audience of collectors.” Confession time: I was, from a very early age, one of those “real literature” high-and-mighty types. I didn’t grow up with comics. As a child I looked askance at my peers with their Archies and Green Lantern and Mad obsessions, occupied as I was with weightier tomes like Stan Mikita’s I Play To Win, Harry Sinden’s Hockey Showdown and Farley Mowat’s The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be. (Mowat was a near neighbor of my grandmother in Port Hope, Ontario; as a young boy I once espied him on the street and was convinced for years afterward that all writers had to smoke pipes and have big bushy beards and that therefore I would never be a writer. But that’s a whole other story, I guess.) It was only shamefully recently, with exposure to Chris Ware’s mind-bogglingly complex and beautiful Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, that the richness of which this form is capable was made manifest to me. Suitably humbled, I worked my way back through Art Spiegelman and R. Crumb and forward to their inheritors. And discovered that one of the two or three most prominent proponents of this culture was Montreal’s own Drawn & Quarterly, who—wouldn’t you just know it?—have a varied line of spring and summer titles for our consideration. 32 Stories: The Complete Optic Nerve Mini-Comics by Adrian Tomine is the publishing equivalent of one of those finely curated demos-and-outtakes collections beloved of indie music labels. If you love the band, you need to have it; if you just like the band, you’ll be curious to check it out but will probably find you can live without it. Tomine’s Summer Blonde and Shortcomings are note-perfect portrayals of young educated urbans adrift: shitty service industry jobs, romantic disaffection, identity confusion, all depicted with crisp visual line, deadpan dialogue, and a willingness to look closely into seamy corners of life many would be content to leave private. Fans of those perpetually popular titles now have the chance to see Tomine working toward his mature style in 32 Stories’ seven facsimile editions, gathered into an attractive box, of the Optic Nerve mini-comics that originally drew him to D & Q’s attention. For review purposes, well, I couldn’t really put it any better than the author does himself, in his introduction: “If you’re a ‘glass half full’ kind of person, you might say that these comics are youthful, energetic, and even enlightening in terms of the evolution they chart. If you’re feeling less charitable, you’d probably describe them as amateurish, scatter-shot, affected, and deeply derivative.” I’m glass half full guy myself, but there you have it. Working similar thematic and stylistic terrain to Tomine is Gabrielle Bell. Cecil and Jordan in New York: Stories divides roughly in two. The first half’s stories are set among the New York art world, where the struggling often rub up against the fabulously rich. In “Felix” a middling art student finds herself in the home of a famous sculptor, hired to give drawing lessons to the artist’s alienated adolescent son. Teacher and student form a touchingly awkward bond while the father develops a suspiciously noblesse oblige attraction to the young woman. Multiple layers of emotion and psychology are implied with minimal dialogue and spare visuals: the settings are almost exclusively interior, the characters defined and confined by their environment. Bell can convey all we need to know about a relationship by how far apart or how close she places two people on a couch. The second half, more autobiographical if Bell’s available bio is anything to go by, focuses on a teenage misfit in rural Northern California. Here Bell allows herself a more relaxed line and a broader emotional palette, even venturing, in the remarkable “My Affliction,” into the realm of full-blown surrealism. Readers may well be reminded of The Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind, and will feel an agreeable frisson on learning that Bell is now indeed collaborating with Michel Gondry. Seth first came to my attention with his stunning design of Aimee Mann’s Lost In Space CD, a package that very nearly single-handedly redeemed the visual limitations of a format soon to pass away unmourned. Born in Clinton, Ontario in 1962, Seth is the established master of a subject he has made his own: the stultifying melancholy of past-their-prime small towns and the thwarted lives therein. It’s a world he’s able to depict so well because of his own clearly conflicted relationship with his subject matter. Here is a man not at home in the modern world, drawn instinctively to the mood and aesthetic of a fading place and time even as he puts that bygone world’s pathos under an unsparing spotlight. If you’re looking for a cinematic equivalent, think David Lynch, but without the gratuitous unpleasantness. The title character of the magnificent new picture novella George Sprott: 1894-1975 is of a type that will ring bells with readers of Clyde Fans, It’s A Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken and Wimbledon Green. Emotionally repressed, a distant ineffectual father, a serial philanderer, small-town TV host Sprott nonetheless manages for decades to pass himself off as a cuddly avuncular minor celebrity. That he’s an unknowing figure of fun to anyone with experience beyond his constricted world—that he is in many ways a deeply unlovable man—doesn’t compromise the sympathy with which Seth draws him. Another favoured Seth theme, the unreliability and subjectivity of memory, gets a good airing here, as figures from Sprott’s life recall events in a contradictory tangle of accounts that only serves to underline the ultimate futility of any attempt to “sum up” a life. Visually George Sprott takes all Seth’s customary strengths—subtle shifts in framing, a limited colour palette that can render the slightest variation powerful in impact, dialogue and text-heavy pages melded seamlessly with wordless passages—and by dint of the book’s lavish outsized format, brings it all to a whole new level. Quite aside from its undeniable literary and artistic merits, George Sprott is a downright beautiful thing, an artifact you’ll like holding in your hands and having in your home. Which brings me to an x-factor about graphic literature, something I think of whenever I hear non-converts complain that graphic novels can appear a bit pricey. At their best, these books provide the strongest possible bulwark against the feared death of the book-as-object: they give us something that Kindle will never be able to duplicate. In a near-future posting on this very blog, I’ll explore in some detail the world of the late Tove Jansson, the sui generis Swedish/Finnish writer-cartoonist whose complete Moomin comic strips are being gathered by Drawn & Quarterly in a sumptuous series that is now at four volumes and counting. Meanwhile I urge all good people to at least dip their toes into the pool of graphic literature—the water may feel cold at first but that never stopped you from learning to swim, did it?--and leave you, for old times’ sake, with something from a band who knew a thing or two about the bittersweet task of taking the underground to the masses.   click here to read more Featured artists Seth Adrian Tomine Gabrielle Bell            Featured products Cecil and Jordan in New York: Stories by Gabrielle Bell George Sprott: (1894-1975) 32 Stories: Special Edition Box Set   SETH interviewed by The Onion AV Club Updated July 21, 2009 Seth on classic cartoonists and illustrators In addition to being one of the most acclaimed cartoonists of this era, Seth (It’s A Good Life If You Don’t Weaken, Wimbledon Green) has become renowned for his extensive knowledge of cartoonists and illustrators. Seth’s appreciation for the masters extends to an involvement with the reprint projects for Charles Schulz (The Complete Peanuts), kiddie-comics purveyor John Stanley (Drawn & Quarterly’s “The John Stanley Library,” featuring such titles as Melvin Monster and Nancy), and fellow Canadian Doug Wright (The Collected Doug Wright: Canada’s Master Cartoonist). In the tradition of The A.V. Club’s Random Rules and Random Roles features, we made a list of well-known comic-book, comic-strip, magazine, and children’s-book artists and fired the names off at Seth, who responded with his opinions of and personal associations with the artists in question. Carl Barks (1901-2000, best-known for developing the Donald Duck universe in various Walt Disney comics) Seth: Carl Barks is a strange case for me, because he’s such an important figure in comics, but I have no connection to him at all. I think the big stumbling block for me is that I’ve never liked those Disney duck characters. I’ve always felt a weird sense of alienation from them, even as a child. Back in the ’80s, when I got to know Chester Brown—Chester’s a huge Barks fan—we talked about it, and I made a strong effort at that point to understand why everyone liked Barks so much. Chester gave me one of those big Barks sets and said “This is his very best material, the most interesting and adult work that Barks did.” I read through those volumes, and the work did nothin’ for me. So that pretty much was the end of Barks for me. I said “Okay, I’ve talked to the expert, and I trust Chester’s opinion on just about everything except politics. If I don’t care for this stuff, then obviously this material is just not for me.” Floyd Gottfredson (1905-1986, did for Mickey Mouse what Carl Barks did for Donald Duck) S: Actually, I like Gottfredson quite a bit. I think it’s because Gottfredson has that same feeling of, say, Roy Crane to me. Maybe I just prefer those early Mickey Mouse characters, too. There’s something in the way they’re constructed that visually appeals to me. I enjoy the adventure strips that Gottfredson did with Mickey Mouse in the early years. There’s something about them that transmits a kind of charm of the 1930s, a lot like when I watch an old Laurel and Hardy film or something. And I do not get any of that from Barks. Don Freeman (1908-1978, author/illustrator of a number of beloved children’s books, especially Corduroy) S: I like Don Freeman, what I know of Don Freeman. Primarily what I like about him is his graphic novel from the ’40s called It Shouldn’t Happen. He’s not an artist I would have a great interest in if he hadn’t produced that one book. I know his children’s books, and I think he’d fall into that category of children’s-book artists that are secondary—maybe even third—in the hierarchy of ones I’d be interested in. But that one book of his is so interesting. Almost independently, every 10 years or so through the 20th century, someone seems to have invented the graphic novel. It seems a natural idea, especially for people who were working with things like children’s books or other kinds of narrative art forms. And Freeman was a lithographer too, doing those kind of American narrative WPA drawings of the ’30s. I think these works naturally led him to a “graphic novel”—since he was already doing street scenes and drawings of everyday life in the ’30s. It’s not surprising that he would take the next step and try to do an actual story—and a story with a social conscience, too. So I think it’s a very interesting book, and that makes him interesting to me. After that, less so. He’s one of those guys where I think it was his ambition that I’m attracted to more than anything. It Shouldn’t Happen is really an interesting book and a good book too, but he never really followed it up with anything of a similar ambition—nothing that pushed his whole body of work into a higher category for me. Certainly he did some nice children’s books, but nothing that made me love him in the way I love Margaret Bloy Graham, who did all the Harry The Dirty Dog books. Those are really charming, and I like them just for themselves. With Freeman, I’m interested primarily because of that one book. Syd Hoff (1912-2004, another children’s-book author/illustrator, best known for Sammy The Seal and Danny And The Dinosaur) S: I did have a really strong attraction to Hoff’s work when I was younger, and it has kind of faded away. I think he had a great drawing style and a lot of charm. But again, his actual work ultimately kind of passed out of my main area of interest. I’d still like to read like a book of his gag cartoons; I think he was funny. What’s most interesting to me now about him is something I didn’t realize when I was younger. William Steig, the New Yorker cartoonist, pretty much hated Hoff, because when Hoff came along, he was kind of stealing Steig’s material. I hadn’t known this fact until I read it in that Lee Lorenz book from a few years back [World Of William Steig. —ed.], but when you do look back on those early years of The New Yorker, Steig was doing all these Brooklyn and Bronx ethnic types, this working-class humor with these potato-nose characters, and then Hoff came along and started doing pretty much the same thing. Steig moved on to such a wide, diverse career, whereas Hoff really stuck with that stuff, so Hoff ended up being the guy people think of when they think of that sort of material. Ultimately, that’s colored my viewpoint of him. It’s not that you can’t have influence, but I think maybe he was stepping on someone’s toes when he first appeared. Too much of an imitator. Ultimately, his children’s books leave me a bit cold too. Children probably like them, but I don’t think there’s a lot to return to as an adult in, say, Danny And The Dinosaur. Recently, Art Spiegelman was putting together this anthology of good old-fashioned children’s comics that he’s going to release though Toon Books. He asked a variety of people in the comics industry to try and assist him in finding old comics that would be good to discuss as possible inclusions in the anthology. And at one point, we really did try to find some Syd Hoff work that would fit, and I sent him a story from a comic called Tuffy, and we really sweated it out trying to find a way to make this work fit, but the problem was that ultimately, it just wasn’t very good. As much as I love his style—it looks great and there’s a lot of that “smell of boiled cabbage,” as they say—unfortunately, I just don’t think that he produced a strong enough body of work to be of great interest to me. The A.V. Club: You don’t actually have kids, do you? S: No I don’t. And that does make a big difference in material produced exclusively for children. As I get older and I see all my friends starting to have children, I see them have different reactions to the material that was probably not of great interest to them when they were younger, because they’re re-experiencing it through their kids. I’ve certainly seen a lot of my cartoonist friends embrace Little Lulu in a much deeper way because their kids love it so much. But that’s not gonna be happening for me. There are no kids coming. Harvey Kurtzman (1924-1993, best known for spearheading the creation of Mad magazine, and for his gritty war comics Two-Fisted Tales and Frontline Combat) S: Kurtzman is such a great figure; it’d be hard not to like Kurtzman. He’s just so important, and a fabulous cartoonist. I think that’s one of the things that’s maybe starting to get more play now, what a great visual cartoonist he was. For so many years, he was mostly respected because he was such a driving force, intellectually, behind the comics he worked on. People were so influenced by Mad magazine and so impressed by his writing that I think he’d gotten short shrift as a visual artist. But it was the cartooning itself that drew me to him originally, because I’m from a later generation, and Mad wasn’t as seminal an influence as it was to the original underground guys. I didn’t even see Kurtzman’s work when I was growing up, except in small doses. When I was an adult and really experienced his work for the first time—well, it was his drawing and storytelling that seduced me. He was just so clearly head and shoulders above everyone else. When I read his war stories, I was just so excited by his compositions and brushwork. It was dynamic and smart. And the storytelling as well. A total lesson in smart cartooning. As I got older, I did come to appreciate more of the other work he did, specifically his satire, but I’m still mostly drawn to Kurtzman as a visual stylist first and foremost. The work has such a gorgeous finish. It’s beautiful to look at. AVC: I don’t actually laugh much at Kurtzman’s gag strips, but I’m stunned by how good they look. S: It’s true. I mean, the thing is, humor does date. I can recognize in that old Mad material why it was so funny—the absurdity is so evident—but I don’t think I actually laugh out loud at much of it. Maybe some of those Elder collaborations, like “Starchie”—I’ve always found that one pretty funny. Still—that’s one of the reasons old humor comics don’t hold as much appeal to comics fans as old adventure strips. In many ways, it’s hard to put yourself back in the mindset of what people found funny at different times. A lot of times, when I’m interested in old humor strips, it has nothing to do with the main point of them at all; I’m just enjoying the rhythms, or how they were put together, or how they were drawn. The gags become completely secondary to me, whereas that was probably the main concern of the cartoonist when he created it. AVC: What’s been most impressive about all the John Stanley material that’s recently been repackaged is how actually funny it is. S: Yeah, it’s surprising. He really was funny. And that’s not true of 90 percent of old comics. When I first started looking around at comics in the ’80s to educate myself on the history of the comic book, I thought there would be a lot of funny old comics out there, and there really aren’t. The truth is, there are almost no good old comic books out there. Those old comics turned out to be exactly as you’d expect: cheap junk produced quickly to sell to children. And a lot of it really does not hold up, on any level, at all. I mean, it depends; often you can like things because they’re bad. And there is a lot of charm in middle-of-the-road pop-culture junk. But if you’re really looking for top-notch work, it’s no surprise that it’s coming from the handful of names people have already heard. Lynn Johnston (1947-present, creator of the newspaper strip For Better Or For Worse) S: I wish I could say I liked Lynn Johnston more. She’s a nice person. I respect her body of work, but it’s not for me. I’m not the right audience for it. I wish the strip was more of a modern Gasoline Alley. They share some surface qualities. I certainly think the work was more ambitious than 90 percent of what else was in newspapers at the time, but the soap-opera nature of it just never spoke to me. At some point, I lost track of what was going on. Not that I really follow what’s going on in the newspapers much anyway. I think For Better Or For Worse is for a different audience, and clearly an audience that really connected to it. But it wasn’t my cup of tea. Bill Watterson (1958-present, creator of Calvin And Hobbes) S: I read all the Bill Watterson books, but they didn’t mean anything to me. In fact, I feel a strange disconnect from all that Calvin And Hobbes material—material that is obviously loved by a lot of younger cartoonists. I wanted to like it. I wanted it to be the new great strip. I’ve felt the same way about Mutts. I wanted to really like it, and I think it’s very nicely drawn, but the strip doesn’t have any great meaning for me. The last cartoonist in the newspaper I really liked was Gary Larson. But I don’t think of that as being a great strip in any way, I just think Larson was a very funny gag cartoonist, and I certainly enjoyed his work. For me, the very last great strip is Peanuts. After Peanuts, there are a very few strips that I enjoyed for different reasons, but I don’t think they were great. I don’t think anything’s come along since Charles Schulz—and I mean since 1950—that I think rises above the professional or the eccentric into that realm of greatness. I think the first five years of B.C. were really nice, and that could’ve been a great strip. I think Andy Capp actually was a really great strip within its limited parameters, although certainly not in the same class as Peanuts. But really nothing else, beyond things that I think were clever diversions. I think Dilbert actually is a very enjoyable strip, but it falls far short of being great. AVC: Have you read Cul-de-sac by Richard Thompson? S: Yeah. Actually, that looks very promising, I’ve got to say. I bought the first collection that came out this year, and I was impressed, I thought it was really good. We’ll have to see where it goes in the long run. It’s funny, I really think there are only two strips in the history of comic strips that rise to the top of the heap, and that’s Peanuts and Krazy Kat. It’s hard for anything to get into that top pantheon for me. I’d have to see where Cul-de-sac goes, but I would say so far, it’s in the group right below that, which is the tier of the really good strips. I’m impressed. He seems to be far better than anyone working in the newspapers at the moment. AVC: So no interest in Garry Trudeau or Berke Breathed? S: No, but I think that’s because I’m a very apolitical type. The subject matter just doesn’t appeal to me. I’m sure there are people more geared toward that who’d put Doonesbury up much higher. Even on the level of just reading it as a strip, without the political undertones, it just never really excited me. I’m just not interested in how he constructs the work. I’ve never even read five strips by Breathed; he wasn’t carried in any papers that I read. George Herriman (1880-1944, creator of Krazy Kat) S: Herriman and Schulz are interesting to me, because I think they’re the two cartoonists working in a commercial vein who managed to infuse their own personalities into their strips in a much deeper way than anyone else has been able to do. I think modern cartoonists working in the underground or graphic novels have managed to do this in a more direct way, like Robert Crumb for example, because they clearly sat down and produced a body of work that is entirely personal. But in that old newspaper format, I don’t think anyone has done it like Schulz and Herriman. Sometimes when I look at their work, I almost think that having to turn out a newspaper strip made the work more powerful than if they had just decided to draw personal story-strips of some kind. I have a feeling that Schulz’s work wouldn’t have been as great if he didn’t have to filter it through that gag-a-day formula. It’s almost like working in the haiku format, where you have to deal with a rigid, strict formula, to formulate your personal experiences, in some manner, through the imagery of the natural world. There’s something about the strict newspaper form that made the work really unique in some special way that nobody else has ever replicated. As much as I love Crumb—and he’s at the top of my heap—it’s an entirely different kind of cartooning. Both Herriman and Schulz managed to take those works that don’t appear to be directly autobiographical and make them entirely about their inner lives. I think they can both be read on the surface as enjoyable diversions, but read as an entire body of work, if you get to know the work deeply, it starts to have that much greater quality of very deep, meaningful works of art. There’s really nobody like those two cartoonists in my mind. Frank King (1883-1969, creator of Gasoline Alley) S: I think King’s great. King’s a different type of artist as well. He obviously put a lot of his life into Gasoline Alley, but in a much more direct, less poetic manner. I think Gasoline Alley is one of the great overlooked masterpieces of the newspaper strip. He certainly would be very close on that list behind Herriman and Schulz, but in a slightly different category. It’s almost as if he was doing a big pastoral novel of some sort. Although that might be overselling it, because I do think a lot of it does fall into the world of soap opera. Still, I think that because the work is so folksy, so breezy, it skirts the main problems that I have with the kind of soap-opera approach—like I mentioned earlier with Lynn Johnston. I think there was a wonderful unpretentious quality to Frank King’s work. It had a kind of naturalism that I don’t think you found in comic strips before that. It had, in the early years, a bit of that page-turner quality that Little Orphan Annie has, but I think the work is much wider in scope, which makes it a lot more appealing to a modern reader. It’s not so clearly based around an adventure model. I do think Gasoline Alley has a shorter lifespan than people think. I think by the end of the ’40s, it was pretty much played out. Maybe even by the beginning of the ’40s, it’s hard to say. But I do think there’s at least 20 years of really great work there. And I do think visually that King is also undersold. He really had a beautiful drawing style. A master cartoonist. AVC: Do you feel on a personal level that King “belongs” more to Joe Matt, who’s collected a lot of Gasoline Alley, and Chris Ware, who’s designed the Drawn & Quarterly collections? Do you feel that you can’t “claim” King so much? S: Yeah, this is something that does go on in the world of comics. There’s less of it in other mediums, because the work hasn’t been buried in the same way. As a cartoonist, you have to go out and find your own ancestors, because they’re not as readily available to you as they would be if you were a writer, for example. As a writer, you could just enjoy Nabokov and not feel like you have to stake any claim to him. With cartooning, the fact that it was all considered junk for so long—and that it was so hard to get hold of the old material—meant that you did kind of have to start picking who was important to you. You’re kind of forced to become a collector, which I suspect is a natural inclination for cartoonists anyway, but it’s out of necessity as well. If you want to learn your craft, you have to say, “Well I’ll go find this work and study it.” Especially if it’s anyone any more obscure than Charles Schulz. Even Schulz, I remember it took me about 10 years to track down all the books that reprinted his work, simply because most of his books were out of print half of the time. That’s not the case if you wanted to go out and read the complete works of Dickens; you’d just walk into a bookstore and buy them. Obviously, I’m simplifying here—I’m sure there are plenty of lesser-known out-of-print writers that you'd have to search out with the same zeal. So I think there is some sense in staking out your own territory. And certainly this felt extra-strong between myself and Joe Matt, because we were living in the same town, and we were both collecting. And we certainly would run up against each other in fights. When we used to go into bookstores, we would both run to the humor section and immediately start scanning it as soon as possible, to make sure we found anything worthy before the other guy did. In fact, it got to be kind of a joke with us, where one of us would pretend to grab for something—reach out and go, “Oh! Look at what I found!” and reach out, just to see the other person’s reaction. I can remember there was an antique market in Toronto, and it was always a battle every weekend to see who got there first. You’d know that the other person had beat you there, because as soon as you got to those certain booths that had the right kind of stuff, the dealer would say, “Oh, your friend was here already.” And you’d know you’d missed your opportunity. At some point, we actually had to come to an arrangement where I said “Okay, you get these guys and I get these guys,” and we sort of traded off who we were collecting. At that point, he agreed to stay away from the Canadian cartoonists that I was pursuing, like Jimmy Frise and Doug Wright, and I agreed to keep away from Frank King. So I do feel some sense that I don’t have any proprietary interest in Gasoline Alley. It’s been taken away from me. But I am allowed to deeply appreciate the work. AVC: Speaking of Doug Wright, there was some criticism when the book Doug Wright: Canada’s Master Cartoonist came out about the use of the word “master” in the title. Which I found strange, because in cinema studies, people use the word “master” all the time, and it doesn’t mean the absolute best, it just means somebody who’s extraordinarily good at their craft. S: And that’s how I intended it to be understood. I actually don’t think there would have been any controversy about it if the publisher, Chris Oliveros, hadn’t, in my opinion, made a flub by overpraising Wright on the Internet. He actually compared Wright to… I think he compared him to Kurtzman and Crumb. I think what Chris was trying to do was imply that here’s a chance for the reader to discover a great pile of work by someone fantastic that they’d never heard of before—the excitement of finding a real master cartoonist where you’d never seen their work before, yet here it all is. I don’t think he was actually trying to imply that Wright was as important or as meaningful a cartoonist as either of those names. But the minute you pull out those big guns, it causes unfortunate comparisons. If that hadn’t happened, I think most people would’ve just seen Wright’s work and said, “Wow, this guy is really a good cartoonist.” But because of that comparison, people had to immediately start saying, “Well, he’s no Crumb.” And of course, he is no Crumb. It’s not his intention, nor is it the area of the cartooning world he was working in at all. He’s a lesser cartoonist than some of the top names like Schulz or Crumb or Kurtzman, but then so are most of the great cartoonists you could name. He was a very good journeyman cartoonist, and he was a master cartoonist. Like you said, I certainly don’t see that as any kind of exclusive title. If I think someone’s a master potter, it does not mean they’re the only good potter. But for some reason, in comics, that word really got on people’s nerves, and they assumed he was being put forward as a candidate for greatest cartoonist. I guess “Canada’s Master Cartoonist” probably does imply he’s being promoted to the top spot. Who knows—when you’re putting a book together, you’re not thinking of those kinds of reactions at all. I merely wanted to honor the man. Harold Gray (1894-1968, creator of Little Orphan Annie) S: Gray is in there with about three or four cartoonists I can think of that I would consider really, really great cartoonists of the early period of comics. And they’re great because they are so incredibly readable. I would put him in there with Frank King and Chester Gould, for sure. I like those three for very different reasons, but the one common thing is, you can sit down and read an incredible amount of them and really enjoy the experience. It’s never a slog. Little Orphan Annie is a very charming strip. I love the way Gray has constructed the narratives. I love how Annie talks to herself endlessly; I think that’s so charming. I just think that kind of dialogue reads so well. It’s amazing how he can pull you through those stories, where you’ll have five days of basically just Annie talking to herself about the value of keeping the house clean, but it’s very, very engaging. He’s got a narrative style that’s really appealing, and it’s utterly different from someone like Gould, whose narrative approach is like a juggernaut in comparison—with everything utilized to simply pull you along with the sheer power of the plot. Annie’s plots are interesting too, but you’re really pulled along on the charm of the main character. Which is probably a little closer to what King is doing, as well. Annie’s a very interesting adventure strip for that reason. In most of the adventure strips, I find the characters kind of boring. Somebody like Roy Crane… I love his work, but I don’t have much personal attraction to Wash Tubbs or to Buz Sawyer. They’re somewhat irritating or uninterestingly staid central characters. But Annie seems like a very fully rounded creation. Even though she’s clearly just a mouthpiece for Gray’s ideas and his political beliefs, when you close the book, you really feel like she was alive in some way. I sure don’t feel like Dick Tracy was alive. He was a very empty sort of character. Yet Dick Tracy was still a terrific strip, because it was so beautifully constructed, and such a page-turner. Not all old strips are that enjoyable to read. Even someone like Roy Crane, who I love, I don’t really want to sit down and read 12 volumes of Wash Tubbs. I tried it, but I didn’t make it past volume six, I think. It gets to be too repetitive. Whereas I do think those three cartoonists—King, Gould, and Gray—you could pretty much read their entire body of work. Gil Kane (1926-2000, comic-book artist who worked on several Silver Age D.C. and Marvel superheroes, including Green Lantern and Spider-Man) S: I think Gil’s work was very nicely drawn and composed, had a nice classical quality to it, but he was not one of my favorites as a child. I think the work was kind of cold, in some manner, to me as a kid. I was drawn more to the cartoonier cartoonists, which I think is obvious, because my work has ended up being more cartoony and stylized. The comic-book artists I was most drawn to when I was young would probably be Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko. Later, I made some bad choices. I was really into John Byrne for a while. I actually think that ties into a love of cartoony artwork too; I think Byrne’s work is closer to Kirby than to Kane, for example. Neal Adams (1941-present, a Bronze Age superhero artist who helped redefine the looks of Batman, Green Arrow, the X-Men, and other D.C. and Marvel favorites) S: I never had any interest in him at all. It’s funny, because Chester Brown and Joe Matt had a real teenage fascination with his work. They were much more interested in his illustrative approach than I was. I can remember being left completely cold by the work. In fact, I don’t think I even thought about it as a teenager. I didn’t dislike it; it just didn’t enter that area where I pulled it out to look at or to copy from. It left me cold in the same way that other artists who I considered bad left me cold. I wouldn’t have thought about Neal Adams any more than I would have thought about, like, Don Heck. AVC: You mentioned Byrne; were you looking at George Pérez at all? S: Yeah, I liked both of them at that time, and in retrospect, I can look back and see what I liked. I don’t think they were bad cartoonists, I just have no interest in them now. I’m not interested in reading what they’re doing today, because I’m just not interested in those kinds of comics anymore. And, I must say, I’m not really all that interested in the work I liked then, either—I don’t have a great nostalgia for it. I wouldn’t pull out like an old Byrne X-Men or something, though it sure had potency to me as a teenager. I do think they were both doing a kind of Kirby-inspired cartooning that was really appealing at the time. I sometimes think it had a lot to do with how they were inked. It was really slick work, and something about that appealed to my teenage mind. Slick in a different way than Neal Adams was slick. There was something about it that… I don’t know why you’re attracted to things, but they both seemed very rounded and shiny to me. That work really pushed my buttons as a teenager. It was fetishistic in some way. AVC: Perez even drew little reflections off of metal and starburst gleams… effects that made the art look even shinier. S: When I look at the bad teenage comics, I was drawing at the time, I can see a lot of the stylizations that both of them were using: those shiny reflections on metal, or the way they would use a broken line to create effects when they were drawing musculature. I sometimes think maybe Terry Austin is who I really liked; I don’t know. Jay Lynch (1945-present, one of the original underground cartoonists, known for a style that evoked old newspaper strips) S: I liked Jay Lynch when I read his work in the ’80s, when I was figuring out who all the underground cartoonists were, but I don’t think I felt any particular attraction to him beyond his historical importance. I certainly went out and collected all the Bijou comics. I was interested in his work. Him and Denis Kitchen both had really nice cartoony styles. Both of them appealed to me, but they didn’t produce a big enough or interesting enough body of work for me to make that deeper connection. I certainly read all Lynch’s “Nard N’ Pat” comics and strips that were around, but this again falls into that category where there weren’t enough of them—or maybe it's just that the work didn’t leave a lasting imprint on me. It was very competent and appealing, but it didn’t have within it the qualities that raised it into the camp of someone like Crumb or Spiegelman, where the ambition in the work is so high that it changes how you respond to it. If Spiegelman had only done the work in Breakdowns, he’d still be high on my list. If he’d only done Maus, he’d still be high on my list. I have a feeling Jay Lynch could’ve done 200 more pages of Nard N’ Pat strips, and it just wouldn’t make it for me. They obviously had different goals as artists, but when it comes to the underground cartoonist, I suppose my sympathies lie with the more ambitious of the lot—the Crumbs and the Spiegelmans and the Deitches. I think to really be important to me, there’s got to be some really greater ambition in the work that makes it have a longer, deeper connection to me. That’s why with someone like Don Freeman, that one book makes all the difference for me. That one ambitious book. That one thing that defines his career in a different way than if he hadn’t done it. This is sounding really unfair to Jay Lynch. I am certainly not singling him out as an unambitious cartoonist. Far from it. As one of the original underground artists, he certainly was part of a movement that made more seminal changes in comic books then my generation could ever boast. It's just that his work didn't speak to me in the same way that some of his peers did. It just didn't have some spark that put him in my personal pantheon. Bill Griffith (1944-present, another of the original underground wave, who later found a niche with the newspaper strip Zippy The Pinhead) S: Bill Griffith is unfortunately in some similar category as Doonesbury. I can recognize the ambition, but almost nothing in it speaks to me directly. He’s done a couple of pieces outside of the newspaper that I think were really great, and I kind of wish he’d never got involved with doing Zippy The Pinhead. That’s the work that I don’t feel any great connection to, but, what can you say? That’s obviously his life’s work. I know he did a couple of pieces in Weirdo that I remember as more personal, direct works, in the sense that they didn’t feel like they were part of the Zippy continuity. Those spoke to me a lot more. I think actually his work in the old underground comics, like Short Order Comics with Art Spiegelman, that was the work that made me think he would be one of the cartoonists I loved the most. It was smart, and had a hard edge that appealed to me. Zippy is the problem, and Zippy is what Griffith is about. But I have this feeling he could sit down and do a graphic novel that would blow me away. AVC: With his syndicate income, maybe he could afford to take a break and create one. S: It’s hard to say with these sorts of things. Sometimes I think the lone graphic novel that comes at the end of a career isn’t necessarily going to turn out to be the good one that cartoonist might have had in him. But with the popularity of the form, I think this is something we’ll be seeing more of now, where veterans who haven’t actually worked in the form before will produce their one graphic novel, and it may not be a good one. I think sometimes you have to do five or 10 books to produce anything of real worth. Producing a comic strip or a serial comic book is a different animal than a comic “novel.” But you never know; sometimes that first one is the great one. Nowadays, you’ll occasionally see a mainstream cartoonist from the past sit down to try to do a more personal book, and it’s clear that they’ve had too many years in the salt-mines of commercial work to be able to produce this other kind of work and have it connect with the audience in the right way. For example, those Joe Kubert books. As much as I admire him for doing them, somehow he couldn’t break through 50 years of doing Sgt. Rock to produce something more personal. It’s like that earlier commercial work polluted the water. You can’t just filter it out when the time comes for the graphic novel. The stink of it remains. The most interesting book I saw in that vein was from Dick Ayers, an old cartoonist from the early days of Marvel. He produced a three-volume autobiography, and it really was a total mess, but it was so earnest and uncontrolled—almost like a piece of outsider art—that it may have been the most successful personal work I’ve seen from one of those guys who worked in the mainstream. Steve Ditko (1927-present, veteran comic-book artist who brought an idiosyncratic style to a number of mainstream adventure comics from the ’50s through the ’80s, most notably the original run of The Amazing Spider-Man) S: Ditko’s work is totally interesting for his continuing desire to communicate. The big problem is, the later work is simply unreadable. I’d like to appreciate everything Ditko’s done since he stopped working on Spider-Man, but the truth is, it’s just not that interesting to me. I’d rather sit down and read some of those pre-hero monster books he did. I think that stuff’s always a lot of fun to read, and it’s great cartooning. Obviously it’s just cultural junk, but that’s the stuff I’d rather look at than Mr. A, or, God knows, all the stuff that followed it. B. Kliban (1935-1990, magazine cartoonist known for his aggressive surrealism and drawings of cats) S: I like Kliban’s work a lot, actually. I think he may be the only gag cartoonist who managed to infuse an underground sensibility into his work. I would like to see a really substantial reprinting of his stuff. I’ve got all his books, but I’m still not sure that’s all of his work. It’s certainly not the best presentation for his work. I think he died fairly young, didn’t he? It’s hard to say where he would have gone eventually. You can kind of see that he paved the way for Gary Larson, but in some way, Larson is a much less interesting cartoonist than Kliban. I think Larson was consistently funny, and he had a really particular eccentric sense of humor. I think Larson may have popularized a kind of humor that perhaps didn’t exist as fully before him in our culture. But when you look back at Kliban, who was doing something similar a few years earlier, the work is just a lot more eccentric. I know he was somewhere on the periphery of that underground scene; he knew people like Crumb, and you can see it in the work. I think possibly after maybe 1965 or something, he’s probably the most interesting gag cartoonist to come along. It’s kind of a wasteland after the classic period of The New Yorker. AVC: Where does Roz Chast fall in that continuum? S: She’s probably the most interesting current one. Thinking about it, I should refine that wasteland statement I just made. I would say that there have been a couple of really good gag cartoonists to come along in the post-’50s period: Wilson, Gross, Kliban… a couple others. Chast is certainly the best cartoonist to come into the New Yorker since maybe 1955. She’s just great. Gag cartooning’s an odd world now, ’cause it’s pretty much dead. There’s no market for it at all. And Chast is great, because clearly she didn’t set out to be a gag cartoonist like Charles Adams or Peter Arno or someone of that ilk. She’s someone with a great sense of humor and a perfunctory drawing style, and it came together to create a really funny, entertaining, idiosyncratic artist who found her perfect niche. I really enjoy all her work. Jules Feiffer (1929-present, a cartooning renaissance man who helped pioneer the alt-weekly cartoon at The Village Voice, and has also worked on superhero comics, newspaper strips, children’s books, graphic novels, plays, and screenplays) S: Feiffer’s an interesting figure. I really like Feiffer, I certainly collected all his books back in the ’80s, and I read them all repeatedly. I think I liked his earliest work best: those first three or four books. But I think as he became a more political cartoonist, I started to lose interest in him, for much the same reason that I don’t care for Doonesbury. I don’t care for a lot of Feiffer’s mid-career work, where he’s talking about Nixon or Reagan or whatever. I do think he’s an important artist. He stands alone, in some manner. You don’t really see him listed with other cartoonists as part of a movement or school. He forged his own territory, kind of like Edward Gorey. They’re off to the side. I know that when Art Spiegelman and I were curating a show for a gallery exhibit for the Vancouver Art Gallery, we were hashing out who would be in the show, and our big conflict came over Feiffer and Schulz. We had a limited number of people who could go in. We had one spot left. I personally could not let Feiffer in if Schulz couldn’t be in, and Art could not let Schulz in if Feiffer couldn’t be in. We were both pretty much entrenched in our positions. We each had a more personal connection to one than the other. Ultimately it had to come down to a handshake agreement that neither of them was going in, and we had to pick someone else, because neither of us would back down. I think it may be a generational thing. For people of Art’s generation, Feiffer was such an important cartoonist, in the late ’50s, early ’60s. For me, I didn’t experience that period of Feiffer at all. For me, it’s Schulz who was the seminal artist—the first cartoonist I recognized as using cartooning in a personal way. I just felt way too connected to Schulz to pick Feiffer over him. AVC: That’s funny, because those two guys are essentially contemporaries, though Peanuts wasn’t pitched directly to Feiffer’s generation. S: I think Peanuts had a period where it was considered very adult humor, probably in the early 60s. Probably college students really glommed onto it. It was seen as very black humor with all its psychological jargon, etc. But I don’t think the cartoonists of Art’s generation liked Schulz in the way that kids who came after them did. In some ways they thought of him as a real square, and they thought of Feiffer as the guy who was telling it like it is. In fact, Art has written about how he had to come to terms with Peanuts later and had to come to understand why others thought Schulz was so great. To him and many of his hippie contemporaries, I'm guessing they thought he represented a kind of establishment ‘50s mentality. I have to wonder if Art’s lack of interest in Schulz is in any way comparable to my lack of interest in Watterson. The younger cartoonists coming up now—I mean the ones I admire—seem to have a deep appreciation of Watterson’s work. I suspect they may be revising the canon to include him. I can understand that. Like I said, as a cartoonist you have to create your own ancestors. You change the context of the work by looking back at it. That's inevitable. Watterson’s okay. I can see the value in his work. But he’s no Charles Schulz. click here to read more Featured artist Seth            GEORGE SPROTT reviewed by Winnipeg Free Press Updated July 3, 2009 Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION Graphic novel 'biography' work of tremendous beauty By: Reviewed by Kenton Smith George Sprott: 1894-1975 A Picture Novella By Seth Drawn and Quarterly, 96 pages, $30 To see one's life with absolute clarity -- could this be considered hell? The title character of George Sprott fears it may be. After all, how much of how we see ourselves amounts to pitiable self-delusion? Refining many of the same themes of his successful comic book Palooka-Ville, Seth digs as deeply affecting a well of existential melancholia as you'll find in contemporary fiction. He demolishes any notions that may still linger of comics being a sub-literary form. Seth is the pen name of the Guelph-based graphic novelist and illustrator Gregory Gallant. His protagonist here, once a No. 1-rated television personality in Toronto, is almost completely forgotten after his death: his niece discovers the station has destroyed his entire backlog of shows, and a collector of Sprott-related memorabilia finds but one hit upon Googling his name. One of the book's most affecting images is of Sprott's reflection in a pond shattered by a ripple, underlining his insignificance. What solace Sprott finds resides in dreams and memory: he spends much time drifting off in his office, a comforting cocoon of memorabilia and nostalgia. But he is also haunted by nightmares of the casual cruelty he inflicted on others, wrapped up as he was in perpetuating a self-image that short-circuited genuine human connections. Not only is George Sprott a brilliant fictional biography and character study, it functions simultaneously on the level of metafiction, questioning the very concept of biography. What, after all, defines a life? Which episodes, which experiences make us who and what we are? For that matter, how can we really know another person? What can we know, given what information we have? How much is only a matter of what we think we know? Sprott's life is related in episodic, fractured fashion, pieced together from testimonials of those who knew him, as well as from his own memories. Seth has made excellent use of the very medium of comics, which is well suited to this approach. As celebrated Watchmen writer Alan Moore has repeatedly pointed out, the comics page allows an artist to plant recurring motifs that may at first seem inconsequential, but acquire significance later on. That the reader can flip back and forth between pages allows him to unpack the included information at his own pace. In George Sprott, one such motif is Sprott repeatedly falling asleep, even on air. What looks to other characters (and to us, initially) to be the doddering of a foolish old man gains in resonance as we come to appreciate the full, sad measure of the character's preference for dreams. Perhaps the key motif, however, is an amateurish painting of a young Inuit, supposedly painted by Sprott himself. At first it seems a mere throwaway detail; its true significance, however, must be left to the reader to discover. Seth, who is also a gifted book designer, has done a beautiful job putting this volume together. His love of retro design can be seen in the art deco front cover, as well as in his adroit rendering of the varying architecture, clothing and graphic design of the 20th century. The crispness of the imagery, facilitated by the book's large format (30.4" x 35.6-cm), is immensely satisfying to the eye; it's no surprise why large format editions are popular among serious comics collectors. For that matter, the density of information on many pages, with their multiple compact panels, would be imperceptible on a smaller page. In both content and format, George Sprott is a work of tremendous beauty. If you haven't yet become acquainted with "serious" comics, let this be your introduction. Kenton Smith is a Winnipeg freelance writer, critic and comics enthusiast. Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition June 28, 2009 B7   click here to read more Featured artist Seth            Featured product George Sprott: (1894-1975)   GEORGE SPROTT reviewed by The Contra Costs Times Updated June 29, 2009 "George Sprott: 1894-1975," by Seth (Drawn & Quarterly, $24.95, 96 pages). New York Times Magazine readers are acquainted with Seth the artist and his fictional character Sprott. If you haven't encountered either, you're in for quite the treat with this oversized book, which expands on the serial featured in the magazine. Sprott is a TV host and former explorer who, similar to Mazzucchelli's Asterio, isn't a sympathetic protoganist — a self-centered man who treated women horribly and ultimately paid the price with loneliness. The inventive Seth fills in the details about this sad character through interviews, internal musings and scenes from the hours leading up to his death. You'll be seduced into Seth's vivid, nostalgic world, and feel the melancholic loss as the people and buildings around Sprott deteriorate and fade from memory. A click here to read more Featured artist Seth            Featured product George Sprott: (1894-1975) GEORGE SPROTT reviewed by NPR blog Updated June 25, 2009 8 Practical Uses For The Giant Graphic Novel 'George Sprott, 1894-1975' by Glen Weldon ... Once you're done reading it, that is. And you really should read it; it's pretty great. Mononimal cartoonist Seth delivers an intriguing, multifaceted meditation on the life and death of a fictional small-time television personality. It's a thoughtful, quietly compelling read: His omniscient narrator keeps apologizing to us for getting the details wrong, while a parade of Sprott's colleagues and family members offer up eulogies that intersect in oblique, surprising ways. George Sprott was originally serialized in the New York Times Magazine, but now that it's been bound in a handsome single volume, you can pick up on the momentum of the thing, the intricacy of its structure and the melancholic grace of the writing. Seth mixes in flashbacks from Sprott's life as an Arctic explorer -- we turn a page, and a coldly beautiful blue-white landscape stretches before our eyes. Turn the page again, and we're back in the sepia-toned routine of television's golden age. And then there's the sheer size of this great honking slab of a book. At 12 inches wide and 14 inches long, George Sprott is only the latest in a slew of graphic novels that seem to have been proportioned for natives of Brobdingnag. Last year's mammoth comic anthology, Kramer's Ergot 7, clocks in at a massive 16 inches by 21 inches. Seaweed, Ben Balisteri's loopy all-ages seafaring adventure, measures 12 inches by 15 inches; even DC and Marvel's regularly published Absolute and Masterworks collected editions are super-sized. It's easy to understand the XXL appeal of it all, though, leafing through George Sprott's gorgeous pages. You'll want to pore over the artist's clean lines and cartoony shapes, and the sheer steroidal size of the volume makes it easy. But what are we supposed to do with the thing after we've read it? Few of us own bookshelves capacious enough to accommodate art tomes this big unless we live on the Upper West Side or inside a West Elm catalog. We can slap it on top of the coffee table, sure -- but that's only a temporary solution, as a home has only so much surface area. Eventually we'll need to cede that precious coffee table real estate back to, you know, coffee. Herewith, some repurposing suggestions. 1. Cutting Board Not dishwasher-safe, duh. 2. Lap Desk Also: TV tray. 3. Windshield Sun Reflector (Smart Car) 4. Owl-Swatter In fact, a hearty smack with the broad side of this book would prove equally effective against most of the small-to-mid-sized creatures of land or air that may beset you in your travels, so let's go ahead and consider it a bat-stunner/mole-whacker/ocelot-basher/coyote-knocker/tapir-thrasher/hawk-paster/wolf-spanker/boar-clubber/puma-socker/basilisk-puncher/harpy-whomper/roc-smiter and, for good measure, a perfectly serviceable ROUS -cudgel. 5. Art Deco Cheese Plate Your turn to host the book club? Set out the Monchego and Montrachet in a cheeky way that says, "I read books!" 6. Limo Driver's Sign for Airport Pick-ups Given the cover design, it's obviously well-suited for those occasions when picking up clients named George Sprott. But it does prominently feature a large image of a fat bald white guy, so it's also likely to work when picking up auto executives, government officials or that one old dude from Cocoon. 7. Crawlspace Baby Gate Show off your indie cred while keeping Junior out of the air vents. 8. Sushi Boat   click here to read more Featured artist Seth            Featured product George Sprott: (1894-1975)   GEORGE SPROTT reviewed by NOW Magazine Updated June 22, 2009 The right Sprott SETH'S LATEST IS SO PRECIOUS, YOU DON'T LEAVE HOME WITH IT DAVID SILVERBERG Let’s get one thing straight: Seth is an extremely talented artist. The graphic novelist known for Palooka-ville and Wimbledon Green knows when to hold back on filling a panel with too much art. He’s the master of the subtle nudge, allowing empty space to say more than a dozen thought-bubbles. In his latest masterpiece, Seth not only displays his artistic depth but also his penchant for storytelling. George Sprott tells the tale of a host of a long-running Canadian television program. The show focuses on Arctic journeys and Inuit lifestyles, chronicling Sprott’s own northern adventures. The inventive part of the book is that the story is told through short interviews with those who knew Sprott, both on and off screen. It works well, even if an omniscient narrator becomes a bit annoying at times. Sprott is a troubled man, and Seth makes him come alive through his nightmares and mumbled regrets. There are several panels where nothing happens, just Sprott staring off into the distance, as if the reader should fill in the blanks. If you’ve ever seen Seth or heard about his home, you know the cartoonist loves anything before the 1960s. His passion for nostalgia infuses the book with honesty that can’t be faked. A warning to interested buyers: George Sprott is not a slim book you can throw into your backpack and read on the subway. As a large coffee table-type book, it gives Seth more breathing room and lets him craft panoramic scenes. It’s not the most portable graphic novel out there, but Seth’s latest is the kind of book you don’t want leaving your house. In a way, it’s much too precious. click here to read more Featured artist Seth            Featured product George Sprott: (1894-1975) GEORGE SPROTT reviewed by Comic Book Resources Updated June 22, 2009 Robot reviews: George Sprott Posted on June 19, 2009 - 02:00 PM by Chris Mautner My father in law passed away earlier this year. He was born in 1929, the son of immigrants, a first-generation American. I often wonder what it was like for him, watching his parents’ culture and way of life fade away as he grew up and then watching his own culture and everything he spent his adulthood embracing all but completely eradicated as he passed into old age. That may be the great curse of the 20th century. Technology and the world has changed so rapidly that we often had little time to turn around and miss whatever was behind us before it got steamrolled over to make room for the new mini-mall. Not that there weren’t things that needed paving over, mind you, just that we rarely had time to reflect. Nostalgia, loss and the unstoppable passage of time are just a few of the central themes to Seth’s latest book, George Sprott. Originally serialized in the New York Times in 2007, Seth has revised and expanded the original tale, and wrapped it up in a handsome oversize edition, ultimately forging a profound and moving . The book focuses on the life of times of its title character, a Canadian TV host, whose sole claim to fame is a few trips he took up north to the cold Canadian wilderness, fancying himself an adventurer. Sprott managed to turn his adventures into a career and spent the rest of his life embellishing and rehashing them, either on his show or on the lecture circuit. By the end he was an obese, tired old man, given to falling asleep on camera and speaking to an increasingly dwindling audience. We learn about Sprott mostly through the eyes of a variety of characters who talk directly to the reader, documentary style. Co-workers, family members, fans and acquaintances all offer up their stories, aided and abetted by a less-then-trustworthy narrator whose frequent apologies and forgetful lapses become something of a running joke (”As an omniscient narrator, I realize I leave much to be desired.”). In between we get brief snippets from Sprott’s life, just enough to get a flavor of the man, such as when he receives the news of his father’s death. Sadly, Sprott ultimately comes off as a bore and more than a bit of a bastard. Though he engenders deep love from his niece and fans, his faults are plentiful and glaring (to list them would spoil the story). It’s to Seth’s credit then, that Sprott remains a sympathetic and even at times likable character. He makes it clear how Sprott’s bad behavior arises from his own insecurities and unwillingness to allow any introspection or self-reflection. Plus, the guy has such a charming air about him that it doesn’t seem completely unreasonable that he’d be able to carry a TV show about the Canadian arctic for 30-plus years. Naturally, a character like George Sprott would never have been able to become a minor celebrity today, a point Seth drives home again and again, reminding us how the modern world has rendered him all but completely forgotten. Sprott pays homage to a time when local TV was as essential as national, and kiddie shows and horror movie hosts were known entities. Of course, a wistfulness for a bygone era is Seth’s stock in trade. He’s explored similar themes in works like Clyde Fans, Wimbeldon Green (which this book most closely resembles) and It’s a Good Life If You Don’t Weaken. I admired, however, how Seth was able to enrich and explore those themes more deeply this time around — this isn’t a retread of a familiar tune, but a song given full orchestration until it sounds lush and full of subtle passages you hadn’t noticed before. Seth attempts a number of narrative tricks that are worth noting. I already mentioned the odd narrator. He also, as he did in the recent, oversize Kramer’s Ergot, divides up the page into little sub-sections, so that a rumination on the history of the TV station Sprott worked for will have a short, nine-panel interview over to the far right side, while the bottom strip runs portraits of various co-workers. It’s an interesting way to break up the page’s rhythm. Indeed, Seth seems to be obsessed with making your eyes pause and he tries a variety of tricks — different colors, different sized panels — to break your flow. He’ll even slow down the book to a near halt to offer a lovely two-page vista or a photograph of one of his cardboard models, built to resemble the buildings Sprott frequents. It’s important to emphasize that this isn’t some simpering “oh gosh, life sure was swell then” nostaliga piece — his wisftulness is well tempered with the knowledge of how such feelings can easily lead to a pathetic bathos, sentimentalism or worse. No, more than anything, George Sprott is a simple and eloquent reminder of how impermenent everything is; how, in the words of Sprott “One day you’re 30 years old, and the next, you look up and there’s an old man in the mirror.” No doubt my father-in-law would have identified with that line. It’s a shame I never got to point it out to him.   click here to read more Featured artist Seth            Featured product George Sprott: (1894-1975)   Adrian and Seth in SF Weekly Updated June 16, 2009 Adrian Tomine and Seth Date/Time:Thu., June 18, 7:30pm Price: Free Contact Info: | Event Website From Sacto, Northern Cal By Michael Leaverton Most writers hate their juvenilia: Adrian Tomine spends nearly the whole introduction of 32 Stories, a rerelease of his collected early work, slamming it. He uses the words “amateurish, scattershot, affected, and deeply derivative.” The title he picked “kills” him, because he put himself in the company of J.D. Salinger (Nine Stories) and Donald Barthelme (Forty and Sixty Stories). So, why is he putting it all out there again? Because he has a smart, persuasive publisher, Chris Oliveros of Drawn & Quarterly, and both of them had a great idea: Release the seven issues of Optic Nerve, which Tomine started self-publishing during high school in Sacramento, in the original Kinko’d, pamphleted form, then ship them out in a box. It’s like opening a time capsule from the early '90s, when Pavement ruled and everyone was tired. The copies, going from raw and dark to slick and clean as Tomine's stature rose, are faithful to the original works, right down to the letters, notes, ads, and Berkeley mailing address (which you should not use; God knows who owns it now). Today, at In Conversation: Adrian Tomine and Seth, he trades stories and pictures with a fellow now-aboveground hero (and fellow New Yorker illustrator) Gregory Gallant, to celebrate the release of five books between them. click here to read more Featured artists Seth Adrian Tomine            Featured products George Sprott: (1894-1975) 32 Stories: Special Edition Box Set Seth interveiwed by Time Out Chicago Updated June 12, 2009 Boring can be interesting: An interview with Seth Posted in Books by Jonathan Messinger on June 10th, 2009 at 8:29 pm Cartoonist Seth has built a career on writing about the quiet march of the everyday. In his new book (originally serialized in the New York Times Magazine), George Sprott: 1894-1975, he tells the story of a minor legend in (fictional) Canadian broadcasting history. In advance of his reading tonight, we chatted with him about nostalgia, tiny houses and why boring can be exciting. JM: How did the story change, going from the New York Times Magazine to a book? Seth: I thought the easiest way to tell the story in the magazine would be, especially since you don’t really know who’s reading it week to week or whether they’re really following it, to try and make each chapter or each page self-contained, yet linked of course to all the other pages. So that people could read a page and if they never picked it up again they would still have some sense of beginning, middle and end. But of course when you sit down to do a book that makes a very different reading experience. The good thing about it is, was that it was easy to add material in between because everything was already like a series of standalone pieces or roughly standalone. And once I decided it was going to be fragmented like that and basically allow the reader to add it all up themselves, that made it actually fairly easy to expand it out into a book. JM: That fragmentary nature also lends it a documentary feel. Seth: It does. It’s funny, having characters interviewed of course immediately makes you think of a documentary but the funny thing is like, I’ve had a few people comment or I’ve read a few things about it, where someone will say, they’ve wondered who’s doing the interviewing and who are these people speaking to. And that was like a thought that never even occurred to me. To me it’s almost like more of a ghost experience where you as the reader are sort of like a ghost floating into his world, sort of looking at the figments of his life. JM: I was wondering about who was doing the interviewing. There’s the one part, kind of early on, where one of George’s colleagues from the TV station mentions there’s a lost video tribute to George. So I assumed that was where the interviews came from. Seth: Oh, OK, that’s an interesting concept. I like to hear that sort of stuff because that never occurred to me in the least. But I like that idea. That’s actually pretty good. JM: Well, good work. Seth: Thank you. Sometimes people tell you stuff and after a while you do start to think you did it on purpose, but that’s just a good interpretation JM: It seems like all of your books are really character- driven, you like to write about these single characters. Seth: Yeah, actually I have a hard time even considering plot, to tell you the truth. It’s like I don’t think in those terms. Automatically, when I think of a story, like if I was to start planning another book, it starts immediately with I start thinking of somebody’s life and more that sweep of their life rather than a particular incident in it. I really think it all just relates to the simple fact that both my parents were very…they talked to me an awful lot about their lives. And they were both much older than me. They both were born like in the ’20s. so I grew up listening to these old stories all the time. And they were both storyteller types. And I think that kind of impressed itself in the back of my mind. I don’t think I realized this till about maybe 10 years ago, but I think that’s kind of why every story I do is sort of an old person relating their life, it’s my idea of what a story is. JM: That’s interesting. Seth: But sometimes I do feel restrained by it. I am planning a new graphic novel that I’ll probably start in a couple of years, and I immediately decided it’s got to have a wider range of characters, so I’m going to try to do a bit more of an ensemble piece with 6 characters, or 5 characters, but I have to say already they’re all old people. So it’s already in the same camp, I can’t get away from it. JM: So you’ll start in a couple of years, is that because you’re working on something else now? Seth: Yeah I’m finishing up my Clyde Fans story, which has been taking forever. I’m going to spend the next year and a half finishing it and that should put an end to that and then I can move on. JM: That ought to feel good. Seth: It will feel good. I think I might have a party at the end. It has taken so long. I think I’m actually going to have a banquet and invite a bunch of people. Sit down and have, like, a retirement party. JM: That seems to fit in thematically with your… Seth: Exactly. JM: Reading about what people say about your work, there’s always this sense that your work is exploring nostalgia for decades past. Do you think that it’s nostalgia? Seth: No, I don’t. I hate the word nostalgia, actually, and I see it every single time there’s any reference to my work. I’ve grown used to it but it always gets under my skin because I think nostalgia has a bad connotation. It always implies a sort of sickly sweet looking back towards a golden age of some kind, even if it’s in your life. Now I certainly think there’s a lot of longing for things in my work or, like, under the surface but it’s not necessarily for the past. And, you know, nostalgia’s tied up with longing for the toys you had when you were a kid or being interested in old TV shows or things like that. And that just seems so hopelessly shallow. Not that we don’t all do it. but it does seem like a shallow thing to be an artistic theme. So it does kind of wear me down at times. JM: And you can’t really be nostalgic for 1935, you weren’t alive… Seth: Yeah exactly. You could have, I’m not sure what you’d even call it, but you could certainly be looking at the past with rose-colored glasses. And I do have my own crank theories about what were better time periods and stuff like that. But it’s mostly just based on aesthetics. I do think that 1925 is probably, in my mind, somewhere around there is like the aesthetic peak of our culture. And it’s been kind of rolling downhill since then. But that doesn’t mean I think everything was even aesthetically was better back then. Some things got better, some things got much worse. But I certainly don’t think 1925 was a better time to live necessarily, especially if you’re not like a privileged white person. JM: Throughout the book there are these sort of cardboard models of the building which I thought were gorgeous; can you tell me a little bit about how that happened? Seth: Yeah, they’re part of a city I’m building actually. I have about 50 of them at the moment. I was planning a story, a graphic novel that actually will probably never happen. It was going to be set in the city of Dominion, which is where George lives, and it was going to be a bunch of characters with separate chapters on each one. So at some point I decided I needed to make up the history of the town. I thought 100 or 200 pages on the history of the town, before you get to the characters, would be kind of interesting. But then I was like, how am I going to start that? So I thought I’d make up a business in my notebook and then roughly figure out some ideas about that. And for some reason I made a little model of the first or the second business maybe I was working on. And I liked the process. I just did it for fun. And I liked it because it gave me time to think what the building’s history was while I was building it. And so I made another and another. And after I had about five it just seemed like an idea to just keep going and so I did. (And the funny thing is that that plan actually really did work out. Now it’s like 9 years later, I know this town pretty well. At some point I eventually reached a point where a map developed and a history. JM: And now they’re touring around as an exhibit; do you think that’s the extent of it then? Seth: It’s hard to say. I go back and forth on it. Every once in a while I do think maybe I should just do the history of the town as a big book. Like just sit down and just pour out, try and come up with a quick drawing style and try to do it, like 6- or 700 pages. And just let it stand almost like those kinds of books you’d buy, like a town history. It crosses my mind. I like it because it sounds kind of boring, too. I am kind of interested in things that are boring.   click here to read more Featured artist Seth            Featured product George Sprott: (1894-1975)   Seth and Adrian Tomine in The Philadelphia City Paper Updated June 4, 2009 Appearing at the Free Library on Tuesday are two frequent New Yorker illustrators and big clues that we are in a great age of the graphic novel. The new one by mono-monikered Seth, George Sprott (1894-1975) (Drawn and Quarterly), is the stylish and deceptively dark life story of a news anchor. Adrian Tomine 's Shortcomings (also D&Q) concerns the rocky relationship of Miko and Ben, twentysomethings whose flaws are likably typical. Tomine's a master of pouring real emotion into tight black-and-white panels. - Patrick Rapa click here to read more Featured artist Seth            Featured product George Sprott: (1894-1975) Seth and Adrian Tomine in The Chicago Reader Updated June 4, 2009 Antiques Road Show Young fogey cartoonists Adrian Tomine and Seth discuss their own work and some neglected masters at Quimby’s. Seth George Sprott (1894-1975) Doug Wright The Collected Doug Wright: Canada's Master Cartoonist (1949-1962) John Stanley Melvin Monster, Volume 1 Adrian Tomine 32 Stories, Shortcomings Yoshihiro Tatsumi A Drifting Life (Drawn & Quarterly) By Ben Schwartz t the height of his fame as America’s “happy hippy cartoonist,” Robert Crumb turned down an offer to do an album cover for the Rolling Stones. Though his artwork graced the sleeve of Big Brother & the Holding Company’s Cheap Thrills, Crumb had no interest in the Summer of Love, and especially not in its music. Janis Joplin was a personal friend and a comics fan, and anyway he needed the $600. But he considered the Stones insufferable posers—like Blueshammer in Ghost World—and found it lamentable that women preferred Mick Jagger to, say, your average underground cartoonist. A few years later he even formed his own band to play more authentic roots blues and country. Not that it slowed the Stones down any. Crumb might’ve been the first cartoonist to wear his anachronism on his sleeve, but he won’t be the last: that gamut runs from Kim Deitch to Drew Friedman to Chris Ware to Jason. Two members in good standing of this society, Seth and Adrian Tomine appear this week at Quimby’s to discuss their most recent projects, all of which are backward-looking in one way or another. The two have six “new” products between them. Seth’s plugging an expanded version of his serial for the New York Times, George Sprott (1894-1975), as well as the first volumes of The Collected Doug Wright, which he conceived, edited, and designed, and The John Stanley Library, which he designed. Tomine’s got reissues of his own Shortcomings and 32 Stories and a new autobiographical work from Japan’s Yoshihiro Tatsumi, A Drifting Life, that he edited, designed, and lettered. Seth’s George Sprott is the “biography” of a fictional Canadian TV personality. “Arctic explorer, television host, raconteur, beloved uncle or opportunist, philanderer, deadbeat father, self-centered bore?” asks the jacket copy; it’s no spoiler to say the title character is all of the above. Sprott, inspired by an actual Detroit talk show host who had a habit of falling asleep as his guests droned on, dreams of his past as he dozes. The defining episode is an affair he had with an Inuit woman during his travels; though he fathers a child with her, he never sees her again. Framing his own memories is a Citizen Kane-style reconstruction of his life as retold by friends, family, and coworkers. For the book version, Seth grew the story by half and even included photographs of Dominion, a fictional midcentury Canadian city he’s been building out of cardboard for the past decade that serves as the setting for Sprott’s life. He has a real gift for creating comforting locales and exteriors populated by emotionally collapsed (if well-attired) figures. Tomine may not have built himself a 1950s city out of cardboard, but he’s immersed himself in the mid-20th century as seen through the eyes of pioneering Japanese cartoonist Yoshihiro Tatsumi. Readers know Tomine best from his New Yorker fiction-issue covers and his autobiographical Optic Nerve, which he began in high school as a series of minicomics xeroxed at a Kinko’s in Sacramento and from which both 32 Stories and Shortcomings were culled, but he’s also been editing and designing Tatsumi’s North American releases since 2005. On the surface, there probably couldn’t be bigger gap between Tomine’s coming of age in sleepy Sacto and Tatsumi’s during the American occupation of Japan. Then again, the struggle to put out independent, literary comics in the North American market of the late 80s and early 90s—dominated as it was by direct sales superhero shops—has its parallels in Tatsumi’s story. Tatsumi more or less invented literary comics in Japan, a style he called gekiga (which translates as “dramatic pictures”) and in A Drifting Life sets his own struggle to break free of the boys’ world of manga comics against Japan’s struggle to redefine its identity after the war. He opens the story on the day of the emperor’s surrender in 1945, with his countrymen literally on their knees, and ends it in 1960, during the riots over the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, which trigger in the cartoonist an epiphany about the nature of his own work. To begin one’s career in literary comics when Seth and Tomine did also meant breaking your own ground. A young Jonathan Lethem or Rick Moody could read any number of new novels by his peers. But for an aspiring graphic novelist, there was Art Spiegelman, Will Eisner, the Hernandez brothers, Harvey Pekar . . . after that, the list got thin. If you wanted more, pre-eBay, you started scouring used bookstores and the dime bin at the comics shop. And once you’d done all that legwork, of course, you wanted to share. Seth, for instance, ran across John Stanley’s mid-1960s work in the dime bins. Best known for scripting Little Lulu (currently in reprints from Dark Horse), Stanley quit comics, reportedly with some animosity, in the early 70s. But before he did he created several titles of his own, including Melvin Monster, Kookie, and Thirteen Going on Eighteen. Seth would eventually write a piece on this later work for the Comics Journal, under editor Tom Devlin. It was Devlin, now at Drawn & Quarterly, who contacted Seth about designing the new Stanley series. An idiosyncratic humorist, Stanley often opened with a simple premise that he’d extend far beyond a one-dimensional joke. With Melvin Monster, publisher Dell surely hoped to cash in on the mid-1960s craze for sitcoms like The Munsters and The Addams Family: Melvin, the good little monster, is a huge disappointment to his evil parents, Mummy and Baddy. But Stanley pushes beyond the obvious gags, and Melvin becomes a somewhat disturbing mix of child abuse and slapstick, set in monster suburbia—a Monsters, Inc. without the Pixar sugar. In one story Baddy sends sissy Melvin to their horrific basement to make a real monster out of him, forgetting about the caged-up beasts that will surely devour his son—not that he tries to save him once he remembers. Melvin survives, then tricks his dad into going down into the basement himself. Seth also designed The Collected Doug Wright: Canada’s Master Cartoonist, Volume 1. Wright (1917-1983) drew the perennially popular Doug Wright’s Family, aka Nipper— the name of the monkey wrench of a toddler thrown into the family’s postwar largesse. Nipper’s sole focus appears to be destroying family property—toys, cars, clothes, food—at maximum inconvenience to his father. Wright drew the strips vertically, to be read from top to bottom, and without dialogue, and made trademark use of a single spot color, bright red, to compose panels, emphasize emotion, or simply identify the main character to the reader. One strip might have a red coat or hat, another red shadows, another a single red z over a snoozing baby. Wright’s appeal to Seth is obvious—there’s his perfectly executed, light design and line, and then there’s the simple central conflict of a family just trying to do anything peaceably—picnic, shop, fish, eat dinner. The anachronists only wish life could be so simple. That’s the difference between them and the nostalgists, who believe it was. In the introductions to both the 1995 and the new edition of 32 Stories, Tomine admits that many of his early minicomics still send a chill of embarrassment up his spine. For the ’95 edition, they were edited into a single slender volume, with “patterned endpapers, metallic Pantone ink, and what’s referred to in the book business as ‘French flaps,’” as if to give them more collective weight—which he now thinks just made things worse. When he reluctantly agreed to a reprint, Tomine made a compromise with his publisher, who wanted the book expanded: he would include everything, but in the original format—a box set of xeroxed pamphlets and minicomics. Nostalgic on the face of it—but from Tomine’s point of view, more honest. One thing it undeniably shows—this generation of literary cartoonists finally has a past of its own.   click here to read more Featured artists Seth Adrian Tomine            Featured products George Sprott: (1894-1975) 32 Stories: Special Edition Box Set   GEORGE SPROTT reviewed by The Oregonian Updated June 4, 2009 George Sprott: 1894-1975 by Steve Duin, The Oregonian Wednesday June 03, 2009, 5:33 PM I'm at a loss as to where to begin. Having proven that he could carefully box his genius for design and storytelling into the tight package of Wimbledon Green, Seth has let it all hang out in the gloriously oversized "picture novella," George Sprott. The 12-inch by 14-inch book from Drawn & Quarterly is an expansive retelling of the biography the Canadian cartoonist fed to us in small bites in The New York Times' Sunday magazine, and a cinematic showcase for Seth's instinct for design. Every element -- the test-pattern endpapers, the chapter dividers, the full-page cardboard reconstructions of the radio station, the Melody Grill and the other major building blocks in George's life -- are so exquisitely timed and rendered that were I to win the next Powerball lottery, I would pay millions to have Seth fly down here and re-design my library, my waning years, my tomb. But wedged in the folds of this novella are the pieces of an elaborate puzzle, presented as the interviews, reminisces and daily rushes of a documentary on the life of the corpulent, haunted Mr. Sprott. Those --- flesh out Seth's preoccupation with loss and nostalgia even if they fail to fully explain the host of "Northern Hi-Lights." When we are introduced to Sprott in 1975, he is only hours removed from the heart attack that will kill him, attended by the niece, Daisy, who is the last person alive still under the illusion that George Sprott cares about anyone but himself. I don't know that George Sprott is really about the power of illusion, given that the reader understands very early that the Arctic adventurer and Canadian media personality. Seth's interviews with CKCK's former weatherman, Sprott's daughter and the manager of the hotel where Sprott moved after his wife died casually pull the curtain back on the "fat old man at a desk, showing ancient silent films of the Arctic while droning on in a monotone voice." But along the way, George Sprott also garners a degree of sympathy for the lost souls and squandered opportunities in his wake. When he was too young and stupid to know better, he fathered a child and abandoned her mother in the Great White North, and they come to symbolize everything that we surrender before we understood their value. I suspect I'm sounding my age. The 24-year-old readers won't be as forgiving of the old man when they hear him speak on memory, "I have tried hard to live a life undisturbed by the past. However, old age has a way of bringing it all back to you. And with a potency that is completely unexpected." In the end, George Sprott doesn't fit together quite as neatly as Wimbledon Green, largely because Seth is dealing with bigger issues and ambiguities ... and lives don't lend themselves quite as readily as books to a grand design. click here to read more Featured artist Seth            Featured product George Sprott: (1894-1975) Seth interview in EnRoute Magazine Updated June 3, 2009 Seth The cartoonist discusses the real versus the imaginary and what keeps him up at night. By Alexandra Redgrave Illustration by Silja Götz Have you ever taken a life-changing trip? I’ve certainly had trips that have had a profound effect on me. About 15 years ago, I drove to Prince Edward Island in an old 1971 Chrysler Valiant, and there was some uncertainty as to whether the car would make it. It was a great experience. I just drove and drove all day. Do you find reading is similar to travelling? Of course, nothing’s really the same as travelling; first-person experience is something you can’t capture in any other way. But reading a book can be a rich and lasting experience. Just recently, I read Tolstoy’s very emotional and deeply profound The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Master and Man; they kept me up all night thinking. Do you prefer to set your stories in real or imaginary places? The earlier part of my life was about accumulating details from the real world and now I’m translating them into fiction. For readers, you are a travel guide of sorts. To some degree, yes. Recently I’ve become more interested in place over character. I almost feel like I could throw away the characters and just focus on the places. There’s something artificial about engaging a reader with a plot and pulling them through a story with drama. I’m intrigued when the description of the objects in a room tells you everything you need to know about a person. I’d rather read 100 pages about what’s in a character’s house. Is taking a journey in your mind more appealing than travelling in reality? I’m a homebody for sure. I spend an awful lot of time by myself because I’m a cartoonist. But sometimes even a walk downtown can turn out to be remarkably significant. Age 46 Profession Cartoonist and graphic designer Location Guelph, Ontario Claim to fame Three graphic novels; has illustrated two New Yorker covers Latest project George Sprott (1894–1975),a graphic novel Last vacation Ottawa Next vacation Prairies road trip Travel essentials Victorian ghost stories Favourite souvenir A page from a graphic novel given to him by cartoonist and friend Chris Ware in Chicago   click here to read more Featured artist Seth            Featured product George Sprott: (1894-1975)   GEORGE SPROTT reviewed by Comic Book Resources Updated June 3, 2009 Chris Mautner’s pick of the week: George Sprott, 1894-1975 hardcover Seth’s serialized story of the life and times of a psuedo-explorer turned has-been Canadian TV host won lots of accolades when it was serialized in The New York Times a year or two ago. No doubt more accolades will follow now that the story has been expanded and collected in an oversize hardcover volume, courtesy of Drawn & Quarterly. No doubt familiar readers will expect dollops of the nostalgia and longing for a bygone era that’s punctuated Seth’s work. That’s certainly here, but also explored here are regret, fear, the sorrow of old age and death, and the horrible mistakes we make trying to find our place in the world. I’m making the book sound like a slog through despondency, but really it’s about as lyrical and graceful and humane a comic as you’ll probably come across this year. click here to read more Featured artist Seth            Featured product George Sprott: (1894-1975) Seth adn Adrian Tomine interveiwed by Newcity Lit Updated June 3, 2009   click here to read more Featured artists Seth Adrian Tomine            Featured products George Sprott: (1894-1975) A Drifting Life 32 Stories: Special Edition Box Set   Seth and Adrian Tomine interveiwed by Newcity Lit Updated June 3, 2009 click here to read more Featured artists Seth Adrian Tomine            Featured products George Sprott: (1894-1975) A Drifting Life 32 Stories: Special Edition Box Set Seth interview by The Gothamist Updated June 1, 2009 Seth, Graphic Novelist f 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. Your 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! 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. What are you currently working on? The aforementioned "Clyde Fans" storyline. My comic book series PALOOKAVILLE will be changing format this year from an old style floppy comic book to a slick little hardcover book format (about 80 pages in length). I've been serializing CLYDE FANS in PALOOKAVILLE for years and that will continue but the book will also showcase other works of mine, as well—my sketchbooks for example. Is there an era you haven't worked in yet that you'd like to set a future graphic novel in? Maybe the future. That often crosses my mind. Like everyone, I have a post apocalyptic story in the back of my mind. It contains no zombies or leather jackets though. Are there any up and coming graphic novelists whose work you're excited about right now? There are lots of younger cartoonists that have come up in the last decade who I think are fantastic—Kevin Huizenga, Sammy Harkham, Jonathan Bennett, David Heatley, Ron Rege—a handful of others. I hesitate to make too tight a list for fear of forgetting someone important. I am quite enthused about a young canadian named Ethan Rilley who just published his first comic—POPE HATS. If someone is just starting to get into the world of comics and graphic novels, where would you suggest they start? Mini comics, I guess. Just draw your own comics and zerox them and get them out there. There is a whole world of young minicomics artist s and it seems like a very supportive and vital place to tap into if you are just starting out. Comics fesitivals like MOCCA, TCAF, APE and SPX are good places for young cartoonists to get a feel for the medium and the "industry". If you are any good you will find your way. There is really no other way to be an artist then to simply do the work. What was the experience like of seeing your work in the NY Times magazine and on the cover of the New Yorker? My first cover for the New Yorker was "killed" before it went to press and that was a pretty big disappointment. So when the next opportunity arose I was emotionally prepared for failure. When it saw press I think I ruined it for myself by being too guarded. In retrospect though that was a major milestone for me. I have had such a deep and abiding love of the cartoonists of the old New Yorker that it was a very important moment to somehow "connect" myself with that tradition. It's nice to have accomplished it and not have that unfinished goal hanging over my head. Every new cover is just gravy on the main dish. Being in the Times was a great thrill because it was such a prestigious venue for my work. It reached an audience that likely would never have seen it otherwise. However being a cartoonist is not like being in a band. You don't get to see anyone read the work. At best you vaguely perceive the work going out into the world. You're still all alone in the studio. Nobody applauds. Is there anywhere your illustrations haven't been that you would like to see them? Nothing leaps to mind. I wish I had had some comics in RAW magazine or in WEIRDO but both those magazines are long dead and I don;t have a time machine. I mean, I was alive when those magazines were published and I could have had something in them, I guess, except for the simple fact that my work was utterly terrible back them. What influences your illustrations and novels? Everything. It's a bad answer but it is true. What I'm reading, what I'm watching. Art i look at. Other cartoonists. When it comes to the writing I mostly look to my own life—to my past. Often things get mixed up with whatever I am currently interested in. With George Sprott much of the story came out of myself and the people I have known but I made him a local tv host because I was very interested in local tv history at the time I started the story. If I had been reading about lumberjacks, for example, he might have ended up working in the lumber trade. My drawing takes less influence then it used to. When I was young every new favourite artist left some mark on my drawing. Now, as a middle aged man, I find the drawing is pretty set it stone. Mostly I am responding to my own work—refining or trying to simplify. It takes less inspiration from other works. But, that's not entirely true—every few years I come across someone that makes me rethink how I am drawing. You never know. What music are you currently listening to? When i was younger I listened to a lot of Jazz and Blues but not so much lately. My taste is more scattered. I listen to a lot of Maritime fiddlers. Some folk music. Not long ago a friend gave me a sountrack album for CHARIOTS OF THE GODS and I listened to that for a couple of weeks pretty much constantly. However the main music I listen to is Glenn Gould. Everyday I listen to Glenn. Please share your strangest "only in New York" story. I'm not sure I have really anything good that fits this question. I've thought long and hard about it and I can't seem to dredge up a good New York anecdote. I do recall at one book signing there was a guy who refused to believe that I wasn't also the artist Maurice Vellecoop. I kept telling the guy that Maurice was a real person and not one of my pseudonyms . Our drawing styles are somewhat alike but that didn't seem good enough justification for this fellow's conviction. More bothersome was the fact that Vellecoop mostly draws pretty hardcore gay imagery. I'm not sure what signals I'm sending out unconsciously because it seems to me I'm the the person least likely to be doing such work—I'm really uptight! And it shows! Which New Yorker do you most admire? God, what a question. That could cover anyone from Harold Ross to Joseph Mitchell to J.D. Salinger. I guess I will limit the question by sticking to comtempory cartoonists. Art Spiegelman's an obvious choice, I so greatly admire his masterpiece, MAUS and art is just such a smart and funny person. But I'd have mention Ben Katchor too. His work is so beautiful. So rich. I know you only wanted one—but I am picking those two guys. In 24 hours the world will end, you are in NYC, what do you spend your last day on earth doing? Well—I might just spend the time in my hotel room on the phone with my wife. But if that's not possible I guess I'd head up to the Whitney and spend some time with Alexander Calder's Circus.   click here to read more Featured artist Seth              GEORGE SPROTT reviewed by The Onion Updated June 1, 2009 Canadian cartoonist Seth had something of an epiphany a few years back, when he dashed off the quickie graphic novella Wimbledon Green in his sketchbook while he was still mired in the slow-developing graphic novel Clyde Fans. For years, his output had been limited, but lately the floodgates have been open, and while Clyde Fans still sits unfinished, the tide of sketchbooks, memoirs, sculptures, magazine covers, and anthology designs that Seth has turned out over the past five years have more than compensated. The latest project to roll swiftly off Seth’s drawing board is George Sprott 1894-1975 (D&Q) an oversized, hardbound graphic novella that expands on a series of serialized one-pagers Seth drew for The New York Times Magazine. The title character is a fictional arctic adventurer turned TV host, and the story presents a Citizen Kane-like series of reflections on the late hero’s life and times. Seth strains a little for poignancy in some places, but in an indie-comics marketplace glutted with memoirs, abstraction, and clichéd melodrama, its refreshing to see an artist construct a subtle, well-realized made-up world out of half-forgotten places and characters who might’ve-been. George Sprott’s subject is nothing less than mortality itself, and how a person, a place, an emotion, and even a memory can cease to exist. What’s wonderful about Seth’s current high level of production is that he’s working hard to assure his own enduring legacy, while also mapping out a lived-in vision of our collective past to supplant the one rapidly fading from the popular consciousness… A- click here to read more Featured artist Seth            Featured product George Sprott: (1894-1975) DOUG WRIGHT reviewed by COmic Book Resources Updated May 29, 2009 Robot reviews: The Collected Doug Wright Posted on May 28, 2009 - 01:07 PM by Chris Mautner The Collected Doug Wright Vol. 1 Edited by Seth and Brad Mackay Drawn and Quarterly, 240 pages, $39.95. The first thing you notice is the line. It’s usually rail-thin, although it will sometimes gracefully thicken when forming the back slope of a character’s head or traveling along someone’s back or legs. It’s simple, and seemingly unfussed, but it’s never less than assured, capable of rendering just about anything with clarity and aplomb, be it a typical 1950s suburban neighborhood, a mud-soaked little boy or the wood paneling on a corner table. Were that all Doug Wright had to offer comics, it would be enough to merit attention. The medium is filled with great and talented artists, but few are capable of the charming effortlessness that’s on display in The Collected Doug Wright, the first of two volumes designed to bring a renewed appreciation to the Canadian cartoonist. Indeed, one of the artists he most draws parallels with is his American contemporary Hank Ketcham, and not just because both are largely known for their strips about over exuberant little boys — Ketcham with Dennis the Menace and Wright with Nipper. The difference, however, lies in the substance behind the drawing. Ketcham is rightly revered as a superb craftsman, but one who nevertheless leaned heavily on a stock gag formula that over the years relied less on observation and human behavior and more on cute, rote situational comedy. Not so with Nipper. In addition to being lovingly rendered, the silent strip overflows with knowing, true-to-life humor about the realities of parenthood. No doubt drawn from his own experiences as a father (at least in its later years, as Wright began the strip before he had children), the weekly strip doesn’t attempt to portray its lead as an innocent angel. Nipper frequently gets into trouble, and his parents are just as frequently exasperated (it should be noted that Wright’s knack for facial expressions are one of the selling points of the strip) but he isn’t a menace. More that he’s blessed with a curiosity and eagerness for play that has to be constantly stepped on by his parents (more so when Nipper is blessed with a little brother). It’s a situation that anyone who’s had to take care of a preschooler for more than two hours can relate to. Much has been made by some of how Canadian the strip is and I suppose with the constantly changing seasons there is a particularly distinct northern humor and sensibility. I tend to regard the strip as a rather universal creation however, Wright’s milieu was one that any reader young or old can easily identify with, regardless of their country of origin. While the Nipper strips make up the bulk of this volume (and continue no doubt into the next one) I don’t want to slight the other material collected here. Co-editor Brad Mackay provides an excellent introduction to the artist, delving extensively into Wright’s background and temperament. What’s more, the abundant magazine illustrations, gag cartoons, other strips and photos of the artist and his family help provide a well-rounded picture. And all bound in a handsome oversize hardcover that once again showcases Seth’s talents as a designer. There’s been a tendency to place Wright in the upper eschelon of his contemporaries, alongside Harvey Kurtzman and Charles Schulz. I’m not sure that sort of overeager boosterism is really necessary, though he certainly does share some overlapping qualities with those creators. Wright’s work, at least what’s lovingly presented in this volume, is strong enough though to stand on its own and demand attention without the comparisons, however apt someone may find them to be. I’m content and grateful that a few people took the time and effort to re-introduce this artist to a new generation of readers like myself. That’s enough.   click here to read more Featured artists Seth Doug Wright            Featured product The Collected Doug Wright Volume One   DOUG WRIGHT reviewed by Comic Book Resources Updated May 29, 2009 Robot reviews: The Collected Doug Wright Posted on May 28, 2009 - 01:07 PM by Chris Mautner The Collected Doug Wright Vol. 1 Edited by Seth and Brad Mackay Drawn and Quarterly, 240 pages, $39.95. The first thing you notice is the line. It’s usually rail-thin, although it will sometimes gracefully thicken when forming the back slope of a character’s head or traveling along someone’s back or legs. It’s simple, and seemingly unfussed, but it’s never less than assured, capable of rendering just about anything with clarity and aplomb, be it a typical 1950s suburban neighborhood, a mud-soaked little boy or the wood paneling on a corner table. Were that all Doug Wright had to offer comics, it would be enough to merit attention. The medium is filled with great and talented artists, but few are capable of the charming effortlessness that’s on display in The Collected Doug Wright, the first of two volumes designed to bring a renewed appreciation to the Canadian cartoonist. Indeed, one of the artists he most draws parallels with is his American contemporary Hank Ketcham, and not just because both are largely known for their strips about over exuberant little boys — Ketcham with Dennis the Menace and Wright with Nipper. The difference, however, lies in the substance behind the drawing. Ketcham is rightly revered as a superb craftsman, but one who nevertheless leaned heavily on a stock gag formula that over the years relied less on observation and human behavior and more on cute, rote situational comedy. Not so with Nipper. In addition to being lovingly rendered, the silent strip overflows with knowing, true-to-life humor about the realities of parenthood. No doubt drawn from his own experiences as a father (at least in its later years, as Wright began the strip before he had children), the weekly strip doesn’t attempt to portray its lead as an innocent angel. Nipper frequently gets into trouble, and his parents are just as frequently exasperated (it should be noted that Wright’s knack for facial expressions are one of the selling points of the strip) but he isn’t a menace. More that he’s blessed with a curiosity and eagerness for play that has to be constantly stepped on by his parents (more so when Nipper is blessed with a little brother). It’s a situation that anyone who’s had to take care of a preschooler for more than two hours can relate to. Much has been made by some of how Canadian the strip is and I suppose with the constantly changing seasons there is a particularly distinct northern humor and sensibility. I tend to regard the strip as a rather universal creation however, Wright’s milieu was one that any reader young or old can easily identify with, regardless of their country of origin. While the Nipper strips make up the bulk of this volume (and continue no doubt into the next one) I don’t want to slight the other material collected here. Co-editor Brad Mackay provides an excellent introduction to the artist, delving extensively into Wright’s background and temperament. What’s more, the abundant magazine illustrations, gag cartoons, other strips and photos of the artist and his family help provide a well-rounded picture. And all bound in a handsome oversize hardcover that once again showcases Seth’s talents as a designer. There’s been a tendency to place Wright in the upper eschelon of his contemporaries, alongside Harvey Kurtzman and Charles Schulz. I’m not sure that sort of overeager boosterism is really necessary, though he certainly does share some overlapping qualities with those creators. Wright’s work, at least what’s lovingly presented in this volume, is strong enough though to stand on its own and demand attention without the comparisons, however apt someone may find them to be. I’m content and grateful that a few people took the time and effort to re-introduce this artist to a new generation of readers like myself. That’s enough. click here to read more Featured artists Seth Doug Wright            Featured product The Collected Doug Wright Volume One SETH interviewed by The Globe and Mail Updated May 28, 2009 Canada's comic-book hero His stories dwell on things vaguely remembered. His new graphic novel is about a has-been fifties TV star. Is it any surprise that Gregory Gallant, a.k.a. Seth, wears a fedora, collects Ookpik dolls and uses a rotary phone? James Adams reports JAMES ADAMS Guelph, Ont. — From Saturday's Globe and Mail, Friday, May. 15, 2009 03:20PM EDT "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. 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. The sweet vanished past   click here to read more Featured artist Seth            Featured products George Sprott: (1894-1975) The Collected Doug Wright Volume One   SETH interview on CBC's Q Updated May 28, 2009 click here to read more Featured artist Seth            Featured products George Sprott: (1894-1975) The Collected Doug Wright Volume One DOUG WRIGHT reviewed by The Toronto Star Updated May 28, 2009 GRAPHICA That little Nipper For generations of newspaper readers, Doug Wright's irrepressible hellion brightened up the familial drudgery May 24, 2009 04:30 AM Be the first to comment on this article... Jonathan Kuehlein It seems as though more than half of our time as parents of young kids is spent either apologizing for their antics or cleaning up the resulting debris. Plus there's a lot of yelling, in spite of your best intentions and everything modern parenting gurus preach. Pouring over the timeless, wordless comic strip gags in The Collected Doug Wright: Canada's Master Cartoonist – 1949-1962 (Drawn & Quarterly $39.95, 242 pages) certainly hammers these truths home and highlights a few more. Wright's classic comic strip, Nipper, which began appearing weekly in 1949 in the Montreal Standard Magazine and later evolved into the much-beloved Doug Wright's Family in the Star Weekly and Canadian Magazine, depicts the ongoing mischievous adventures of a young boy. He's determined to explore every aspect of chaos in his house, yard and extended neighbourhood at the price of his parents' wits. Wright's strip also does a masterful job of highlighting the glee with which kids still humble, hurt and humiliate their parents with great regularity. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the initial success of Nipper, at least from a parent's perspective, is the fact that Wright's knack for capturing the precociousness of kids came before he had any of his own. The first of his three sons was born in 1953, an event that added even more realism and depth to the strip in subsequent years. This first volume of a two-book set, assembled by award-winning Canadian illustrator and designer Seth, featuring an insightful and comprehensive biography by journalist Brad MacKay and an introduction by Lynn Johnston, creator of For Better or For Worse, is a breathtaking tribute to Wright's sizable artistic skills. The book includes content ranging from some of Wright's earliest childhood drawings in England to his first job – doing illustrations on staff newsletters for Electrolux – and work from the position that brought the artist to Canada as staff illustrator for Sun Life Insurance in Montreal in 1938. Several of Wright's cartoons for the RCAF service magazine, completed under the pseudonym "Ozzie," and examples of his take on the rural-themed Juniper Junction, which he took over in 1948 from the late Jimmy Frise and continued for another two decades, show the artist's diversity. But it is Nipper, the character that captured the zeitgeist of the late-'40s baby boom, who gets most of the attention in this book. From tipping an ashtray into his sleeping dad's mouth to roaring around the house dragging the cat in a shopping bag to countless adventures that leave him covered head to toe in mud, the endearing little hellion almost always gets the last laugh in a wonderful collection of strips that truly stand the test of time. Wright died in 1983. Jeffrey Brown's willingness to lay himself bare in his autobiographical graphic novels has endeared him greatly to many readers over the past decade. From emotional depictions of how he lost his virginity (Clumsy) to his first love (Unlikely) to becoming a dad (Little Things), Brown has captured the often mundane moments that form much of our lives and made them compelling through deep introspection and a delightful self-deprecating wit.   click here to read more Featured artists Seth Doug Wright            Featured product The Collected Doug Wright Volume One   DOUG WRIGHT reviewed by the Times Colonist Updated May 28, 2009 Wright's car culture tribute to times past Peter Kenter, Canwest News Service Published: Friday, May 15, 2009 Growing up, one of my favourite comics was Doug Wright's Family, a weekly two-colour pantomime strip that graced the back pages of the long-departed Canadian Magazine. For most of us, Wright so accurately reflected changing suburban Canadian family life that we simply didn't realize we were looking into a mirror. The Wright kids not only played hockey and watched Victoria Day fireworks, they had a real father who drank beer and sometimes didn't shave and a mother who cussed her brood and burned with shame at their antics. I never questioned that Wright was drawing from real life. If he wasn't, I don't need to know about it. I recently got my hands on the first of a two-volume set, The Collected Doug Wright, Volume One. The book covers not only the Doug Wright's Family strips but also Wright's enormous output as an illustrator for hire. Email to a friendEmail to a friendPrinter friendlyPrinter friendly Font: I can see where I might have gotten such strong impressions of that bruiser of a station wagon. Wright must have loved cars -- or at least loved to draw them. Editors Seth and Brad McKay note Wright's "great passion for the motor vehicle -- and his remarkable skill in cartooning them" That's almost an understatement. Even the kiddy cars in the strips are rendered with an attention to detail usually reserved for adult-sized vehicles. The book could almost pass as a history of the Canadian automobile experience from the early 1940s until 1962, where this volume leaves off. Vehicles ranging from family sedans to beaten-down pickup trucks and giant 18-wheelers are rendered in loving detail all out of proportion to their importance in the narrative. What's also fascinating is the fact that all of them seem to be made up out of whole cloth -- an amalgam of fine detail cobbled together in perfectly harmonious fashion to deliver car brands and models as they might have been. There's a canary yellow 1962 Astrojet locking its brakes as a squabbling family in a grey something-or-other pulls a crazy U-turn in the middle of traffic. I'm almost fooled into thinking a two-toned pink-and-white model called a Satellite is the real thing, until I realize the illustration precedes the introduction of the Plymouth Satellite by three years. Landscapes are littered with automotive minutiae: gas at 35 cents an Imperial gallon, advertisements for Guck Oil, delivery vehicles for Provincial Pork Packers and independent roadside coffee shops from a time before Tim Hortons (though not Tim Horton). Still, it's the family strips that speak to me the loudest. I first experienced them at an age when I was only a passenger in my father's car. As a driver and dad, they're far more meaningful. A helpful child assists his father by sandpapering the car. (My car?!!!) Two kids hail a streetcar, only to run away after exercising control over a stream of vehicles that stops suddenly behind its open door -- only I'm no longer the cheeky kid but the guy who's stuck in traffic. It gets worse. Dad tells a Canada Customs agent he has nothing to declare, until his blabby kid points to a giant-sized carton of cigarettes stashed under the front seat. In a water gun fight, one of the boys sprays his pals with radiator fluid he finds in the garage. I didn't see the station wagon with the faux wood panelling in this volume, but I'll wait for it in the next one. In the meantime, I'll settle for the giant 1962 Astrojet -- running on 35-cent-a-gallon gas. © Times Colonist (Victoria) 2009 click here to read more Featured artists Seth Doug Wright            Featured product The Collected Doug Wright Volume One TCAF event coverage in Now Magazine Updated May 28, 2009 An impressive trio at TCAF Seth, Adrian Tomine and Yoshihiro Tatsumi at Toronto Comic Arts Festival Jay Dart To kick off the 2009 Toronto Comic Arts Festival, the Authors at Harbourfront Centre series played host to a presentation by three renowned comic book artists, aka cartoonists, aka graphic novelists, aka graphic artists, aka artists. While it may not be clear what they prefer to be called, one thing that can definitely be said about Adrian Tomine, Seth and Yoshihiro Tatsumi: their collections of bound visual narratives near perfect examples of this popular medium. drian Tomine (above) began the evening by reading the self-deprecating introduction included in the 10th Anniversary edition of 32 Stories, a compilation of his early work that is being re-released, much to his chagrin, by Drawn & Quarterly after the first printing recently sold out. Although Tomine explained that he would rather these "quaint artifacts" from his past just disappear, they will continue to be available alongside Optic Nerve, a popular alternative comic series, and his most current novel, Shortcomings. Guelph-based comic artist, Seth, then took the stage and treated the standing room only crowd to 12 of his own stories relating the life of one humble cartoonist. Seth's unconnected tales took us back to his formative years when he would rush home from school for Charlie Brown, and then eventually Marvel Comics. Looking back now, he realizes that when he did his own comics featuring the heroes from Marvel, he bridged the gap between his inner and outer realities by drawing his thoughts out in a tangible form, and thus paving the way for his own unique style of biographical tales such George Sprott (1894-1975) which, in 2007, was serialized in New York Times Magazine in 25 installments and is now being released as a stand alone book this Spring. The rest of his presentation was also filled with more insightful ‘wisbits’ as he shared his experiences writing his weekly comic strips, his thoughts on the poetry of comics, and his days spent isolated in his basement, dedicated to this artform. Tomine then returned to the stage to interview Yoshihiro Tatsumi (pictured above), one of Japan's most influential comic artists. Most of the audience were only introduced to his works in 2006 when Drawn & Quaterly, and specifically Tomine, first brought his collections to the West. During the interview, Tatsumi shared partial stories of how friends and family reacted to being featured in his recent auto-biographical masterpiece, A Drifting Life, and what it was like when he first met his idol. Tatsumi also related stories of his upbringing in the slums of Osaka and rising to the forefront of the "Gekiga" style of comics – a term that he coined to describe a new style of Japanese comics meaning "dramatic pictures" which opened the medium up to more mature audiences and was adopted by cartoonists who did not want their art being called manga or "irresponsible pictures." In the end, he also imparted some wisdom for maintaining a long and successful career: take care of the body first, then the mind. So, aspiring graphic artists take note: do some push-ups and run a few laps before inking in those panels! This event also marked the opening of the exhibition Graphic Novels: The Creation of Art and Narrative which runs until June 21st in Harbourfront Centre’s York Quay Centre and features Canada's Jeff Lemire, Kagan McLeod, Jillian Tamaki & Mariko Tamaki, Doug Wright (by Seth) as well as Anke Feuchtenberger (Germany), Emmanuel Guibert (France), Yoshihiro Tatsumi (Japan) and Adrian Tomine (USA). All pictures by Jay Dart.   click here to read more Featured artists Seth Adrian Tomine Yoshihiro Tatsumi            Featured products George Sprott: (1894-1975) A Drifting Life 32 Stories: Special Edition Box Set   SPROTT starred review by Publishers Weekly Updated May 28, 2009 George Sprott: 1894–1975 Seth. Drawn & Quarterly, $24.95 (96p) ISBN 978-1-897299-51-7 First serialized in the New York Times Magazine, this exquisite extended version of the life of fictional Canadian TV personality George Sprott only adds to Seth's place as one of the form's masters. In the hours and moments before Sprott's death in 1975, the omniscient—and nameless—narrator flashes both backward to key moments in the TV man's life and forward to interviews conducted after Sprott's passing. After spending four years in seminary school, Sprott sets out to be, as he dubs himself, a “gentleman adventurer,” taking numerous trips to the Canadian Arctic and filming his exploits. After he lands his own television program, Northern Hi-Lights, in the '50s, Sprott spends the next 20-plus years (1,132 episodes) telling and retelling stories of his adventures with the Inuits. Along the way, we meet his long-suffering wife, Helen; employees of the Radio Hotel (where Sprott lived for the last 10 years of his life); and members of the Coronet Club (where he delivered regular and increasingly boring lectures). Musings by the man himself—on everything from modern life to food to loneliness—help to round out this portrait of a man who never seemed truly satisfied but somehow made do. Seth (Palookaville) manages to make what is essentially the story of one man's slow death into an often humorous rumination on the power of media, memory and loss. (May) click here to read more Featured artist Seth            Featured product George Sprott: (1894-1975) TCAF event writeup in The National Post Updated May 28, 2009 Tomine, Seth, and Tatsumi talk shop at TCAF Posted: May 09, 2009, 6:18 PM by Lia Grainger The 4th annual Toronto Comic Arts Festival opened with a bang last night at Harbourfront Centre, as three legends of the genre captivated a packed house with stories and art. Adrian Tomine spoke about a new edition of his collection 32 Stories, Seth told twelve tales plucked from his long career as a comic book artist, and Yoshihiro Tatsumi discussed his seminal new autobiographical graphic novel A Drifting Life. It was an inspiring evening. Christopher Butcher, founder and director of TCAF, and owner of The Beguiling – one of the most valuable comic art and graphic novel resources in the country – introduced the evening’s speakers to an enthusiastic audience. Adrian Tomine, best known for the ongoing comic series Optic Nerve and his recent graphic novel Shortcomings, humbly presented the repackaged version of his first collection 32 Stories. Tomine was painfully self-deprecating, recounting that when his publisher initially told him it was going out of print, his response was “Thank God, finally.” He quickly learned it would be reprinted, and with the aid of a slideshow, Tomine walked the audience through the story of its original creation, painstakingly pointing out what he perceived to be the many ways in which the collection was naïve and amateurish. At one point, after agonizing over the hideousness of the book’s original dust jacket, Tomine described a dream in which Raymond Carver’s widow comes across the collection in a second-hand bookstore and is horrified. Tomine also noted that actor Keanu Reeves' band Dogstar released a song in the '90s with the unfortunate title, "32 Stories", and proceeded to play the song, accompanied by images of Keanu rocking out. The presentation was understated and hilarious, and though Tomine seemed intent on tearing down his early work, I was left with a strong desire to run to the sales table down the hall and buy a copy of the new edition. It includes several bonuses, including angry letters from now-famous cartoonists and the rejection letter he received upon his first submission of the piece to Drawn & Quarterly, way back in 1993. Next to take the stage, dressed in an impeccable 1940s pea-green suit and looking very much like one of his characters, was Seth. With work characterized by clean, delicately tapered lines and a deep, muted palette, Seth is best known for his comic Palookaville and graphic novels (though he hates the term) like Wimbledon Green and Clyde Fans. A legend in his own right, Seth’s presentation reaffirmed the reputation he has earned over his long and groundbreaking career. With elegance and panache, Seth told twelve deliberately random stories from his life, and noted the beginning of each new tale with the ringing of a small gold bell. His points, in brief, were: 1. Comics provide a concrete link to a vivid inner reality. 2. Cartooning is a solitary pursuit. 3. Times have changed: in the beginning, it was difficult to be serious in comics. 4. Seth resists technology. When he learned he could Google himself, it was not a good thing. 5. Comics have the rhythm, and require the deliberate decision-making, of poetry. 6. Peanuts comics are haikus. 7. Seth is pretty sure someone stole his theory that “Peanuts comics are haikus.” 8. Seth’s college 3D art teacher was an angry, talented man, and Seth is glad for it. 9. No matter how hard you work, you can’t change your intelligence or your talent; Chris Ware disagrees. 10. Style in comic book art is extremely deliberate, like a pompadour. 11. Comics appear to be silent and still, but they’re not. 12. According to Crumb, “There’s nothing wrong with repeating yourself, so long as you dig a little deeper each time.” While he spoke, images of his work flashed on the screen behind him. He assured the audience that they were entirely unrelated to what he was saying, and yet at many points the art seemed to unintentionally fit with the words, giving the speech a calming rhythmical cadence that was a pleasure to hear and observe. The main event was Japanese manga legend Yoshihiro Tatsumi. Tatsumi is credited with inventing gekiga, a form of manga with complex mature themes designed for adult readers. In a Godzilla t-shirt, blazer and brown driver’s cap, Tatsumi looked cool and relaxed. With the help of a translator, Adrian Tomine interviewed Tatsumi about his new book, A Drifting Life. Tatsumi was animated and forthcoming about his early years, explaining that, “The country was getting rich, but for me and the people in my life, nothing was changing, and I wanted to make work about that, as a form of protest.” Tomine asked several questions about Tatsumi’s relationship with Osamu Tazuka, best known for Astroboy. Tatsumi discussed how their careers had diverged, as Tatsumi tackled darker themes and Tezuka continued with fantasy. When asked if he had any advice for artists, Tatsumi cheekily replied, “I agree with what Seth said. In fact, I really learned a lot from him.” The Toronto Comic Arts Festival runs until Sunday. For more information visit www.torontocomics.com.   click here to read more Featured artists Seth Adrian Tomine Yoshihiro Tatsumi            Featured products George Sprott: (1894-1975) A Drifting Life 32 Stories: Special Edition Box Set   DOUG WRIGHT reviewed by The Calgary Herald Updated May 28, 2009 Reviving Canada's master By Nancy Tousley, Calgary Herald May 11, The Collected Doug Wright: Canada’s Master Cartoonist, Volume One, edited by Seth, (Drawn & Quarterly, 240 pages, $39.95) Remember Doug Wright? His cartoons ran in Canadian newspaper magazines for 35 years and a generation or two of Canadians grew up with his main character, a rambunctious little Canadian boy-cousin of Charlie Brown. Nipper, as he was called, was born in print a year and a half before Charlie Brown and two years before Dennis the Menace. Charles Schulz and Hank Ketcham, Charlie Brown and Dennis’s respective creators, are enshrined in the pantheon of great cartoonists. Wright, on the other hand, though heralded as “Canada’s best known cartoonist” during his lifetime, has been all but forgotten. More’s the pity because the creator of Nipper and Doug Wright’s Family was a great cartoonist, says Seth, the author of Palooka-Ville, Clyde Fans and the forthcoming George Sprott. As if it takes one to know one, Seth is a great cartoonist himself. The two facts, that the work of Wright, who died in 1983 at age 65, is great and nearly forgotten, are what spurred Seth on to bring him back into the foreground and set our cultural memory straight. Saturday night, The Collected Doug Wright, initiated, edited and designed by Seth, was launched by its publisher Drawn & Quarterly at the 5th annual Doug Wright Awards. Hosted this year at the Art Gallery of Ontario, the awards are held in conjunction with the Toronto Comic Arts Festival, running this weekend. The best book award, by the way, went to Skim, a graphic novel about the difficulties of adolescence by former Calgarians Jillian and Mariko Tamaki. Seth and writer Brad Mackay, a former journalist for the National Post and the CBC, founded the awards around the same time they started research on the book. The award recognizes Wright’s influence on a generation of leading Canadian cartoonists, who include Lynn Johnston (For Better or Worse), who contributed the book’s introduction, and Chester Brown, whose first comic, written when he was 11, was a tribute to Wright. The Collected Doug Wright will be issued in two volumes, with an appreciation-cum-biography of the British-born cartoonist and illustrator, written by Mackay. The oversize hardcover monograph, with its eye-catching red foil cover, was a patient labour of love all around, encouraged by D&Q publisher Chris Oliveros. “The history of cartooning has quite a few seminal cartoonists who were more important (than Wright) in defining the form in some way, and most of them were much earlier in the 20th century,” says Seth. “I think Wright’s real significance was that here in Canada, where there was such a small pool of working cartoonists and a very small market, he was such a very high-quality artist. There is only a handful of guys worthy of study and Wright is right up there at the very top.” Seth, who hunted down and collected Wright’s printed cartoons for years, culled the “best-of contents of the collected Wright from hundreds of the prolific cartoonist’s distinctive, wordless, vertical strips. This first book, which was five years in the making, contains Wright’ early work as an illustrator and a 200-page portfolio that follows Nipper to Dec. 22, 1962. Volume Two will be out in two or three years. “Wright’s great strength was that he tried to infuse his work with the actual feeling of the place where he lived,” says Seth. “All the little details: he drew what was around him.” What Wright so meticulously depicted with all its comical and conflictual moments was the childhood and family life of the post-war baby-boom generation in middle-class Canada. Today’s readers might be surprised to look into Wright’s social mirror and see how much parenting has changed. A lot of anger and some violence is unleashed in the strip, in which angry, frustrated faces are darkened with cross-hatching. In one strip, Dad is seen ripping off his belt to deliver a little ’50s style corporeal punishment. Spanking is common. “Like a documentarian of suburban domestic life, Wright was taking what he saw and heard around him and popping it in there,” says Mackay. When Wright began to draw Nipper, he was a 30-year-old bachelor. He lived in Montreal with his mother and unmarried sister and knew nothing about children. There weren’t even any nieces or nephews to observe. He dreamed up the idea for the strip and drew it in a rush, which Mackay thinks might be why it has no words, after he noticed the editor’s query to art director Dick Hersey on a Punch cartoon on Hersey’s desk: “Why don’t we have more strips about the contrariness of kids?” Wright decided to try it almost on a whim, thinking it would be a one-off. “He was baffled that they took it and that the strip took off,” says Mackay. “He was bummed about it at first.” What he really wanted to be drawing was adventure stories, like Milton Caniff’s Terry and the Pirates. Under the circumstances, drawing a strip about an energetic toddler posed a challenge. Nipper’s debut on March 12, 1949 in the Montreal Standard was based on a funny anecdote Wright’s mother told him about the antics of a neighbour’s child. But if Wright had to borrow and improvise at first, he grew into the strip after he married Phyllis Sanford in 1952. One year later, Mackay says, “Suddenly there was a kid in the house.” “By the time he got around to having kids of his own Nipper was a certified hit,” Mackay writes in The Collected Doug Wright. “By then, the ironic detachment he had accidentally cultivated on Nipper allowed him to accomplish an unprecedented feat: re-inventing the moribund family strip for a modern audience.” Wright eventually became the father of three boys and during that time the strip moved from slapstick sight gags to a more textured picture of family life. It was in 1967, after Wright and the family left Montreal, where he settled after emigrating from England, for the suburbs of southern Ontario that he changed the strip’s name from Nipper to Doug Wright’s Family. Wright’s strip is visually striking for his fluid drawing style, his skilful pantomime, the vertical orientation of the strip and the red overlays and spot colour, which he used so effectively to direct a reader’s eye and attention. Although Seth does not think the vertical strip was Wright’s invention, he does not know of another cartoonist who used it habitually or so successfully. “Wright’s work is based on real drawing,” says Seth. He observes that the self-taught Wright was not a great cartoonist when he started, but put so much work into it that he became one. “I think it mattered to him.” The ambitious pantomime, which in a lesser artist would be difficult to sustain, is acted out so clearly that it is easy to read for a five-year-old. Yet it also has something to say to an adult. Mackay, who is 40 and has a three-year-old Nipper of his own at home, says, “As a kid, I found the strip hilarious; as a dad, I read it from a completely different perspective.” Why did Wright fall into semi-oblivion? “I think it has a lot to do with just how Canada operates, to tell you the truth,” Seth says, “and the fact that it’s popular culture. Pop culture does kind of come and go. Cartooning in most of the 20th century was extremely ephemeral. Once it stopped appearing in the papers, I think people just stopped thinking about it. “But I do think it’s a distinctively Canadian thing that we don’t value things that are in our own media. It’s like the fact that it appeared in Canadian publications made Wright’s work seem less important. Canadians just didn’t give it the same value as they did to so many iconic American cartoon characters.” The timing is just right for a Wright revival. With the rise of the graphic novel, one of the biggest phenomenons to hit book publishing in the past 10 years, cartoonists are being shown more respect. Drawn & Quarterly, celebrating its 20 anniversary this year, is one of the two premier publishers of literary graphic novels in North America. With The Collected Doug Wright, big books honouring the work of a single master cartoonist are now appearing on both sides of the 49th Parallel. Seth, Brian, Chris, take a bow. ntousley@theherald.canwest.com Editor's note: Corrections made to this story. click here to read more Featured artists Seth Doug Wright            Featured product The Collected Doug Wright Volume One DOUG WRIGHT reviewed by The National Post Updated May 28, 2009 He had the Wright stuff Canadian artist had a good eye for all things automotive Peter Kenter, National Post Published: Friday, May 08, 2009 Growing up, one of my favourite comics was Doug Wright's Family, a weekly two-colour pantomime strip that graced the back pages of the long-departed Canadian Magazine. For most of us, Wright so accurately reflected changing suburban Canadian family life that we simply didn't realize we were looking into a mirror. The Wright kids not only played hockey and watched Victoria Day fireworks, they had a real father who drank beer and sometimes didn't shave and a mother who cussed her brood and burned with shame at their antics. I never questioned that Wright was drawing from real life. If he wasn't, I don't need to know about it. Thinking back, the cartoon image that stuck with me the most was Dad, patiently packing his kids and a passel of hockey equipment into the back of a huge station wagon -- not a hatchback, but the kind with a rear door that opened sideways -- on a frozen Canadian landscape before dawn. I'm not sure I actually saw a strip like that, but I can see the way Wright might have drawn it, with special attention to the wagon's wood veneer panelling. I recently got my hands on the first of a two-volume set, The Collected Doug Wright, Volume One. The book covers not only the Doug Wright's Family strips but also Wright's enormous output as an illustrator for hire. I can see where I might have gotten such strong impressions of that bruiser of a station wagon. Wright must have loved cars -- or at least loved to draw them. Editors Seth and Brad McKay note Wright's "great passion for the motor vehicle -- and his remarkable skill in cartooning them." That's almost an understatement. Even the kiddy cars in the strips are rendered with an attention to detail usually reserved for adult-sized vehicles. The book could almost pass as a history of the Canadian automobile experience from the early 1940s until 1962, where this volume leaves off. Vehicles ranging from family sedans to beaten-down pickup trucks and giant 18-wheelers are rendered in loving detail all out of proportion to their importance in the narrative. What's also fascinating is the fact that all of them seem to be made up out of whole cloth -- an amalgam of fine detail cobbled together in perfectly harmonious fashion to deliver car brands and models as they might have been. There's a canary yellow 1962 Astrojet locking its brakes as a squabbling family in a grey something-or-other pulls a crazy U-turn in the middle of traffic. I'm almost fooled into thinking a two-toned pink-and-white model called a Satellite is the real thing, until I realize the illustration precedes the introduction of the Plymouth Satellite by three years. Landscapes are littered with automotive minutiae: gas at 35¢ an Imperial gallon, advertisements for Guck Oil, delivery vehicles for Provincial Pork Packers and independent roadside coffee shops from a time before Tim Hortons (though not Tim Horton). A lot of it is simply timeless Canadiana. A 1962 Christmas cover for a Montreal Star Saturday supplement shows a fine, fin-laden automotive specimen nestled cozily under a thick blanket of snow. A mid-'50s illustration shows a richly detailed sedan, its driver hidden in shadows, plying a rural winter road at sunset. The depicted drivers are similarly timeless --fuming parent huddled angrily over the steering wheel, cussing cabbie and juvenile hot rodder. Still, it's the family strips that speak to me the loudest. I first experienced them at an age when I was only a passenger in my father's car. As a driver and dad, they're far more meaningful. A helpful child assists his father by sandpapering the car. (My car?!!!) Two kids hail a streetcar, only to run away after exercising control over a stream of vehicles that stops suddenly behind its open door --only I'm no longer the cheeky kid but the guy who's stuck in traffic. It gets worse. Dad tells a Canada Customs agent he has nothing to declare, until his blabby kid points to a giant-sized carton of cigarettes stashed under the front seat. In a water gun fight, one of the boys sprays his pals with radiator fluid he finds in the garage. I didn't see the station wagon with the faux wood panelling in this volume, but I'll wait for it in the next one. In the meantime, I'll settle for the giant 1962 Astrojet -- running on 35¢-a-gallon gas.   click here to read more Featured artists Seth Doug Wright            Featured product The Collected Doug Wright Volume One   DOUG WRIGHT reviewed by The National Post Updated May 19, 2009 All In The Family It's high time you revisited the work of pioneering Canadian artist Doug Wright, argues comic historian Seth Seth was rummaging around a junk shop sometime in the mid-1980s when he discovered old back issues of Canadian magazine. Flipping through the pages, he came across comic strips drawn by a man named Doug Wright. The name piqued his memory. "I think with a lot of the artists that I've been interested in as an adult, many of them were interests as a child but then forgotten during my teen years," says Seth, on the phone from his Guelph, Ont., home. "Wright fell into that category." Over the next 20 years, Seth, the acclaimed cartoonist behind It's A Good Life, If You Don't Weaken and Clyde Fans, undertook to collect all of Wright's work that he could find. The detective work paid off, as this month Drawn & Quarterly publishes Volume One of The Collected Doug Wright, which chronicles the years between 1949 and 1962. As journalist Brad Mackay writes in the book's introductory essay, "If you grew up in Canada during the 1960s or 1970s, then you likely need little introduction to Doug Wright or his masterpiece of Canadian cartooning." But for those of us from a later generation, a history lesson is in order. Wright was born in Dover, England, in 1917. A high school drop-out, he began his career as an illustrator for appliance manufacturer Electrolux before immigrating to Montreal in 1938 to work for Sun Life insurance. He first gained attention for his military themed strips during the Second World War, and after the war he became a freelance illustrator for the Montreal Standard. In 1948 he took over the popular strip Juniper Junction after creator Jim Frise's sudden death. His most famed strip, Nipper, about a mischievous bald-headed child, debuted in 1949 -- a year and a half before Charles Schulz's Peanuts, points out Mackay, and two years to the day before Dennis the Menace began terrorizing Mr. Wilson-- two strips to which Nipper is often compared. Nipper, later rechristened Doug Wright's Family, ran for 32 years and consists of roughly 1,664 strips. Wright inspired a new generation of Canadian cartoonists, including Lynn Johnston, who pens the book's foreword, Chester Brown and, of course, Seth. We can only hazard a guess to why Wright was forgotten -- maybe it's because he's Canadian, says Mackay, or perhaps because Wright rejected merchandising, unlike Dennis the Menace, says Seth--but both men note that they, too, forgot about Wright. "There seems to be black hole in pop culture for cartooning in Canada," says Mackay, on the phone from Ottawa. "We spend a lot of time mythologizing hockey games and artists -- God, if I see another article about Stephen Leacock this week! Those people get mythologized a lot, almost too much. But for some reason cartooning--maybe it's just too everyday, it's too common. But it does seem like a shame." Says Seth: "I do think in Canada we do have a distinct lack of interest in anything that's actually produced here. It's almost like a feeling it must be second rate if it's here in Canada ... The funny thing about Wright was he really was a superlative draftsman, far above 90% of the American cartoonists, yet still, I think, there was sort of a stigma about it, that this was homegrown material. And like so [many] publications it's ephemeral -- here this week, gone the next. When it stopped publishing people forgot about it." Over the years Seth -- dubbed comics' premier historian in the latest issue of The Walrus magazine -- compiled as much of Wright's work as he could find. Mackay says that at first Seth proposed a book called Gang of Seven -- a look at Canadian cartooning from the turn of the century onwards -- though a lack of interest from publishers shelved the idea. Later, the concept was revived when D&Q publisher Chris Oliveros showed interest in a Wright-only retrospective. The book, designed by Seth, is an impressive collection of his early work, comic strips, sketches, paintings, magazine covers, photographs and rough drafts. A trove of original material was uncovered at the National Archives in Ottawa, which proved invaluable. "Wright himself was remarkable in that he saved everything: He kept all his originals -- a huge amount of them -- he kept careful scrapbooks, which some cartoonists do but most don't ... He kept all the stuff, and that was a godsend," says Seth. Initially, Seth hoped to do a complete reprinting of the strip--as he is doing as designer of the massive 25-volume The Complete Peanuts -- but it wasn't economically feasible, plus there was no guarantee they could locate all of Wright's work. A "selected" volume was the logical choice. Wright died in 1983. He suffered a stroke near the end of his life that effectively ended his cartooning career. In 2004, Seth and Mackay co-founded the Doug Wright Awards for Canadian Cartooning, whose fifth annual ceremony is being held tomorrow. They hope the book, coupled with the awards, will spark a Doug Wright renaissance. "The publishing of the book," says Seth, "is more about trying to give him his due. I guess as a working cartoonist you hate to think somebody worked their whole life on something and then were forgotten. It seems important to me to leave a legacy of some sort, and I would kind of like him to be reclaimed. I see him as a national treasure, and I would like that in 10 years a young cartoonist would know his name and not realize there was even a period that he'd been forgotten." - The Collected Doug Wright is published by Drawn & Quarterly ($39.95). The Fifth Annual Doug Wright Awards take place tomorrow. Check nationalpost.com/theafterwordfor a complete list of winners. click here to read more Featured artists Seth Doug Wright            Featured product The Collected Doug Wright Volume One GEORGE SPROTT reviewed by Rob Clough Updated May 5, 2009 Saturday, May 2, 2009 Unreliable Narration: George Sprott, 1894-1975 Rob reviews the revised "graphic novella" by Seth, GEORGE SPROTT: 1894-1975 (Drawn & Quarterly). This is an expanded version of the strip that originally was serialized in the New York Times Sunday Magazine. As seen in the New York Times Sunday magazine, Seth's GEORGE SPROTT was a sort of distillation of the storytelling techniques he used in his delightful (but slightly melancholy) WIMBLEDON GREEN combined with the same sort of themes found in his current long-running serial, "Clyde Fans". The original 20-part serial was composed such that each page could be read as a discrete unit but also fit as part of a larger narrative. That narrative, such as it was, contained frequent digressions into the history of certain buildings and long interviews with people who knew the titular character. The handsome new release for Drawn & Quarterly fleshes out certain aspects of Sprott, provides a bit more breathing room with incidental illustrations and even concretizes them with photos of Seth-built cardboard buildings. Seth is labeled a nostalgist in the way he tends to idolize the past. I've always thought that for him, it wasn't so much idolizing past values, but rather a sense of immersion in an aesthetic that always felt tied to a particular time and place. That's why the buildings of importance in GEORGE SPROTT are given so much development and "characterization"; to Seth, they are crucial pieces of the story. These buildings are both repositories of specific experiences at specific times and aesthetically beautiful in and of themselves. George Sprott is just one man living in the fictional Canadian town of Dominion, a town so real and vibrant to Seth that he felt compelled to recreate it as a series of models. For Seth, his aesthetic battle is between generic and specific. One gets the sense that through mass production and globalization, the individual aesthetic of local communities is being obliterated, and along with it the quirky panache that Seth reveres. This theme of the shrinking importance and influence of individuals in the face of an increasingly bland culture resonates throughout GEORGE SPROTT, recapitulating the themes that have always been present in Seth's comics. What separates GEORGE SPROTT from other slice-of-life studies is the apologetic, sheepish narrator who is far from omniscient. While the narrator does move the story forward (with a number of digressions) as Sprott's last day on earth is detailed, they apologize not only for leaving out details, but for failing to pithily explain who Sprott really was to the audience. The reality is that all narrators are unreliable, with none moreso than those who narrate their own stories. Putting together a biography is an act of trying to overlay a narrative on top of a life--but a story is not a life lived, but rather a retroactive interpretation of that experience. One can talk about a life, around a life, give facts, figures & dates--but such an approach doesn't really provide true insight. Having a narrator who knew all sorts of stuff about Sprott but who wasn't in any real position to tell us what it all meant was a refreshing approach, and one that allowed the reader to approach the story more on their own terms. Following the visual style of WIMBLEDON GREEN fit nicely with that approach, because as the narrator is constructing the story of a life out of overly-simplistic parts, so does Seth the artist draw his figures as simply-drawn geometric figures. Circles, squares and triangles make up nearly every figure and building as there's a minimum of rendering, an interesting departure for an artist whose dense brushwork creates so much atmosphere. By simplifying his figures, Seth reduces the reader's tendency to linger too long on individual images, instead propelling them along the page as we follow the simple figures. At the same time, the reader is immersed in the atmosphere of the piece, as the use of color is crucial in creating mood. Seth masterfully creates this atmosphere with that brush, giving the simple figures a certain power, all while creating a total environment where every element is designed to convey the overall emotions of the piece. The effect of the metallic blue and the reddish brown color overlays feels like we're looking at an old photograph, starting to fade. The new material in the book consists of anecdotes that can run a few pages long, and these are all done in tan, as though we're looking at a crumbling piece of newspaper. Of course, the slickness of design, the way the colors pop and the quality of the paper add a certain tension to this illusion; it's somehow both new and old. If the reader is kept at a distance from Sprott, it's because the character deliberately pushed aside troubling feelings by adhering to a strict set of daily rituals. The irony here of course is that Sprott as a younger man fancied himself an adventurer, a rascal and a lover--a man who lived by his whims and felt no compunctions about spontaneity, even if that wound up hurting others. That robust, handsome man had become obese, living in the past as employment with a TV show and weekly lecture that had him constantly recounting his younger, more vital days. His only remaining skill was that of raconteur, trying to entertain but never to interact. Like all of Seth's characters, he's now a man trapped in the wrong time who squandered his opportunities to make the lives of others better and is now trying to chase away demons of guilt. Of course, Seth makes sure never to make it that simple. We get all kinds of accounts about Sprott, from intimates to those who only knew him from his TV show or lectures. Those stories wind up telling us little about Sprott but lots about them, especially since so many of the accounts seem to contradict each other. The sharpest comparison is between his illegitimate daughter, who never knew him, hated him for this and then perpetuated her feelings onto her children; and his niece, whom he heaped affection on. His niece was the one person still taking care of him late in his life, and it's implied that Sprott heaped affection and attention on her because he realized it was too late with his daughter. Whatever the reason (guilt, regret, a desperation to connect), a connection was formed; there's one drawing of his niece as a child sitting in his lap, an utterly contented look on her face. There's never a real sense of mystery to be found in this story, another deliberate move by Seth. We understand early on why Sprott feels regretful and whom he hurt and how. There's something about details being revealed to the reader that concretizes the experience all the more, making us both pity and feel shame for Sprott. In the end, the narrator doesn't pretend to try to wrap things up or make sense of his life. We don't know if George's affection for his niece proved to be some form of redemption, or if that concept has any meaning at all in this context. From a purely materialist standpoint, the strip about a collector TV ephemera proudly showing us his Sprott collection was both touching and pathetic. Touching in that in some small way, Sprott won't be forgotten--but pathetic that he will only be remembered as a sort of trivial fetish. The scattered array of panels toward the end that represent Sprott's last moments recapitulated the way his life was represented in the book: fragmented, episodic and filled with meanings that are not easily teased out.   click here to read more Featured artist Seth            Featured product George Sprott: (1894-1975)   SETH in The Walrus Magazine Updated April 30, 2009 Back In Palookaville Cartoonist and designer Seth emerges as comics’ premier historian by Sean Rogers books discussed in this essay: George Sprott: (1894–1975) by Seth Drawn and Quarterly (2009), 96 pp. The Collected Doug Wright: Canada’s Master Cartoonist (Volume One) by Doug Wright Drawn and Quarterly (2009), 240 pp. The Complete Peanuts: 1950 to 1952 by Charles M. Schulz Fantagraphics Books (2004), 343 pp. Palookaville was the title of the comic book series, and right away we should have known that its creator, Seth, was up to something. The word was as vague as the names of the other small-press comics springing up in Canada at the time, but where Yummy Fur promised tactile surrealism and Peepshow and Dirty Plotte connoted sex, what did Palookaville tell us? Marlon Brando used the term in On the Waterfront, but it was decades out of date by the time Seth claimed it for his solo debut in 1991. For devotees of cartooning history, the word might also recall Ham Fisher’s pugilist, Joe Palooka, but in any case it conjures up a fanciful middle-of-nowhere populated by marginal has-beens like Fisher’s cartoon hero or Brando’s dockworker. This Palookaville is Seth’s town, full of cast-offs, outmoded relics from the past, and the arcane history of comics, all located somewhere at half a remove from our own Canadian reality. Although his characters may visit or come from Chatham and London and Guelph and Strathroy, Palookaville is the small Ontario town of the mind where they — and Seth — have actually lived for the past couple of decades. Seth’s output is more broad than prodigious, but remarkably consistent in its melancholic concerns with time, comics, and places, specifically Canadian ones. It encompasses everything from comic books to book design, from museum installations to architectural models, along with the odd foray into critical prose. Lately, however, he has increasingly channelled his creative energy in one direction. So, to start with, recent issues of Palookaville describe an inept salesman’s memories of failure in a large Ontario town, not unlike London or Kitchener, called Dominion. The artist has also crafted dozens of cardboard models of the town’s buildings, which have been displayed in galleries in Waterloo and Dundas. He has privately sketched out, in images and prose, the town’s history, its architectural motifs, and its people. One of them, a washed-up Arctic explorer, provided the basis for his recent contributions to the New York Times Magazine’s Funny Pages. The Times Magazine strips have been collected and expanded upon in a book called George Sprott: (1894-1975), released this month by Seth’s Montreal publisher, Drawn and Quarterly. It’s an appropriately large showcase for one of the smoothest hands in the business, the brush strokes precise and hefty, the colours muted, the page design bold and rhythmic. Told in the simplified staccato of Seth’s sketchbook cartoons, rather than the more languorous style of his Palookaville comics, the story of George Sprott slowly emerges from dozens of single-page strips and occasional, sepia-toned multi-page flashbacks. An elderly local TV host who still dines out on the northern excursions he made in his thirties and forties, he is now forgotten, stumbling toward death. Seth describes his protagonist’s decline in documentary style, providing omniscient narration along with the contradictory testimony of characters who’ve known Sprott both casually and intimately. The result is puzzling. How do we reconcile the doddering old coot with the bilious young seminarian, or either of these with the dashing ladies’ man who fathers an illegitimate daughter? Sprott comes off as just a sketch, but his very lack of definition makes him Seth’s most believable character since the cartoonist portrayed his own frustrating inconsistencies in It’s a Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken. The art of cartooning seems so intuitive to Seth that we might be forgiven for failing to see the study and thought he puts into it. His preoccupation is with outcasts, with obscure and slightly awry histories. Thus we have the story of explorer and television personality George Sprott, or of salesman-cum-dreamer Simon Matchcard (Clyde Fans), or even of the artist’s own father (Bannock, Beans and Black Tea). But the figure of the cartoonist himself fits this lonesome archetype perfectly. Obsessed by the idea of cartooning, Seth invents characters that also allow him to explore the story of comics, about making them, about reading them, about being frustrated with them — in short, about loving them. And it’s no longer only through his own cartooning that he analyzes the medium. In his increasingly prominent role as designer of such high-profile reprint projects as The Complete Peanuts and this spring’s The Collected Doug Wright, his idiosyncratic methods of contextualizing each cartoonist’s work make him more critic than designer, redefining the terms by which we understand classic and Canadian cartooning. Chip Kidd was one of the first designers to impose his sensibility on the masters of the medium, to middling artistic success and great fan consternation. A book on Plastic Man creator Jack Cole, which Kidd co-designed with Art Spiegelman, ends with a twenty-page collage of images from Cole’s zanier comics, intended to replicate the artist’s state of mind before he took his own life. Kidd would rile even more cartoon nerds with his book Peanuts: The Art of Charles M. Schulz, which focused on the early and undocumented history of the beloved strip. This choice allowed him to highlight the physicality of Schulz’s work, whether clipped from yellowing newspapers or scratched on bristol board by Schulz himself. But Kidd’s vision of Peanuts was soon to be overtaken by Seth’s. Following Schulz’s death, Seth won the approval of the cartoonist’s widow and took on the job of designing the landmark Complete Peanuts project. It was an act of reclamation: “I hope to create a package around the work that shows it in a slightly different context than it’s been presented in for years,” he said. “I don’t want the reader to think much about it at all, but when they come to it, I hope they’re led in and out of Schulz’s work in a way that puts them in the right mood to read it again as the subtle work that it is, not as the product that has been pushed for so many years by merchandising and TV specials.” His design choices are atypical of pretty much anyone else’s take on the strip. The interiors, cast in a melancholy shade of blue, isolate the kinds of objects he so loves to centre out for attention in his own work: a car here, a mailbox there, a snowman, a record player, a puddle, a tree. They are divorced from the children who otherwise populate the strip, and who themselves hover solitary on the cover, the spine, the flaps. Seth’s is a lonely, forlorn Peanuts. Make no mistake: this is Seth’s Peanuts more than Schulz’s. One of the drawbacks of Seth’s omnivorous approach to cartooning is that his admiration for his peers often compels him to incorporate their innovations into his own practice. Not so with his work as a designer, which remains sui generis: his take on Peanuts is the one through which most future readers will understand the strip, and with which future critics will have to wrestle. It is, in other words, authoritative. And that he presents us with a version of Peanuts that looks so brazenly unfamiliar should come as no surprise when we consider how ready he is, elsewhere, to discard, tweak, or wholly invent broad swaths of cartooning history. Seth’s fabrications have the air of truth. His creation of the town of Dominion, for example, or of whimsical, bogus national industries like Polar Cola or Northern Fried Chicken — these enter rather easily into our consciousness. But when he combines such ersatz Canadiana with his immersion in comics history, enlivening and embellishing national and artistic narratives that might strike some as lacklustre — well, we know we’re back in Palookaville. In his previous book, Wimbledon Green, he tells the story of a world-famous (Canadian) comic book collector, who finds troves of (Canadian) comics in barns outside prairie towns, or on mad chases up Ontario’s Highway 11. But the most extreme example of his conflation of “forgotten” Canadian and cartooning histories is his invention of the New Yorker cartoonist Kalo. In the seemingly autobiographical It’s a Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken, Seth searches for cartoons by and information about gag panellist Jack “Kalo” Kalloway, interviewing the man’s family and including his photo and few extant cartoons as supplements to the main story. Seth had, however, faked this evidence of the man’s life. Kalo was a fiction. There was no need to invent Doug Wright — he actually existed. But where Seth built an entire narrative around a handful of strips by Kalo that he’d “found,” for the first volume of the new Collected Doug Wright he builds a shrine. Until recently, Wright was a neglected figure, his only legacy found in crumbling newspapers in booksellers’ back rooms. From the late ’40s through the ’70s, his weekly strip, Nipper (later renamed Doug Wright’s Family), appeared in the Montreal Standard, Weekend, and Canadian magazines. Nipper was a rowdy, young, bald-pated, striped-shirted hellion, of a kind with fellow comic brats Dennis or Calvin, but less overstated cartoon than lively regular kid, who exasperates and gladdens his parents in equal measure. In its day, the feature was highly popular, but as Seth’s co-editor, Brad Mackay, points out in his essay included in the volume, without a breakfast cereal or Saturday-morning cartoon to keep the character in the public consciousness (and a scant few long-out-of-print booklets dedicated to the work), the strip and Wright’s consummate skill have faded from memory. No longer: Seth’s offhand advocacy of Kalo, it seems, served as a trial run for his championing of Wright. In It’s a Good Life, he mentions his pursuit of both men’s work in the same breath. In each case, he happens upon a random cartoon in some wayward shop, feels an immediate connection with it, and embarks on a search for more. Hunting out merchants who might have examples hidden away, he gradually collects a small but satisfying sample of the cartoonist’s oeuvre. After coming into contact with the artist’s family, he discovers that his subject had scrambled to the top of the cartooning heap — but the similarities end there. Kalo’s fictional output, Seth imagines, either fell out of favour or simply fell off, and the family he went on to nurture knew only the man, not the cartoonist. Doug Wright offers us a different story. While he lived, he stayed at the top, a talented workhorse, and when he died his family donated his life’s work to the National Archives. “This windfall allowed us to make this book the one that he deserved,” Seth writes. And deserve it he does. While the book’s frequent references to Nipper as a masterpiece may come off as a tad overzealous, by any reckoning Wright was a stunning draftsman and a winning and unflinching humorist. In their prefatory notes, Mackay and Seth recite his many fine qualities. There’s his refreshing lack of sentimentality in depicting the wilful and chaotic lives of children, the stern efforts parents make to curb their kids’ behaviour, and the mercurial changes in mood one side endures from the other. Or there’s his exacting attention to technical particulars, his renderings of cars and buildings and workshops full of engaging but undistracting detail. And there’s the ease and grace with which he confronted postwar middle-class existence — suburbs and shopping, television and trick-or-treating — while making it a recognizable way of life for his readers. But he had formalist inclinations as well, developing a unique vertical layout that lends each punchline a finality not available in the traditional lengthwise format. Also among the strip’s chief accomplishments was his use of the two-colour format, the strong blacks weighting down each panel while the snappy reds guide the reader through each event and toward the gag. Seth’s design draws upon each of these strengths in turn. As with Peanuts, he foregrounds the objects Wright draws, imparting a sense of wide-open space. But these aren’t the friendless objects or existential voids of Peanuts — rather, these things and places belong to the burgeoning Canadian suburbs in which Wright lived and set his strip, and which consisted of precisely these cars and lawns and fields and skies. The enormous skies also call attention to the unusual height of Wright’s canvas, while the overwhelming red that fills them in illustrates how sparing is his actual use of the colour in the strip. This red, too, is more vibrant, more celebratory, than the ponderous blues that lead us into Seth’s take on Schulz. While his goal with the Peanuts books is to retrieve the strip from the quagmire of childish and mass-cult associations into which it has sunk, his approach here takes an opposite tack. With Wright, he is wresting the work from obscurity, insisting upon its importance in big, swooping gestures for all to see, stamping it out in die-cut if he has to. So we can understand how Seth would demand, at the end of his appreciation of John Stanley (the children’s comic book artist whose reprint series he’s also designing), “Go find these damn comics and save them from oblivion.” Because that’s exactly what he’s doing with Schulz and Wright, with misfits like George Sprott, and with whomever else he cares about and whatever it is he holds dear about comics, or Canada. He’s saving them all from that one-way ticket to Palookaville. click here to read more Featured artist Seth            Featured products George Sprott: (1894-1975) The Collected Doug Wright Volume One Seth interviewed by Newsarama Updated April 17, 2009 The Life of George Sprott: Talking to Seth By Michael C. Lorah posted: 17 April 2009 George Sprott 1894-1975 The New York Times Magazine has been home to some of the world’s greatest cartoonists since beginning its regular The Funny Pages section in 2005. Chris Ware and Jamie Hernandez were the first to be published in the institution, and Megan Kelso, Daniel Clowes, Jason, Rutu Modan and Gene Yang have all followed. Following Ware and Hernandez, the third creator to serialize a story in The Funny Pages was Canadian cartoonist Seth, best known for Clyde Fans, It’s a Good Life If You Don’t Weaken and Wimbledon Green. Seth’s serial, George Sprott (1894-1975), first appeared in The New York Times Magazine September 17, 2006, and ran until March 25, 2007. Following the popular run in The NYT Magazine, Seth has expanded and completed the story, a fictional biography of a local access television host. We emailed Seth to find out how it was for him working with The New York Times Magazine, how much new content appears in the graphic novel edition of George Sprott (1894-1975), and what his goals were for this project. The New York Times Magazine approached Seth “during Jamie Hernandez's run in the magazine, probably about halfway through his story,” the cartoonist said. “That gave me enough time to get a head start on Sprott so I could hit the ground running when Jamie finished up. I guess that would place their first phone call sometime in 2006? The years fly by so quickly now I have a hard time recalling when anything happened. It seems like it was about six months ago, not several years." “Not really,” Seth admits when asked if George Sprott was his first choice of stories to appear in the prestigious venue. “I had a very vague germ of an idea involving George that I had been playing around with in my head, nothing very concrete. In fact, I proposed three ideas to The Times. Sprott was at the bottom of that list of ideas.” Long-time fans will probably be disappointed to hear that Seth admit, “The first idea – the one I most wanted to do – was to finish up a strip, which had come to a sudden end because of a dispute between myself and the editor, that I had begun a couple of years previously in the Canadian magazine TORO. I suspected this wouldn't fly since they would dislike the fact that it had begun somewhere else. I was correct. I doubt this work will ever see completion now. “The second idea was a non-character oriented piece. I was going to write a long “poetic” thing about an imaginary city street (about one block of it) that was condemned. I wanted to explore each of the buildings in a single strip – building up about 20 or 25 of these individual histories, allowing them to add up in the reader's mind into a more complete story. I may yet try and do this story someday in the future. “Finally, I tacked George on as a third option. I described it in the loosest of terms – a funny old man – a local TV host – falling asleep on air, some sort of character study. Predictably, they picked the piece I was least interested in doing. I should have known it. That is the way these things always go. However, also predictably, as I began work on George Sprott, I discovered it was the strip that pushed me the most and was ultimately the most satisfying of the three ideas to work on. I think that if they had not picked George, I would simply have forgotten about him and nothing would have come of those vague plans. I’m grateful they made that choice – in the end I learned a lot as an artist working on George. After his previous problems serializing in a magazine, Seth says that he found working with The NYT Magazine’s editorial staff surprisingly easy. “Excellent,” he gushes of the process. “They simply requested, at the beginning, that I produce six strips in pencil form so they could get a feel for the strip. I was a bit worried then, because of the troubles I just mentioned with the magazine TORO. I quit that job over too much editorial interference and I didn't want a repeat of that situation. The Times turned out to be great to work with. I received not one bit of interference. They never tried to influence where I was taking the story or to art direct the strip. They simply copy edited for spelling and grammar. Occasionally they would ask me to remove the work “fart” or something like that. They always apologized for asking and I never minded (I put “fart” back in for the publication of the book). They backed down graciously when I wanted the phrase “knocked up” after initially thinking it had to be replaced. They were great. Sheila Glazer was the editor I worked with and I can offer nothing but praise for how she did her job.” In fact, the most difficult part of working with The Times had more to do with the realities of a weekly publication far more than any editorial issues. “About the process, there isn't much to say. After the strip started running I struggled to keep ahead of the deadline – penciling the next strip and sending it off to them for editing while I inked the previous one. It was close to the edge. My lead time slowly disappeared as the six months went on; when the final strip arrived I was getting it in at the very last moment,” Seth acknowledged. page 65 page 65 ENLARGE IMAGE Despite the deadline pressures, however, Seth told us, “I enjoyed having a serialized story and I would do it again. However, I would never do it as a permanent position. It's too stressful for producing “real” work. You don't have enough time to take a breather and really consider just what it is you are doing. I generally need more time for simply thinking.” The upcoming George Sprott 1894-1975 book has some new material that didn’t appear in The NYT Magazine. Seth explained, “I knew the serialization of a story over a period of months would make a “continued next issue” type narrative hard to follow. Readers would forget where they left off last week. So, when I planned the strip, I designed it so that it could be read in self-contained pages. Each page would hopefully be fully satisfying to the reader while adding to the previous ones. Eventually they would make up a story. You might even, as a reader, be able to figure it all out even if you missed a few weeks. “Later, after the strip was finished I wondered what I would do with the work. I could certainly reprint it, as is, in some collection of my comics but I also knew that it was drawn to be read at a larger size. It would probably translate poorly into a collection of my other work – looking cramped next to comics pages which had only seven or nine panels on them. I thought perhaps it would make a book on its own, but of course, the big problem with that was it was too short to make a reasonably sized book. Each page contained the equivalent of three of my usual pages, but they couldn't be easily broken up since I had designed each page rather tightly. It was a bit of a dilemma.” Fortunately, Seth had had ideas for George Sprott’s life that couldn’t be fit into the magazine serial. “The one good thing, though, was that since it was entirely episodic in nature I could easily add in any material I wanted throughout the story without any real editing at all. This gave me the chance to add in a great deal of stuff that I had thought of while doing The Times strip but had to jettison because of space limitations. It also opened the door to exploring some of George's life I hadn't given all that much thought to – just hinted at. Nothing major – just little things. “Making it into a book was an interesting process. I approached it as an editor and a designer and really tried to figure out what could be added to make this material into a “real” book. What was needed? How it had to be arranged and juggled. How could I make this pile of separate “things” flow and read properly. How to make it “feel” complete.” Readers who’ve gone through the original version won’t find anything jarring in the book-length edition of George Sprott (1894-1975), but they will find plenty of new material to digest. “I'd guess that I doubled the length of the original run, at least. That's just the comics pages, of course,” Seth explained. “There are other full-page drawings, double-page spreads and photos in there as well. I think what a reader of the original strip would most notice in the book collection is that the pacing of the story is rather different now. It is somewhat more fractured – but I hope it is also a deeper character study than the original.” One of the strip’s more interesting aspects is how the narrator (Seth himself?) acknowledges his own limitations, admitting on several occasions that he’s not clear on the facts of Sprott’s life. Seth says of the observer, “I am not entirely sure that the narrator of the strips is me. It might be someone else. “Whoever it is – the narrator was included because I liked the idea that the story was being told to the reader by someone who didn't have all the facts. The narrator is sometimes privy to the most tiny details and in other cases was lacking the most basic information. Having a narrator involved also allowed me to do use a lot of exposition without it being too utterly boring. When you have only a single page to tell a big chunk of story you are clearly going to be stuck with narration boxes. I like narration but it can get repetitive, so I figured this allowed me to add a bit of character to the omniscient voice. It's an idea I would like to explore further in the future.” In addition to the narrator’s limitations, readers also discover who George Sprott was via interview-like sequences with supporting cast characters – similar to reality TV segments. The effect is to keep readers distanced from George Sprott himself, enforcing the truth that we can never truly know him (or anyone else), but can only understand him through how others perceived him. “In a word, yes,” Seth said of his intention to keep George Sprott away from the reader. “I wanted to hold George himself at some distance. I imagined that seen from the outside George might look bad but I also suspected that the reader wouldn't be entirely sure what to make of him. I liked the ambiguity. I deliberately chose not to go “inside” him too much. The moment you do that the reader instantly sympathizes with the character. I only really go inside George once in the book – it is in the gatefold section of the book. You literally “open him up” and look inside his mind/soul.” Throughout George Sprott (1894-1975), many cardboard models of the buildings in the city where George lives most of his life appear as photographs. The models were created by Seth himself. “They are part of a cardboard city named Dominion that I have been building for several years. I displayed the city for the first time a few years ago at the Art Gallery of Ontario. They are currently part of a traveling show in Canada that began last year in Kitchener, Ontario, and will travel on to Dundas, London, Montreal and Charlottetown. I won't bore you with the long story of why I built this cardboard town but Dominion is the city that George Sprott takes place in. It also appears in Clyde Fans, as well.” Keeping track of the details of George Sprott’s lifetime wasn’t as difficult as readers might imagine, Seth said. “Early on I worked out a bare bones lifeline for George's life. Nothing too complicated, I just mapped out what needed to be spelled out for the reader and what “interviewees” could be used to give that information. Early on in The Times run of the strip I did an installment that quickly spelled George's life out for the reader. I figured that would make it easier to follow the subsequent episodes.” Seth, like many of us, grew up with a range of local television personalities influencing his childhood, and those childhood memories played a large role in the evolution of this book. “I grew up around Windsor, Ontario, (primarily) and spent a great deal of my childhood watching both Canadian and Detroit television. I loved TV, possibly I loved it even more than comics. Anyhow, I took in a huge amount of local programming and it left a lasting effect on my brain. The Detroit of my youth (and the decades preceding it) was a very vital broadcasting town. In those days a big town like Detroit had its own pop culture with a very distinct regional flavour. I liked that, and to tell the truth, I miss it in the current world. I don’t watch a lot of TV any longer – it all feels pretty much the same to me, just stuff pumped out of some collective pipeline emanating from the centre of the world. “Detroit had a real pantheon of 'stars' - movie hosts, kiddie show hosts, horror hosts, news men etc. They felt both distant and somehow close by. That regional element of it all still holds some undefined interest for me. There was a particular host of a travel show named George Pierrot that was the direct inspiration for George Sprott. Some of his surface characteristics are similar – though none of the personal ones are. George Pierrot was famous for falling asleep on the air. “I took a lot of this Detroit material as the background for the strip and mixed it in with a certain amount of similar material from Canadian local TV (which was rather similar but less flashy – Americans always do everything in a bigger way). Seriously I could have written hundreds of pages using this background. It's interesting stuff – a real time capsule. Does its passing mean anything important – probably not. The world is a little bit less interesting though when the media ceases to reflect the local environment. After expanding and completing George Sprott (1894-1975), Seth is returning to one of his most famous and popular comics. “Back to Clyde Fans – the home stretch in this book that never ends,” he laughed. “I am converting Palookaville into a hardcover format this year. I love the old comic format but Chris Oliveros convinced me that the work would do better if we moved on to this new direction. It's kind of sad, passing of an era and all that. “Anyhow – the hardcover will be more diverse than the old comic – allowing me to include other aspects of my work. Besides the conclusion to Clyde Fans, there will possibly be written articles, sketchbook material ... other strips perhaps. Who knows? I am working on a new strip in my sketchbook right now that seems to be shaping up unexpectedly like Wimbledon Green into a rather long piece (though not in the same vein as Wimbledon). I'm really am looking forward to finishing up Clyde Fans sometime. God help me, I have another long story I am anxious to get going on.” George Sprott (1894-1975) arrives in stores in May from Drawn and Quarterly. The original New York Times Magazine serialization can be found as pdfs on The NYT Magazine website.   click here to read more Featured artist Seth            Featured product George Sprott: (1894-1975) GEORGE SPROTT reviewed in The Daily Crosshatch Updated March 20, 2009 The Daily Cross Hatch George Sprott 1894-1975 By Seth Drawn & Quarterly "This book was created on a lark,” writes Seth, in the introduction to 2005’s Wimbledon Green. “Actually, it was never intended to be a book at all—merely an exercise in one of my sketchbooks[…] It’s an approach wherein you tell a longer story through a variety of shorter, unconnected comic strips.” As is often the case in art, what was born out of a lark (though, of course, the validity of the artist’s claims of nonchalance will never be known to anyone but himself) grew into a motif and has since become seemingly something of an obsession. Wimbledon Green’s one and two page vignettes largely centered around the book’s own meta obsession with sequential art, borrowing heavily from the mid-20th century short story comic books that would have no doubt struck the fancy of the titular Scrooge McDuck-esque comic collector. And while Seth did inject the piece with character interviews and other non-sequential elements, he never strayed too far from his linear comic comfort zone. Still, it was rather obvious to anyone who read the book that Seth was scratching the surface of something interesting, a fact clearly not lost on the artist himself. In some sense, George Sprott is a realization of many of Wimbledon Green’s flights of fancy, or, at the very least, their logical extension. Once again in the book’s introduction, for better or worse, the magician happily reveals his secret. This time, however, Seth is a touch more discreet. Whereas Wimbledon Green saw the artist spelling his intentions out—literally—in prose, issued like something of a disclaimer, he’s subtler this time around, opening on something of an ethereal, dreamlike state, wherein Sprott, tumbling naked through limbo, questions the linear march of time, thereby setting one of the book’s major conceits, a general abandonment of chronology. It’s hard not to imagine that some of this move toward non-linear storytelling is due to the fact that the story was initially serialized in the pages of New York Magazine, a fact which no doubt afforded Seth some initial freedom to move away from more traditional forms of storytelling. Like Wimbledon Green, George Sprott is, above all, a character study, but Seth’s insistence on decentralization a chronological narrative serve to take even more of the focus away from the storyline. The vignettes presented in the book ultimately, more than any other function, act to fill in the empty spaces of Sprott, the well-known host of a regional news program. The pieces, too, are more subtle than in their predecessor. After all, Sprott is a more fully-realized character than the playfully cartoonist Green. His adventures do not consist of helicopter races to secure mint condition comics, instead they’re far more realistic—and, by proxy, depressing—acts, like fathering and subsequently abandoning an illegitimate child. Seth’s fictional source material is also more diverse, and often pages play out like visual scrapbooks, combining still keepsakes with dialogued comics panels, for some of the most effective spreads of the book. The artist also, happily, takes some visual cues from Chris Ware, constructing painted cardboard models of many of the book’s settings, which live on transitional pages between strips. The character that ultimately emerges from these vignettes is not an especially redeeming one, and while Seth does make a point of visualizing some regrets, there’s little reason to believe that he was intended to be the target of too much empathy. Perhaps its symptomatic of the presentation, but despite the fact that we are allowed, on occasion, to step into Sprott’s thought patterns, it’s hard not to feel that, as readers, we’re never allowed to get too close to the character. In that sense, our experience is not unlike those characters who attempt to get close to Sprott in the book. It’s a lack of depth echoed in the graphical presentation of many of the panels that comprise the book. In that sense, George Sprott maintains some of the sketchbook roots of its predecessor. The panels are often drawn in tight on their subjects, allowing for little background detail to infiltrate the frame. But, as is the case with much of the book, the importance is placed less on the individual detail than what they ultimately add up to, and in the case of many of the pages presented herein, the panels result in some of the more stunning layouts that we’ve seen from the artist. In the end we’re left with what still feels like something of an experiment, albeit an exciting one resulting from an artist pushing into an new realm. It’s probably not quite accurate to suggest that George Sprott is ultimately more than the sum of its parts, but that doesn’t mean that the pieces, when taken together, aren’t worth an awful lot. –Brian Heater click here to read more Featured artist Seth            Featured product George Sprott: (1894-1975) Summer Blonde, Good Life and Pyongyang in GQ Updated March 19, 2009 THE 20 GRAPHIC NOVELS YOU SHOULD READ (AFTER ‘WATCHMEN’) Yes, they’re comic books, but these are not for kids By Alex Pappademas and Kevin Sintumuang They finally made a movie out of Watchmen, God bless ’em. Perhaps you’ve heard about it. Maybe you’ve also heard that before it was un film de Zack Snyder, Watchmen was a comic book, one that, despite being made of humble ink and staples and panels and word balloons, represented as giant a leap for its medium as Citizen Kane or Easy Rider did for theirs, and though it didn’t put an end to dumb comics any more than those films put an end to dumb movies, it established a climate in which it was possible to do something grown-up, to aim over the heads of the guys in the Cheetos-dusted Punisher T-shirts once in a while. But if we can add one thing to the conventional wisdom about comics, it’s this: Those giant leaps may not happen every day, but every week a whole crapload of new comics hits the shelves (every Wednesday, to be specific—between that and Lost it’s basically the Nerd Sabbath). And while they’re not all gems, plenty of them are moving the ball forward, boldly, in terms of what kinds of stories the medium can tell. If you used to read comics but drifted away, there’s never been a better time to drift back; if you’ve never read them, there’s never been a better time to start. You can’t go wrong with the books in this slideshow. They’re risky, inventive, boundary-pushing—and (we promise) you can appreciate all of ’em whether or not you have forty-five tangled years of X-Men backstory committed to memory. And if you do have a backstory question, try the guy in the Punisher shirt. He’s there every Wednesday. So are we. Here’s why. Summer Blonde By Adrian Tomine These four Salingeresque short stories are dark, tragicomic portraits of social awkwardness. A washed-up novelist dates a teenage girl for new material, the high school nerd gets his sexual initiation from a girl who recently pooped her pants, and a stalker has nothing but the best intentions for the girl he’s…stalking. Pyongyang By Guy Delisle Proof that totalitarian regimes are comedy gold. Delisle’s collection of anecdotes, drawn from the time he spent in the capital of North Korea as an animator, is a witty, appropriately cynical look into the land of mandatory volunteers and institutionalized paranoia. But for all of his observations of the surreal and odd, he’s never the white guy peering into a North Korean freak show. You leave Pyongyang as Delisle did: with empathy. It’s a Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken By Seth Ignore the title—this is not the indie mope-fest you’d expect. Seth’s quixotic, nostalgia-fueled quest to track the life and career of Kalo, an obscure Canadian illustrator he discovers while rummaging through old magazines, leads to some truly poetic observations and ruminations on the fading, dusty world of the ’40s and ’50s.   click here to read more Featured artists Seth Adrian Tomine Guy Delisle            Featured products It's A Good Life If You Don't Weaken (HC) Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea (hardcover)   PALOOKAVILLE #19 reviewed by Pop Matters Updated June 11, 2008 Palookaville #19 Writer: Seth Publisher: Drawn & Quarterly March 2008, 24 pages, $4.95 by William Gatevackes POP MATTERS "This is my first exposure to both Seth and Palookaville, so I am viewing this through the eyes of a new reader. This issue is part three of the "Clyde Fans" storyline, which has been running in the title since issue #10. To Seth's credit, you don't have to read the previous installments to understand what is going on. The status quo is established fairly quickly, and each character's personality and relationship to each other is firmly set up. You might not know each character's names, but they each have individual traits that make them unique and vibrant. The story involves Simon and his bully of a brother putting their elderly mother in a nursing home. This action plays havoc with Simon's emotions - it's clear he was not wholly in favor of the idea - and he escapes into the world of hallucinations in order to deal with it. The story is a sad one and Seth invokes sorrow from the reader like a master. He presents the story in a simple and plain way. There are no showy outbursts. There are no crying jags. There are no gut-wrenching scenes of melodrama. He simply lets the story itself move the audience, and move the audience, it does. Seth's artwork is simple yet effect. Dark, crisp lines permeate throughout and capture a version of reality without being realistic. His use of two colors, grey and blue, enhances the melancholy inherent in the story. Each page is just drenched in colors of sadness and they cling to the characters like a tight-fitting coat." click here to read more Featured artist Seth            ALL WE EVER DO IS TALK ABOUT WOOD, PALOOKA-VILLE 19 and CRICKETS reviewed by Newsarama Updated April 15, 2008 All We Ever Do Is Talk About Wood Written & Illustrated by Tom Horacek Published by Drawn & Quarterly Reviewed by Michael C Lorah It doesn’t look like much, this book. It’s a tiny little thing, barely bigger than a pad of Post-It notes, with an Earthy brown front cover you might glance past if you’re not paying attention. But, c’mon, take a second and really look at that cover. It’s freaking brilliant. And that’s pretty much what you’re in for when you pick up Horacek’s collection of one-panel gag strips, eighty-eight pages of sly, subtle, dry hand-grenade humor (hand grenade humor = you pause for a moment after the joke is throw before the humor hits you like a bomb). Later cartoons show a boardroom full of somber execs, mourning as their sales chart goes flat line or an alien in a doctor’s coat with a heavy Proctology textbook on his desk. It’s delightfully bitter work, sardonically upsetting readers’ expectations in unlikely ways. Horacek’s characters, with their huge, round heads and outward innocence, seem the least likely characters to pull down social mores, but he’s unafraid to put them through the wringer for a laugh. There’s no overall theme to the cartoons, but Horacek’s dry wit and illustrations bind the entire package together stylishly. The small package is well designed, giving each gag its own page so that none are crowded by another laugh. And, really, who can’t appreciate a joke about a father suggesting that he and his wife name their newborn son Margaret just to “see what happens”? Hilariously recommended. Palookaville #19 (D&Q; by Mike): The third chapter of Seth’s Clyde Fans continues in this installment, a cleanly drawn, creatively told segment about Simon placing his mother in assisted living and then going through her momentos and collectibles. Though little plot occurs, Seth’s large, dense pages are heavy with information and nuance, and nobody uses the panel gutters to greater affect than Seth does throughout this book. Whether its marking the passage of time as Simon walks through a neighborhood, or disconnecting Simon from his mother, Seth arranges pages in imaginative, engaging ways that keep you turning. Good work. Crickets #1-2 (D&Q; by Mike): Sammy Harkham’s new series debuts, dominated by the serialization of “Black Death.” One man escapes certain (very, very certain) death with the aid of a golem, and begins a journey through a peculiar forest. In issue one, they meet a father and son taking the corpse of the young son’s baby brother to be buried among family. In the second, a raving naked man is rescued from a well by the unlikely tandem of man and golem. It’s well drawn, and Harkham has a very clear idea of who his characters are and where they’re going, but two issues into the serial, it’s far too early to guess where things might be going. There’s some real potential here, so we’ll have to see where it goes.   click here to read more Featured artists Seth Sammy Harkham Tom Horacek            Featured products Crickets #2 All We Ever Do Is Talk About Wood   PALOOKA-VILLE 19 on Wizard TV Updated January 17, 2008 Palooka-ville 19 January 10, 2008 WIZARD TV click here to read more Featured artist Seth            EXIT WOUNDS, IT'S A GOOD LIFE IF YOU DON'T WEAKEN reviewed by the Daily Telegraph Updated September 13, 2007 Graphic novels Reviews by Sam Leith 28 July 2007 The Daily Telegraph Exit Wounds by Rutu Modan Koby, a young taxi-driver in Tel Aviv, is approached y a stranger. She tells him that she's convinced a body, burned beyond identification in a recent suicide bombing, is that of her lover, his estranged father. Uneasily, they set out to investigate what happened. Their search, and its conclusions, surprise them both. Rutu Modan's panels are restrained, her palette warm, her lines clean and the faces of her characters at once diagrammatic - in a sort of Julian Opie way - and expressive. The pages look simple, but the story is not. The economical-but-expressive quality of her drawing is echoed by the narrative, which intermixes political tension, private complexity, and the texture of daily life. Exit Wounds is the real thing. Modan brings you a world entire. The final panel of this tender and strange story offers an image half-hopeful, suspended in air. A wonderful book, and beautifully published to boot. It's a Good Life, If You Don't Weaken by Seth The hero of this "picture novella'' is called Seth. He is a cartoonist, rather depressive and neurotic, who affects round glasses and a fedora and hates modern life. He tends to push women away. He imagines that he'd have been happier in the 1940s or 1950s, but then catches himself imagining it and realises how absurd the idea is. Seth's brushwork (or nib-work) consciously harks back to the old-style New Yorker cartoonists, and his strips are in retro-style, two-colour format with a blue tone. This tells the story of his infatuation with, and quest to find out more about, an obscure gag cartoonist called Kalo, whose style resembles his own, after spotting one of his drawings in a 1951 New Yorker. This is classic modern comics hipster stuff: downbeat, introverted, but exquisite of its kind.   Featured artists Seth Rutu Modan            Featured products It’s A Good Life If You Don’t Weaken (PB) Exit Wounds   D+Q at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival, August 17-19 Updated August 3, 2007 With Special Guests: Joe Matt, Seth, Chester Brown, and Kevin Huizenga. TCAF Kick-Off Events - Friday, August 17th: @ Innis Town Hall 2 Sussex Avenue Toronto, ON (located within Innis College on the U of T's downtown campus, at the NW corner of St. George Street and Sussex Avenue, just south of Bloor. St. George subway). Featuring the presentation of the 2007 Doug Wright Awards, AND Seth, Chester Brown, and Joe Matt reunited on stage as Joe returns to Toronto from Hollywood! Seth & Chester put the spotlight on Joe Matt in light of his latest graphic novel Spent 6:30 programming starts, signing with Joe Matt, Chester Brown, and Seth follows! 9:00 after party (details TBC) Saturday, August 18th festival hours 10AM - 7PM Old Victoria College 93 Charles St. West 12:30 - 1:30 Seth (@ D+Q table) 1:30 - 2:30 Chester Brown (@ D+Q table) 3:00 - 4:00 Joe Matt, Chester Brown, & Seth signing in the Beguiling-sponsored signing room 2:30 - 4:30 Kevin Huizenga (@ D+Q table) 4:30 - 5:30 Joe Matt (@ D+Q table) Sunday, August 19th festival hours 10AM - 6PM Old Victoria College 93 Charles St. West 11:30 - 12:30 Chester Brown (@ D+Q table) 1:00 - 2:00 Joe Matt, Chester Brown, & Seth signing in the Beguiling-sponsored signing room 12:30 - 2:30 Kevin Huizenga (@ D+Q table) 2:30 - 3:30 Joe Matt (@ D+Q table) 3:30 - 4:30 Seth (@ D+Q table) Featured artists Chester Brown Seth Joe Matt            Featured product Spent EXIT WOUNDS and IT'S A GOOD LIFE in The Telegraph UK Updated August 2, 2007 Exit Wounds by Rutu Modan Koby, a young taxi-driver in Tel Aviv, is approached by a stranger. She tells him that she's convinced a body, burned beyond identification in a recent suicide bombing, is that of her lover, his estranged father. Uneasily, they set out to investigate what happened. Their search, and its conclusions, surprise them both. Rutu Modan's panels are restrained, her palette warm, her lines clean and the faces of her characters at once diagrammatic - in a sort of Julian Opie way - and expressive. The pages look simple, but the story is not. The economical-but-expressive quality of her drawing is echoed by the narrative, which intermixes political tension, private complexity, and the texture of daily life. Exit Wounds is the real thing. Modan brings you a world entire. The final panel of this tender and strange story offers an image half-hopeful, suspended in air. A wonderful book, and beautifully published to boot. It's a Good Life, If You Don't Weaken by Seth The hero of this "picture novella" is called Seth. He is a cartoonist, rather depressive and neurotic, who affects round glasses and a fedora and hates modern life. He tends to push women away. He imagines that he'd have been happier in the 1940s or 1950s, but then catches himself imagining it and realises how absurd the idea is. Seth's brushwork (or nib-work) consciously harks back to the old-style New Yorker cartoonists, and his strips are in retro-style, two-colour format with a blue tone. This tells the story of his infatuation with, and quest to find out more about, an obscure gag cartoonist called Kalo, whose style resembles his own, after spotting one of his drawings in a 1951 New Yorker. This is classic modern comics hipster stuff: downbeat, introverted, but exquisite of its kind.   click here to read more Featured artists Seth Rutu Modan            Featured products It’s A Good Life If You Don’t Weaken (PB) Exit Wounds   SETH and RUTU MODAN in the Independent [UK] Updated June 5, 2007 THE NEW REVIEW It’s a weird life Tim Martin 3 June 2007 Independent On Sunday THE NEW REVIEW | Tim Martin finds current masters of the graphic novel tackling everyday life and death in Israel, returning to the golden age of comics in Canada and tracing the wildest imaginings of a disordered mind It’s a good time to be writing comic books. Not only is the form finally and blessedly free of the theorising over its seriousness and validity that has persisted since the term graphic novel was coined, but it’s also a relatively young discipline, unhampered at its best by generic cliché and offering genuinely original narrative possibilities to writers willing to experiment. Publishers seem to be catching on, too; heaven knows how well these things sell, but three striking new examples demonstrate serious investment in the kind of production and design that allow a cartoonist’s art to sing. It’s A Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken proves once again that the Canadian cartoonist Seth’s is a talent to be treasured. Like last year’s Wimbledon Green (also published, rather beautifully, by Cape) this is a quietly sardonic story about comic geekery and the bachelorish pleasures of collecting things, as well as a tribute to the golden age of comic cartooning exemplified by The New Yorker under Harold Ross. Set in the mid-1980s, in semi-rural Ontario and Toronto, it’s the story of Seth’s growing obsession with a minor cartoonist from the 1940s and 1950s called Kalo, and of the miniature quest he undertakes to establish why Kalo published so little and stopped drawing so soon. This is an introspective, nostalgic little tale, endearingly brisk in its delineation of character and with a sly, self-condemning sense of humour – the Seth of the book is made to seem tryingly old-womanish in his habits and self-preoccupations. It’s A Good Life ... is also wonderfully designed and drawn, with Seth’s deftly stylised sepiatone drawings in the service of a genuinely astute grasp of pace and narrative. It’s a small triumph for the form. Also from Cape is Exit Wounds, the second graphic novel from the Israeli illustrator Rutu Modan. It’s the story of Koby, a young cab driver in Tel Aviv, and Numi, the girl who contacts him to tell him that his estranged father – her lover – may have been the victim of a recent suicide bombing in Hadera. Off they go in his taxi to find out, discovering on a sequence of cross-country forays that neither of them knew the missing man, or themselves, as well as they thought. Produced in lavish full colour, Exit Wounds is an enormously attractive book, and Modan’s striking talent for scenic arrangement, her distinctive jolie laide humans and her snappy grasp of dialogue give an absolutely cogent picture of the weirdness of life in contemporary Israel . “Look at those poor bastards,” says one character, leafing through a picture spread of bomb casualties. “Oh, they’re from the Haifa bombing,” responds the other, gloriously missing the point, “nothing to do with us.” Modan’s vision of Israel isn’t as explicitly surreal as that of her contemporary and sometime collaborator Etgar Keret, but it’s just as compelling in its portrayal of the country’s many faces, from desolate countryside to teeming city, from frontline political violence to Americanised consumer fastness. It’s an intriguing, percipient, unsentimental piece of work that deserves a decent audience. ‘It’s a Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken’ by Seth and ‘Exit Wounds’ by Rutu Modan are both published by Cape at £14.99. To buy discounted copies (free p&, contact Independent Books Direct on 08700 798 897 Further browsing Read more about graphic novels at http://www.drawnandquarterly.com Featured artists Seth Rutu Modan            Featured products It’s A Good Life If You Don’t Weaken (PB) Exit Wounds