Seth’s Not Funny

During an especially trying period in graduate school a few years ago, a friend of mine asked what I might do instead. I answered, half-joking, “I want to move to Toronto and become a famous comic book person.” At the time, I was debating a move to the Toronto area anyway, and since I did (and still do) a cranky auto-bio comic (called booty, which is endless fun at conventions) I thought, Hell, the Toronto Three seem like a hip group, if a not-exactly well-adjusted bunch. I wanna go do that. The hell with grad school!

The Toronto Three are a trio of men—Joe Matt, Chester Brown, and Seth—who live in the Toronto area, all publishing through Drawn and Quarterly. Matt, apparently the cheapest man in comics (go look at his books if you don’t believe me), puts out the cartoon diary Peep Show. Brown, who has (or had) one pair of notoriously patched jeans, created the critically acclaimed Yummy Fur (among others, including collections). And Seth does Palooka-Ville, the first issue of which he describes in the introduction as “truly awful” and calls it, in the back of P-V #15, an “old whore gussied up in a pretty new dress.” (I personally think that’s a little harsh, but I like auto-bio comics, and not just because I do one.)

What fascinates me about this group of men (whom I’ve never seen as a group, though I did meet Joe Matt once, and that was enough) is that they infiltrate each other’s work. Seth takes Matt to task in Matt’s collection The Poor Bastard: “Talking to you is like being on a treadmill!” he shouts after an especially awful round of Matt’s girlfriend angst. Chester Brown is drawn in Seth’s his collection It’s a Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken, watching fireworks explode over Toronto. And there’s a riotously funny two pages by Seth at the end of Matt’s first collection (which is not something one usually says about Seth’s work. Fascinated with the past, yes. Riotously funny? Not usually.)

Palooka-Ville #1 is absolutely not funny . . . though there are a few amusing moments: sharp dialogue being one, Seths self-depreciating inserts about his former white-haired sunglass-wearing self another. The issue’s been out-of-print for ages, and the story was written in 1990 but details the events of one particularly bad night in 1984. Explaining the events to an acquaintance, Seth says, “They were beating me up for being gay, and I let them think they were right” (22:4). For as much as Seth dislikes the comic for its anecdotal foundation (“A good story is made up of less tangible things; memories, dreams, etc.” says his introduction. “Elements that are harder to nail down than a plot line.”), I think it is a good read (and an important one, for obvious reasons). Even if Seth hates it, I recommend it, and not just because, as a bleach-blond, I snickered knowingly at his recounted perils of yellow patches in white hair.

Palooka-Ville #15 is also not funny, but for a far different reason. Here, Seth concludes part two of the ongoing Clyde Fans story set in the late 1950s. Seth’s work in comics displays a fascination with by-gone eras; travelling salesmen in smalltown Canada in the 1950s and collecting both Pez dispensers and View-Master reels. The issue, and I mean this in all sincerity, is beautiful. Gorgeous. The pages are black, white, and blue, which especially suits the tone of the issue. Further, the buildings and streets are drawn in mesmerizing ways. One page in particular is a breathtaking full-page panel of three city blocks, with traffic and people and old-style billboards. There are pages without words, as an old man looks around his hotel room, and the entire issue actually feels the readers dreaming it rather than reading.

Where P-V #1 is determined to carry a plot line, P-V #15 is more concerned with the details of careful, slow storytelling and beautifully rendered panels; it is elegant and demands that the reader both pay attention to the characters’ facial expressions and body language and notice the backgrounds. Not like Alan Moore’s detailed Watchmen where everything’s a clue. More in the sense that, the book’s so lovely, the lines so crisp, that it’s almost a disservice to not look closely at the panels and see shadows across buildings and notes of a long-lost time.

At the sort of middle-point between these two issues is It’s A Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken, collected in 1996 but originally P-V issues four through nine. I bought the book in London at Gosh! Comics in preparation for a long flight home. It combines autobiography and history in Seth’s search for an old New Yorker cartoonist named Kalo. Folks later figured out that Kalo did not exist, but that doesn’t matter. The story’s both clever and smart, filled with beautiful drawings, and especially brilliant human touches. Some of my most favorite things in this book are some of the most mundane; there’s a fat black cat named Boris who develops an abscess. I know it sounds disgusting, and it probably was, but this cat’s plaintive “Mrow!” and the way Seth draws him (eyes all sad, flattened ears, and drooping whiskers when facing the vet) does something to me that most modern comics don’t. And that’s what good comics do best: move the reader.