Seth

Conversations

Eric Hoffman, Dominick Grace, Eric Hoffman, Dominick Grace

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781626743878
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Comics & Graphic Novels Literaturkritik

Canadian cartoonist Gregory Gallant, pen name Seth, emerged as a cartoonist in the fertile period of the 1980s, when the alternative comics market boomed. Though he was influenced by mainstream comics in his teen years and did his earliest comics work on Mister X, a mainstream-style melodrama, Seth remains one of the least mainstream-inflected figures of the alternative comics' movement. His primary influences are underground comix, newspaper strips, and classic cartooning. These interviews, including one career-spanning, definitive interview between the volume editors and the artist published here for the first time, delve into Seth's output from its earliest days to the present. Conversations offer insight into his influences, ideologies of comics and art, thematic preoccupations, and major works, from numerous perspectives—given Seth's complex and multifaceted artistic endeavors. Seth's first graphic novel, It's a Good Life, If You Don't Weaken, announced his fascination with the past and with earlier cartooning styles. Subsequent works expand on those preoccupations and themes. Clyde Fans, for example, balances present-day action against narratives set in the past. The visual style looks polished and contemplative, the narrative deliberately paced; plot seems less important than mood or characterization, as Seth deals with the inescapable grind of time and what it devours, themes which recur to varying degrees in George Sprott, Wimbledon Green, and The Great Northern Brotherhood of Canadian Cartoonists.

An Interview with Seth

DYLAN WILLIAMS / 1995

Destroy All Comics 2.2 (February 1995) pp. 1–27. Reprinted with permission.

Seth: My very first influences in comics or cartooning, the first things that interested me in it, would be a combination of a few newspaper strips. The first would be Peanuts, of course. Peanuts has been a lifelong interest, and I don’t think a point will ever come where I don’t love it as much as I do now. Around that same time, there was a Canadian editorial cartoonist [for the London Free Press, in London, Ontario] who signed his work Ting, although his real name was Merle Tingley, who came to my school when I was in grade one or two and gave a little lecture, and after that . . . I think I was always following his work anyways, because like a lot of editorial cartoonists he had a little mascot creature in his drawings that was a worm! You had to look for it in the cartoon, so that was enough to make me interested in it when I was that young, ’cause obviously I wasn’t interested in the subject matter. He really inspired me and made me see that people were cartoonists, that there were actually people doing this. That, and my parents used to have certain strips they really liked, which I mentioned in Palookaville. Nancy and Andy Capp, that my mother really liked, were real big favorites of mine, and still are, and this strip called Little Nipper by Canadian cartoonist Doug Wright was another thing that I still think is a great strip. These things were probably the first things that got me interested. Like any kid, I was reading a few comics at that time, I was reading Heckle and Jeckle and Richie Rich and Archies and stuff.

Dylan Williams: Did your parents have any anthologies of the cartoonist’s work, or did they just get it in the paper?

Seth: Just from the paper. There were a few paperbacks around the house, but the truth is, there weren’t ever many books around my family’s house. I think my interest in reading and cartooning is something that really just sprang . . . I don’t even know how it came about, except that I liked the stuff. Because there was no tradition in our family towards the arts in any way, like nobody in my family even was much of a reader.

The formative influence of comic strips on Seth. From It’s a Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken © Seth. Used with permission from Drawn & Quarterly.

Williams: Did you get the New Yorker?

Seth: No, my family was definitely lower middle class. At one point or another, we were even living in a trailer park. So, definitely as a young man I wasn’t flipping through the New Yorker or the New York Times or anything. My dad was a mechanic when I was really young, and later he was a shop teacher. I’ve got to give him credit though. He had a grade three education, and he managed to up it, and go back to school and go through teachers college and everything, so in retrospect, it’s kind of impressive.

I remember sometime in grade school, actually it was at summer camp, I read some Marvel comics. They were Kirby X-Men. They were in a big box, so they hadn’t just come out or anything, and this fired me up. This really got me interested in comic books in a way I’d never been before.

Williams: It’s funny, when I think about Kirby stuff, those are the ones that I think are the least great, but even then they are so great.

Seth: When I look at those, I still have all of them around here somewhere, that stuff just looks great to me. There’s a real nostalgic charm to it that’s unmistakable. It’s really appealing to me. For some reason that got me fired up, and when I got back home, I remember I started watching the Spider-Man cartoon on TV and stuff, and then I remember, it kind of clicked together one day, “Hey, Spider-Man’s in a comic book,” so I started buying comic books, and within a few years I was a total Marvel addict. I went through this period, through most of my teen years, of buying and reading every single Marvel comic that ever came out. That’s where I developed my drawing ability. If I hadn’t loved comic books, I wouldn’t have spent that much time drawing. I think it’s probably true of an awful lot of people who do comics, since the fact that they were kind of an outsider to the scene. I was definitely a loser in high school. If they had a drawing ability, they would produce their own comic books. I must have drawn hundreds of comic books when I was in high school, all superhero crap, and some horror stuff.

Williams: There should be some therapy group for kids like that.

Seth: To keep them from ending up at Marvel. I see some groups for those kids, but they don’t look too good. They’re role playing groups in the back of a comic shop or something. I was fortunate that I didn’t know a single other person who read comic books until I was in my twenties. I was horribly ashamed of it, in fact, so there was no way I was going to tell anyone in high school that I was reading comic books. I figured, “I’m enough of a loser, I don’t need to add this to the group. They have plenty of reasons to hate me as it is.” But that’s where I think I really developed my drawing abilities. If it hadn’t been for that I probably wouldn’t be able to produce a comic book now.

I guess it was around when I went to art school that I lost interest in those Marvel comics, but I still had interest in the medium.

Williams: And you were just doing painting?

Seth: Sure, yeah, I was in a more commercially oriented department.

Williams: Were you in illustration?

Seth: I was in what they called communication and design, which incorporated any kind of artwork that was for commercial purposes. I took illustration courses, and I took graphic design courses, and production art, and technique. All those things. But halfway through art school, I really realized, “This doesn’t do me any good. At the end of this I’m going to end up working on the Jell-O account or something, this isn’t going to make me a cartoonist,” so I kind of got disenchanted with the whole thing, and that’s when I . . .

Williams: So you still wanted to be a cartoonist?

Seth: Yeah, even during all this I still wanted to be a cartoonist, I just didn’t know what the hell I was going to do with it. I was really kind of mixed up. There’s only been one point in my whole life, since I was a kid, where I didn’t think I was going to be a cartoonist, and that was in my third year of art school, and I was really fucked up, and I thought, “This ain’t going to happen. This is a dream.” I guess this actually would have been right after I dropped out of art school, because I hadn’t even drawn anything for about eight months, and I thought, “I’m not going to be a cartoonist. I’m not going anywhere. I’m working at a shitty job, and I’m not doing any art, and what was I thinking anyway, I don’t even know what I’m going to do.”

Williams: What kind of job was it?

Seth: I was working in a jewelry factory, assembling costume jewelry. And I was also really fucked up on drugs at that point too, so life really didn’t seem like it was heading anywhere.

Williams: So, how much art school did you have?

Seth: I was there for about two and a half years.

Williams: Did you learn all the basics of drawing?

Seth: I guess so. I start to wonder what you really learn in art school. It’s a good place to kill time.

Williams: It depends on the teacher. If the teacher is really teaching you stuff, then it’s important, but if it’s one of those, “draw how you feel,” kind of things . . .

Seth: Yeah. First of all, I think I was too young when I was there. I just wasn’t prepared to learn. The truth is, I didn’t really have a clue. I remember being in graphic design class, and I didn’t even know what graphic design was when I was nineteen years old! I would look at the stuff, and it would seem like some sort of a magic thing to be able to get a graphic design that you would get an A on. I didn’t know how it worked. Now, it’s like an instinctual thing. You look at something and you can tell what’s good graphic design and what isn’t, but at that point I was completely lost. I was an idiot, and I didn’t learn anything really useful when I was in art school. I feel like most of my learning has come through self-teaching, because you have to learn when you’re ready.

Williams: I really think that most art school is a fraud because nobody is really ready to sit down and learn that stuff when they’re nineteen.

Seth: Exactly.

Williams: You have to be like twenty-five, or you have to be mature enough to actually digest the stuff.

Seth: I mean, what the hell do you know about anything when you’re nineteen, and how can you translate that experience into any sort of an artistic statement? It’s pointless. I think the best thing you might get out of art school is a lot of life-drawing classes. That was always fun. I don’t know if it helped my drawing, but I sure enjoyed it. It’s always a pleasure to draw from the figure.

Williams: Yeah, I agree. If you sit down and actually look at things . . .

Seth: It’s definitely something every cartoonist should do.

Williams: I spent three years straight, all the way through the summer and everything, just going to figure drawing classes.

Seth: It’s definitely important, because you really can’t learn to draw from other cartoonists.

You can learn to emulate their stylistic tics, but it’s not going to help you draw any. When it really comes down to the basics of drawing and composition, you can’t learn that from anybody else. You’ve got to learn that yourself.

Williams: What renewed your interest in cartooning?

Seth: I guess when I was about twenty, when I was in art school, I pretty much lost interest in cartooning, for a while. That’s because I stopped reading the Marvel comics. I was still interested in comics, but I just didn’t realize there was such potential to the medium. So for a couple of years there I just stopped doing any kind of cartooning. I was just goofing around. I dropped out of art school. I started doing a lot of drugs and stuff, and then I read an ad that Vortex Comics was looking for an artist or something. I went up there and showed them some stuff that I had and they didn’t care for it, but this guy Ken Steacy . . . I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of him . . .

Williams: The airbrush guy.

Seth: Yeah. He took me out to the comic shop, because I told him I wasn’t reading any comics and he said, “You gotta buy this Love and Rockets.” So this would probably be ’82 or ’83, and so I picked up issue number three and I started reading Love and Rockets. For a while that’s all I read, then I started branching out and reading some oth...