The cartoonist known as "Seth"—born Gregory Gallant in 1962—first entered the collective comics consciousness toward the end of the '80s, when he started illustrating the cult science-fiction series Mister X. But genre work never really fit his interest in classic children's comics, magazine cartoons, and commercial illustration. At the start of the '90s, Seth began writing and drawing his own comic series, Palookaville, joining a then-formidable army of autobiographical cartoonists that included his Canadian cohorts Chester Brown and Joe Matt. In the mid-'90s, Seth serialized arguably the peak work of the autobiographical-comics genre, It's A Good Life, If You Don't Weaken, a graphic novel about his crippling obsession with a forgotten New Yorker cartoonist. The book continues to sell well, landing on lists of essential comics, though Seth invited some unintended controversy when it came out that much of It's A Good Life's "autobiography" was actually fiction.
Since the late '90s, Seth has been eking out the impressionist graphic novel Clyde Fans, about the emotionally stunted relationship of salesman brothers Simon and Abraham. In addition, as the crossover successes of cartoonists like Chris Ware, Daniel Clowes, and Craig Thompson has raised Seth's profile, he's responded with a flurry of new books, illustrating his father's memoir Bannock, Beans And Black Tea, assembling the sketchbook collection Vernacular Drawings, and designing the bestselling series The Complete Peanuts. Up next is Wimbledon Green, a dashed-off but highly involving adventure about a portly millionaire comic-book collector and his colorful rivals. Seth recently spoke with The A.V. Club about his work schedule, the state of the industry, and his persistent fascination with lost artifacts of the past.
The A.V. Club: Does anyone call you Gregory any more?
Seth: Everyone calls me Seth.
AVC: Even your wife?
S: Oh yeah. My wife had never known me as anything but Seth. Even my family. Everybody except maybe my father, who's getting a little old. I'm surprised he even remembers my name at all. [Laughs.] He still calls me Greg.
AVC: How long have you been Seth?
S: Since sometime in the early '80s, I guess. A long time.
AVC: Is it strange to just invent a name halfway through your life and then have everyone call you that name? It's not like it's a new identity, but—
S: Actually, it was pretty calculated to be a new identity at the time. It was part of a separation from who I was as a teenager, really. I came to the big city and I started to get involved in the punk scene and stuff, and I wanted to sort of brand myself. I made a pretty conscious effort to be a different type of person.
I think obviously there's a core of who you are, and as you get older, you become more aware of what behavior is immutable. For a long time, I felt there was a deep separation between the person I was as a teenager and the person I was in my 20s and early 30s . It's only maybe in the last 10 years that I've started to see more continuity between those periods. In the last couple of years, I've been looking a lot back at my childhood and teen years and sort of reconnecting. I felt a real alienation from my teen years for a long time. I was an unhappy teenager, and it was the last thing I wanted to think about.
AVC: Can we expect future comics set in that era?
S: I think so. Actually, I've been feeling a strong desire after Clyde Fans to do a story that captures the real complicated quality of what it feels like to be a teenager. I think that's one of the things lacking in what I'm doing right now, getting that feeling of what real life is about. I want to try and do a comic that has that degree of digression in it, where you really let yourself go and just talk and talk about some subject for hundreds of pages, kind of all over the place. It's very unformed in my mind right now, but I think that's sort of what I want to try and get at.
I don't think it will be very plot-heavy, to tell you the truth. I have an idea of the structure of it and how it's going to work. But more and more, I'm feeling like I want to capture what it feels like... what your experience in the world is like.
AVC: You were pegged as being part of the "autobiography" movement until It's A Good Life, If You Don't Weaken was revealed as a work of fiction, only modeled on your life. Some people felt betrayed by that revelation, but some seemed to respect the book more, believing that it's harder to tell a fictional story than just to relate something that happened to you.
S: Yeah, I've heard that before, it's true. But I don't actually believe that. I think it's just as difficult to tell a real story. Although when it comes down to it, I guess they're all kind of fictional stories, because of what you have to do to tell a story.
I'm always interested to hear the responses to It's A Good Life, because it certainly was never created to be a hoax, in the sense that I wanted the secret kept. I've gotten a lot of reactions from people regarding how they feel about it, when they find out it's not real. I'm always more happy to hear from the ones who feel better about it than the ones who feel betrayed.
AVC: Nostalgia is a major element in your work, and one of the appeals of nostalgia is that it lets people re-encounter foggy parts of their past. Sort of like the way the décor in an old movie may remind viewers of their grandmothers' houses, even if they can't even remember their grandmothers' houses all that well.
S: Yeah, I think that's kind of the key. These electronic media, because they save stuff, it allows you to go back and try and re-feel things. It's not really an experience of looking at them so much. It's like, you see this stuff and it gives you an opportunity to recreate feelings associated with these times. I'm really involved with that myself right now. I've been trying to collect TV that I might have been watching in the '70s, to re-spark the feeling of what my life was like at that point.
AVC: It's good to have a job that lets you do something you'd probably do anyway.
S: [Laughs.] Exactly.
AVC: That's interesting in relation to Clyde Fans, which started out more dialogue-driven and plot-heavy, but now really seems to be more about walking around in long-gone places. Was that always your intention?
S: It's pretty much always been planned to be this way. That's what it's about, for sure. What I'm trying to do is deal with a couple of characters through a variety of approaches. Right now I've just finished an issue, and I've got one more to go until part three is finished. There'll be four issues in part three. And this whole section has been created to go inside of Simon, into his mind. Each part of the book is a chance to see these characters, but from different angles. Like the first part was a monologue, to see Abraham from the outside. You hear him talk, but you don't really have any access to his thoughts. And then the second one, I wanted to introduce Simon, but I wanted to have it viewed almost entirely from a cinematic point of view, so you don't really have access to him in either way. He barely speaks, and you don't have any of his interior life. Now I'm almost done with part three, which is almost entirely interior monologue, so you can pretty much count that it's truthful. When I get into part four, I finally get a chance to bring the characters together. And part five, I'm just going to keep to myself.
AVC: What's your target date for finishing?
S: I still think I've got at least two years ahead of me.
AVC: That quickly?
S: If things go well. I'm hoping to change my schedule in the next year so I can focus more on the comic. We'll see. I've said this before. But that's my plan. This year, I've been working so much on so many different projects, and I feel I need to restructure my life a bit.
AVC: Do you think your work is served well by serializing? Would it be possible to complete the entirety of Clyde Fans and then release it?
S: I don't think it would've happened, to tell you the truth. I think the serialization is a way to trick myself into getting the story done. I think with future projects, that may be the route they go. It may also be that I change the way I draw. Wimbledon Green is done in a much looser style, one that allowed me to do a whole story all at once. The artwork in Clyde Fans is pretty laborious, and tedious, actually. I don't think I could've sat down and done three or four hundred pages of that and then released it. I really needed the serialization to force myself to do it.
AVC: Wimbledon Green was created in your sketchbook, correct?
S: Exactly. That may be the future model, maybe for the book after Clyde Fans.
AVC: Did you know all along that you were working on a full-length story, or did you just start one day and see what happened?
S: I just started. I really didn't know what I was doing until I was about halfway through. And even then there was always a certain element of chance about it, because it wasn't done very preciously. If at the end I had thought it was terrible, I didn't have to publish it.
AVC: If it hadn't worked, would you have re-used the material in some other way?
S: If some of it was good, I might've found some way to pull it together. I've got another story in a similar vein that I've done about 60 pages of, and it's halted at the moment. I'm probably going to finish it up, but that's one that I'm not so sure about. I think I may publish it somewhere down the road, but it's not slated for any kind of immediate publishing. It could go either way.
AVC: Wimbledon Green goes through some pretty distinctive changes, starting off as a spoof of the collector's mentality, and then becoming almost like a Tintin adventure in the middle. Was that conscious?
S: It was very conscious. Actually, that sequence is not where it sat in the book originally. If you remove the adventure parts about The Green Ghost, that's pretty much what the original book was. And when I got to the end of that, which was probably about 80 pages or something, I just read it over and I thought, "There's something missing from this." So I did that big adventure section and just dropped it down into the middle. I felt like it added something to the book, giving it more life. It changed the tone.
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