CITY LIGHTS: Seth at Drawn & Quarterly

jack — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 21:06:00 +0000

One evening in the early days of November, a group of 50 or so admirers crowded into a small bookstore on Bernard street, quickly occupying its 30 or so chairs, filling up its aisles and then finally sitting on the floor when no more room could be found. The shop, The Librairie Drawn & Quarterly, is perhaps the last outpost of indie high culture that stands on guard along the northern border of Montreal’s Mile End before that neighbourhood, known for it’s Sesame-esque street life and thriving hipster population, extends into the decidedly un-gentrified Siberia of Parc Ex, where there are presumably no complete Peanuts anthologies in the window displays, no complete box sets of eclectic McSweeney’s postcards to purchase, and no 2ft high “Sof Boy” figurines that stare up at you like the most perfect embodiment of pure wonder and glee. The audience was an alchemy of those born after the year 1980, and those born in some mysterious time period prior to that, who looked remarkably similar to the 80’s group in dress though disturbingly altered somehow. They gathered there to sit at the heels of (or kneel in some cases) the cartoonist Seth.

Seth, whose comics and illustrations may be familiar to readers of The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine, is also the creator of many of his own comic books, or “graphic novels” (a term he despises for its inherent discrimination against the word “comics,” which, he suspects, is a word that certain audiences still find distasteful). His talk was, not unlike his comics, a series of short stories told in succession, the ending of each he would punctuate with the nostalgic “bing” of a clerk’s desk bell. This was, in his words, “a cheap device” that he had “grown attached to.” The stories were true life accounts from his own biography. Seth believes that comics are a medium best suited for auto-biography, and were presented more or less in chronological order. They also had nothing whatsoever to do with the slide show being presented alongside them (although here, it turned out, there was to be more then one instance of uncanny alignment of words and imagery. “So that’s why I draw things like hockey players even though I haven’t watch a game in 30 years” remarked the artist, just as a Montreal Canadian flashed a semi-toothed smile on screen).

Later, when asked by a member of the audience about the importance of the the past as a theme in his work, Seth remarked: “The question is, why am I so concerned with the past…” (the event was being filmed be the National film board, so Seth had to repeat all the questions addressed to him first, before answering them). Then to answer: “I feel that the past is inherently sad, because as soon as any moment happens, it’s gone forever, never to return.” Because of the subject matter of his work, his pallet of sepia tones, his style of brush stroke, his daily implementation of vintage tweeds and brill cream, and the model 1940s town he constructed in his basement, Seth is sometimes referred to as a nostalgist, which is, as it rather cruelly turns out, yet another term which makes him bristle. Perhaps though, it is not that his audience is constantly searching for new ways in which to secretly derive his work, but instead that Seth is in fact an expert in capturing the ephemeral moment: that through his stories and pages of worlds, loves, and objects long-vanished, he is sharing with us the beauty of things to which we too have grown attached.

One of the funniest stories Seth told also happened to be one of the shortest. It was about a conversation that he once had with fellow cartoonist Chris Ware while the two were in Paris–a fact, it turned out, which was apropos of nothing. Seth: “I said to Chris, ‘Isn’t it such a shame that you’re only given so much talent, and so much wisdom in life, and that no mater how hard you try you can never make yourself any smarter or more talented?’ And Chris Ware, who is very talented, and very smart, just looked at me and said, ‘What are you talking about? Of course you can.’” Bing!

**Note: The author has paraphrased all quotes. Though there are pretty darn close.

Jack Dylan » City Lights

CITY LIGHTS: Seth at Drawn & Quarterly