The great cartoonist (and designer and illustrator) Seth joins the Virtual Memories Show to talk about memory and time, his love of digression, being "Mr. Old-Timey", and learning to let go of the finish and polish that used to characterize his work.
"When I was young, I thought there were an infinite possibility of stories you could do. As you get older, you realize you're following a thread, and that you don't have as much choice about what you're writing about as you thought."The Virtual Memories Show
Season 4, Episode 23 - Haste Ye Back
[music] Welcome to The Virtual Memories Show. I'm your host, Gil Roth, and you're listening to a weekly podcast about books and life, not necessarily in that order. You can subscribe to the show through the iTunes Store, and you can find past episodes, get on our email list, and make a donation to the show at our new site, VMSPod.com, or at our archive site, chimeraobscura.com/vm. You can also find us on Twitter @VMSPod at facebook.com/virtualmemorieshow, and at virtualmemoriespodcast.tumbler.com. I'm recording this week's intro from the Turnberry Resort in Scotland. A client invited my old magazine to send an editor out here for a press junket, but both staffers had to decline. They asked me if I could come out and write something for the magazine, so here we are. The thing is, I flew out to Glasgow on a red eye from Newark, which then got delayed by two hours because of various maintenance and traffic issues, so I've been going without sleep for more than a day now. That's not too huge a problem, because last year I discovered New Vigil, this really amazing drug that I think I told you guys about. Taken judiciously, it really helps me get through that first day and avoid the midday nap that kind of wreaks havoc on your body and leaves a jet lag basically for the rest of your life. I have no idea what happens when it's taken inj judiciously. The thing is, it's a speed-type drug, and I am currently zooming on it right now. Since we checked in at the hotel, I've finished reading the novel that I started on the flight, taken a nature walk through the nearby woods, watched a few episodes of the thick of it in order to prepare for Scottish people cursing at me, and did all my ironing, twice. So I figured I may as well get this episode together so I could take care of the work-related stuff that I'm actually here for for the next few days. Our guest this week is one of my favorite cartoonists, Seth. Seth's main work is this ongoing self-anthology called Pollucaville, that's published by Dron and Quarterly. Its latest incarnation, Pollucaville comes out as an annual hardcover book with self-contained strips and comic diaries that are mainly composed of rubber stamp art as well as ongoing stories. The main one that Seth's been working on for way too many years is Clyde fans, the story of two brothers and their collapsing business in electric fans. Seth has a really unique sensibility, I'm not going to tell you much about it because it really comes up over the course of our conversation. I should tell you that he's published a number of standalone books in addition to the Pollucaville work. They're all through Dron and Quarterly also. These include George Sprott, which is, I think, my favorite of his work, Wimbledon Green, my second favorite, and its semi-sequel, the great northern brotherhood of Canadian cartoonists. In addition to his work in comics, Seth does graphic design and illustration work and chances are you've seen his stuff, we'll talk at length about doing that sort of work versus doing his comics. The thing about Seth, one of the things about Seth, is that his birth name isn't Seth. Also his trademark is that he dresses in what we'll call old-timey style, for lack of a better term. He wears these 1940s-era suits and a hat and kid gloves and a long overcoat when he's out in public. Given the crap sense of style that most cartoonists have, this puts Seth head and shoulders above his peers. But I was fascinated by the notion that he comes up in our talk, that he's kind of trapped himself in this persona, and that he knows this is who he is now, because this is who he is. I once offered to buy him some basketball shorts and a college t-shirt so he could walk around a comics convention without drawing attention, but he didn't bite. I thought it would have been pretty funny. Now, I've been reading Seth's work since the early 90s, when Pulukaville was coming out as a, I think, 24-page comic book, maybe 32, but probably 24. Seth was part of a trio of these semi-autobiographical cartoonists who were working in Canada at the time. Chester Brown and Joe Matt were the other two. Chester's from Toronto, Joe is American, but I think he'd settled up there and met these two great cartoonists, and they pushed each other and all made some really amazing comics at a time when I was just totally primed for indie non-superhero fare. Now, Seth and I met at the small press expo in Bethesda, Maryland last September, and I wore a suit the first day, which I think impressed him, so we made a date to record during the Toronto Comic Arts Festival this past May, and now you get to listen to the virtual memories conversation with Seth, and I will stop speeding. I saw you in a presentation last September at the small press expo. You made the comment that keeping a diary keeps you from thinking that you have new ideas, to what degree do you actually feel as though you're growing, I guess, in that respect? How does your arch? I do think I'm growing, it's funny, but I don't think, I imagine I'm growing the way I would have thought when I was a young cartoonist. I think when I was young, I thought that, you know, you kind of, your work was what you chose to work, the work you chose to do was up for grabs. You had like an infinite possibility of works you might produce, and you would, you might pick a story, however a story came together, and your other books would be just completely different other books, and as you get older, you recognize that you're following a thread, and that the books are all, all the work you're doing is just further along this thread that you're going, and that you don't have as much choice in what you're writing about as you thought. I mean, you could, of course, you know, there are people who do one book that's about, I don't know, astronauts, and then the next book's going to be about, you know, Bushmen of the Kalahari or something, and perhaps these things are completely different, although I would tend to think that even perhaps that, trying to jump from one topic to the other might be the determining point that tells you, yeah, one of those persons about. And for me, I think the work is constantly evolving, but it's evolving in a very small way with a very small set of topics and concerns, and as I get older, they become clearer and clearer to me what I want to write about and why I'm writing about them, and I don't feel like that my work is not going to evolve in ways that people reading my work are going to say, oh, this is a big jump for him, or he's really changed. I did feel your work made a significant, maybe formal jump around the time you began doing sketchbook comics, and then the Wimbledon Green book, and then onto George Sprod afterwards. Do you feel, again, along those lines that you're maybe developing formally, but not in terms of things? Yeah, I think so. I mean, the work is changing in that sense. I'm not as concerned with the finish in the work anymore. It's like, the funny thing is years ago, I remember I had an illustrator friend who had a very polished style, but it was laborious, and I could see he didn't have any joy in doing it, and he wanted to listen up and do something light, or something, like he would look at the kind of cartoony work I was doing and think that that looked a lot easier. I was encouraging him to do it, but part of the reason he couldn't let go is he just really had a strong kind of a chip on his shoulder that he wanted people to know he could really draw. It was really important, and even for someone like myself who's working in a pretty simplified style, to switch over to the looseness of the sketchbook style is also like it's hard to let go of that finish of the really polished brush line. There's something about in the Clyde fans' stories where I'm trying to make the highest possible finish on the artwork. I don't enjoy doing it, but I do enjoy doing the sketchbook material. This memoir I've been working on, nothing lasts, has been much more pleasurable, and I feel, to be honest, in a strange way, I look at those pages and I'm just as happy with them as the Clyde fans' pages, but there's some little thing that makes it hard to let go of trying to create the perfect fetish object that you always wanted, that comic strip that looks just the way that it's best you can make it. But the truth is, I think that's coming to an end. I don't think I'm going to be doing much more of that Clyde fans' style work. I think after Clyde fans is done, the next big book will be done in the loose style. Well, what prompted the move to the loose style? Simply time-constraint? It's funny, I think after I put out the book of vernacular drawings, which was a collection of my sketchbooks, which was mostly single-page drawings, when that book came out, I really lost interest in drawing in my sketchbook in that way. I didn't think I would, but almost immediately I started to do strips in the sketchbooks. It seemed to me that I think it must have just been some desire that I wanted to do something different, but I knew I couldn't invest the time in really doing it. I was right in the middle of Clyde fans then, as I've been for my whole life. I didn't want to say anything. I felt like that I couldn't obviously take the time to do, say, if I wanted to do that Wimbledon Green book in the full style, as I call it. It wouldn't have happened. It would just would have been another thing written down in a notebook, like, "Oh, this would be an idea." I think it was a way to get away from working on Clyde fans, a way to work on something fun, because I've always got so much commercial work I'm working on, too, so something that you could, you know, you got up in the morning, you could work for a little bit in your sketchbook and have fun. It was comics that made me feel like I was actually doing some work. I think it just evolved, working that method into realizing that I could like the work as much in the looser style. I think it was starting to like my pencils more than my inks anyway, and that might have been connected to that. Yeah, I wondered, because rereading the new issue of your anthology book, Palookaville, I noticed that nothing lasts, the memoir that you're working on, almost seems like a hybrid. It's done in the format of those sketchbooks, but does seem to have a little bit more polish, I suppose, in appearance. It's funny for me it's even further down the scale, because I was just working with magic markers there, and I decided to throw away like the art tools entirely, and I'm using like the cheapest of methods, which in a lot of ways it's going back to how I used to work when I was a teenager, which is really just working with flair pans basically, and some gouache, which was a style I used a lot as a teenager. It just feels fun. The funny thing is, that's the complicated part of doing artwork for a living, is that it always starts out as something that people always say like, "Oh, I want to do this for my life because I enjoy doing it so much." At some point, you get better and more professional in creating the artwork, especially in something tight like comics, a lot of the fun goes out of doing it. It becomes quite laborious to produce the pages, and then you look around and you see certain cartoonists who have a rough style, and you really are jealous, and then somebody like Kate Beaten is a good example, a lot of her, she just had a really great strip she did called Dux, I think, that I read online. It couldn't have been scribblier, literally it was just like every drawing must have been the first attempt with no penciling whatsoever. It's not like when I read it, I thought I was thinking, "Oh, this isn't up to par." I was completely happy with the drawing because it served its purpose, and at the end, you think to yourself, "Why am I putting so much effort into trying to make this so slick? It doesn't make the storytelling any better. It doesn't make the read any better." It's like the point is communication. If you can get the communication across, and this is the only point where it comes in, is can you communicate the ideas you need with a lesser palette of skills? I think you can. For myself, really, what I'm trying to do now with the sketchbook comics is I'm trying to craft a simpler grammar to work with. I want the work to be honest and very straightforward, and that's why I'm using, I think, an almost unsophisticated approach of just telling the stories, just speaking directly to the reader, and making it very simple and very unpretentious. And does it fit in with the consistency of themes you were bringing up earlier, which I really should have launched into? What are the themes that you're particularly pursuing? Well, that's a funny thing. It's hard to boil now what your themes are, but everything I do is about memory primarily. It seems to me that that's memory and time. I don't think I've ever sat down and really tried to analyze exactly what this means, but I know that I talk about it a lot, and the work is focused on those two particular concerns. I'm sitting around with my wife, probably the two things I'm talking about, all the time would be memory, going on and on about things that have happened in my life or the sense of feeling distant from these events in my life as the years pile on, and also just about the feeling of swimming in that weird current of time, how your whole life is this constant negotiation with time moving forward. I think that's the thing that there are two sides of the same coin. People would think that when I'm talking about that I'm the person that my main interest is the past, per se, in the idea of a nostalgia or an interest in early 20th century culture, but that really just falls into the surface veneer of my aesthetics. That's what I'm interested in. In my real life, like most people, I'm interested in my own past. I'm not really that interested in 1920 when it really comes down to it. I'm interested in 1975, probably. This is what I'm thinking about all the time. When I'm sitting in the studio, I'm constantly revisiting the events of my own life and feeling that strange disassociation that everyone feels as they start getting older, that these events happen to somebody that appears to have been you, but it was so long ago that it's like these are strange, distant events, all these elements that make up your identity and who you are and your life, it's a dreamlike experience to be alive. This is the stuff that my work is most focused on, is I'm trying to capture like these little bits and pieces of what make up the sensory experience of feeling that you're alive and trying to get that feeling down on paper and the sense of loss that goes with it because God knows it seems like there's a kind of pervasively quiet undertone of loss and sadness to life that I think sort of is like the rhythm that runs underneath most people's lives, I suspect, if they're paying attention to it. In your first, I will say your first major work, it's a good life if you don't weaken. I also once heard you mentioned that it's a young man's idea of looking at the past. That was about 20 years ago when you started that work. How has your approach to the past changed and how has your approach to looking back at your earlier work? Yeah, it's tricky. I mean, I haven't read that book in a long time, but certainly I've flipped through it at some point or another. Every once in a while, I'll see something from it, some review, some will still mention it, or I'll see a page or two from it somewhere, and I've become very aware that it was crafted with my own persona in mind as well. I was thinking a lot about myself as I wrote that book, to present a certain type of person. I think at that point, I was aware enough that I had already formed this identity as Mr. Old Timey. Do you feel trapped by that? To some degree. Yeah, I would say so. It's funny. I do think it limits how people view me. I think it gives them a nice, easy answer right away. I was just reading in the paper this morning about Farley Moet, Canadian writer, and he was well known for being a naturalist writer, but a fiction writer. When he was well known for being bombastic and outrageous and an old-fashioned kind of writer who had a real kind of obnoxious little personality that was kind of funny, and his was clearly a created persona that he had used to have a way to deal with publicity and to build an image and all this sort of stuff. The writer was saying that she'd asked him in old age what he'd thought about this identity he'd created, and he'd said basically that was somebody I could hold out in front of me as I went out into the world, and the real me could be behind it, but now that I'm older, I don't need him anymore. I thought to some degree, I think that's what I did, too, although my image was certainly much less bombastic. I've always wanted to be a certain person, some kind of person. I call this idea a persona building is that you add things on to yourself bit by bit through life to create this kind of person you want to be. Eventually, to some degree, it is you, since you pick these things specifically. It's kind of like the old thing, if you want to have a British accent, if you pretend you have a British accent for 10 years, well, I guess you've got a British accent at that point. You've stopped thinking about it, and so much of creating an identity for yourself works that way as well. In one sense, I think this is me, but on the other sense, I'm very aware that I've always been very careful about creating an identity for myself bit by bit, changing my name, changing the way I dress, trying to, I mean, I remember when I changed my name, I did it in such an aggressive fashion where I insisted that people call me by the new name, and made, this was I still just, like in my early 20s, I still had a job at a restaurant, and I had to change my name officially at the restaurant and make everyone at the restaurant, you know, my boss and the other waiters call me that name, my mother, you know, it was very kind of methodical. And I think that that's how I've built my whole identity, and to some degree, it's problematic because I think that it is a misleading identity, it's too easy to fall into the surface. Yeah, yeah, and I think that the term nostalgia has really dogged me through my whole life. I mean, it's a fair label. I've come to finally accept it. You know, even just a year ago, I was fighting against, like, I'm not an nostalgic artist, I would say, like, my work isn't about longing for the past, it's, my work is about thinking about the past, it's about looking back, that was the line I always used, it's about looking back, not wanting to, you know, turn back the clock. But, you know, at some point, if every single article has ever been written about you, if the first sentence, they say the word nostalgia, it's time to, like, step up and say, I guess there's some nostalgia in there. And I am a very nostalgic person, but it's like, I don't feel that's the guiding force of what the work's about. It might be that, you know, if that's so much of what your own life is about, you can't help but pour it in there. But I feel like mostly what my work is about is just trying to, like, deal with the idea of memory. I think that my characters are always dealing with, like, that, you know, inescapable quality of, like, you know, what's going to happen in their lives. This is, like, Clyde Fans is also about the persistence of memory as well. And to a big degree, good life was about that, although it's not what I planned it to be about. To me, it was, the book was about basically, like, the scope of a life, the idea that, you know, like, that your life goes somewhere without you planning it, that you could change where your life's going, but it would take a big effort to do it. And sort of my character tracking down this old cartoonist gets to see that scope in his life and how his life was shaped, and it reflects on my own life, apparently. But when I look back on the book now, if I were to flip through it, I would say that it's, again, it's about, it's entirely about memory, too. Every in time and how you really can't control, or that you really are trapped in this kind of constant process of moving forward and feeling things fall away from you. And how do you find the, well, the ability to translate that into art? In turn, not of visual art, but to not simply recount. What is that process for, sorry, we're in Canada. What's that process for you in terms of moving from strict autobiography into the notion of a fictional narrative? Well, I mean, in the fictional narrative, it's like, in a certain way, it's easier to craft like a more layered kind of experience. I think with Clyde fans, it's like, hopefully when it's finished and people read it in its final form, they'll be able, they'll see it as a more multi-layered reading experience, whatever you want to call it. There's a lot going on in there, I think, and to boil it down to one idea is probably, it's not really how you write a book anyway. Certainly, I don't know anybody who says the theme of my book will be, and then sits down and writes it. Things emerge through it. And I think the most interesting part of the whole idea of writing is that you just allow a certain amount of that sort of stew that goes on in the brain to come out, and you know it will all connect up somehow. I think that's one of the most fascinating things about writing is that even the book is finished, you look down and there's some where you say this is really clever how these things come together, and I didn't plan this out at all, but it looks 100% like this must have been planned. I can't remember the details of it now, but I remember in George Spront, there were several things where it's like, I set, it looks very clearly like I set this thing up in the beginning, and then at the end, I connect to it, and I was like, that looks great, but I didn't do that at all, and there was never a moment's thought to put those two ideas together, and yet it's almost impossible when I look at it to think that I didn't know that I was doing that, and I have to say that the only way that happens is because it's you doing it, somehow or other, that's the way your brain works, it connects it for you, but it wasn't done consciously. So I think when you want to write, I think to write a good book, you have to let a lot of that creep in where you just let it happen, and not plan things out too much. I mean, with Clyde Fans, I've obviously had a long worked-out script that is still open to has some holes in it that things can change, and I'm certainly going to go back and fix up a few things, but like with the nothing-last story that I'm working on, that feels to me like the direction I'm headed, which is you don't write anything down, you just go for it page by page, and it evolves as you're working on it, and obviously when you're dealing with your own life, there's like a structure to begin with that you don't have to make it up, it's just a matter of picking and choosing. And that seems to me the way I want to write in the future is not to like nail things down. Probably the next book after I finish "Nothing Lasts", I'm probably going to finally dive into all this dominion material I've been putting together to build this imaginary city, and I'm probably just going to sit down and write a big book that will have like a kind of a, I've got a structure for it that'll work, but it's a structure that'll allow me to just have endless digression, which is really what I'm most interested in writing. Just let the writing digress, it will loop in again at some point, and I'm not really interested in narrative as much anymore. What do you think that is? I don't think I'm like, I don't think I ever really liked plot all that much, like I always felt like I was kind of coming up with a plot. I think that was like the key thing I did with good life was that before that I've been doing a bit of autobiography, and I thought I want to do a different type of thing, and I need a plot, and that doesn't really come naturally to me, and that's kind of a person who dreams up stories. Some people are clearly great storytellers, but I'm just a talker, I just like to talk, and a talker just rambles, and to me that's the kinds of stories I like best are not really plot heavy or movies or whatever I like. In fact, at some point I remember early on in my life hearing that a good story, the main point of a good story was conflict, which seems to be like the given answer on how you write a story, and as a young person that made sense to me, I was thinking of movies and books I'd read, and I thought, yeah, I see that, there's always a conflict, even if it's a conflict with yourself or whatever, but as time has gone by I've started to think that's the essential element of why I don't like most storytelling. I'm not interested in conflict, and most movies I watch, I think to myself, I wish there would have been less conflict in that, especially genre stories, genre stories, it's the classic of like when you don't know how to write characters, you just give them a lot of angst, you make them fight with each other a lot, there's a lot of arguing, I never enjoyed that kind of thing. I've always enjoyed stories that are like quite the opposite, it doesn't mean I don't like conflict at all, I mean obviously if you take something like Long Day's Journey in Tonight, there's a lot of conflict in that story, and yet it doesn't feel like the conflict is the attack on element to make it plot out of it, it's just like there's the natural conflict of characters and their lives dealing with each other, the problems people have, blah, blah, blah, blah, but that wouldn't be like why I would come to that work, specifically, that work draws me in because it has like a, there's a perfect tone to something like Long Day's Journey in Tonight, even something as chaotic as, who's afraid of Virginia Woolf, there's something probably because they were plays and they're set in small, contained spaces, it kind of forces a culture of digression in the storytelling, it's just a lot of talking, a lot of rambling back with a lot of people telling each other things, that really appeals to me on some basic level as a good story, much more than like something that's filled, like you know, if we're going to talk about films, I'd be much more interested in watching like Long Day's Journey in Tonight and something that would be very exciting as they would say, you know, something with a lot of action in it, even if it doesn't mean I'm making me on fair comparison of like Long Day's Journey in Tonight versus Star Wars or something like that. - I was thinking about Spider-Man, which you'd go see every day. - Yeah, no I mean like even like a really great intelligent like good art film, but something that's like quite, you know, filled with like a lot of physicality, I would always be much more attracted to that one that's mostly just people talking. I just love, I do, you know, when I was very young, I remember reading Kecher in the Rye and there's the scene where Holden talks to his professor and he's talking about in class so when they would have to get up and give like a, they'd have to give a report of some kind that in the class people would shout out, if the person wandered from what, what is the main point, they'd shout digression and they'd have to go back and Holden was complaining that the digression was the most interesting part of it and that always stuck in my mind, that was a recognition point of like, yeah, the digression is the part that I'm most interested in when people get away from the point. - Is there that fear of going too far, the one that always occurs to me is the sequence in the crumb documentary when we see Charles's work over the years and the writing becomes this unintelligible mess and it's just drapery, focusing on drapery and there's that sense of the digression that just becomes an OCD. - Yeah, I know what you mean and the funny thing is it's like, yeah, there's always a slight worry that if you just follow your own interests you will lose the audience at some point but I always kind of think, I don't really have an audience of that sort, nobody's following my work I would say because - - You won't believe what Seth did in the new issue of Blookerville. - Exactly, they know what they're there for and I think that that, if anything I think the more you pursue what you're really interested in the better the work will be somehow. You can be wrong and certainly this does happen, as artists get older they make these choices where they follow their own interests and people say like, well, I can't read any more of this stuff, it's completely off the rails. But I feel like, I feel for myself that my best work is ahead. - Do you feel that that sense of age as an imperative to, there's no time to screw around any more you need to produce and how do you reconcile that with, or how do you balance that with the design and illustration work and the sense of paying the bills versus making the art? - Well, I get frustrated at times, I've been working on this series of books with Lemony Snicket and they've been very giving to me, very kind to me, but it's a process and there's a lot of people involved in this process and it means a lot of back and forth of changing things, doing this, it eats up a lot of my time, takes time away from my real work and that gets frustrating. Sometimes I think like, I don't want to be working on this today, I want to be working on my own work and sometimes that day turns into weeks. But then the flip side of it is, I think to myself, I'm lucky that I've got this work. There's lots of artists who want to, basically my work isn't that commercial. There's lots of artists out there who are probably in a similar situation but they don't have a saleable set of skills and therefore maybe they're working a regular job somewhere and so it's just as frustrating if not more to come home from a regular job and then have to try and work on your own art in the evenings, I think to myself, I'm pretty, basically lucky that I have a career that allows me to stay in the studio and so everything I'm working on is even if it's like an illustration for a business magazine, on some level I'm honing the skills that are necessary to do my work. I'm not going and answering phones somewhere for the afternoon. - Tending bar or something. - Yeah, exactly. - And you don't get a feeling of, it does feel as though it's a constant use of the muscle, not a, you know, I'm wasting effort. - Yeah, it is. I mean, there's definitely a feeling of wasted effort but there's two types of other work I do and I sort of divide them into hack work and my own work and even though it may not be like working on Palucaville, certainly like when Criterion calls up and says like, "Would you design like the City Lights DVD?" It's like that still falls into my own work because that's something I'll still shower some love on and I don't feel like it's just, you know, to pay the bills. I'm doing it also for the money, of course, and if it was just for the money and I had enough money, a lot of this stuff I would just say no, but even the Lemony Snicket books fall into the category of my work because it's like I'm still using like, I'm putting another, the real care into it. That doesn't mean that I still don't wish that I was pouring that more into my own stuff but there's also a recognition that I don't want to just do comics. There are other things I enjoy doing and I've really, it's been good for me to do a lot of this while there work, not all of it. Certainly a lot of the design stuff has taught me a lot over the years and I'm a better artist now from designing books than I was before. Can you characterize some of the lessons you picked up from that? Well for one thing, I've just learned to be a lot more sensitive in how I design things, like how I organize elements on the page. My very understanding of cartooning has gotten better by paying more attention to like designing things as a package and I think that it's like my aesthetics by focusing on my aesthetics and honing my skills tighter on things like my display lettering and stuff like that. It's given me a tighter set of skills. I think when I started out I was like a lot lazier as an artist. I've really like, it's kind of, as I'm talking about getting looser, I think that there's a real process that involves like reaching a high level of finish and then allowing yourself to let go of it rather than never aiming for it to begin with. There's, it's kind of a difference. I feel like I have the, it's kind of like the artists who were forced to draw from plaster casts for two years before they could draw their own drawings. They built up a tremendous amount of skill that sits behind that letting go of it and I think that this whole process of working on more offestidious things, paying closer attention, being more sensitive to design, coming to even understand what design is. I mean to on some level when I started out as a cartoonist I'm not sure I even knew what a good graphic design was, all I knew was cartooning. This has widened my horizons, I think, and made me a more sophisticated artist on some level. What was your training in cartooning, or in order to begin with? Well like most cartoonists my training was self-taught. I went to art school at the end of high school, I came from a small town and that seemed like the answer. I was like, at that point I probably still would have liked to have gone and drawn at Marvel Comics, but that didn't seem a realistic goal to me when I was like 18 years old. In a little small town I thought I should go to art school, but what I didn't really realize at that point, which would be like about 1980, was that art school was not going to teach me much about cartooning. Not that I thought I would go there and there would be a cartooning course, but I did think that kind of naively that I would find classes that I could apply to cartooning, but in two ways I didn't really work out one is I think I was really just too young and unsophisticated to really understand what they were trying to teach me. I took graphic design courses and things of that sort and I didn't get much out of it because literally I just couldn't understand what they were telling me. That sounds like, you know, sounds kind of over the top like you couldn't understand, but I couldn't. I mean like I couldn't figure out when the teachers were talking about a good typographic design or a bad typographic design, I was thinking this could be magic they're teaching me, I don't really see, I don't know what the difference is, and in some ways I'm not sure that I could impart the difference to someone if I was teaching a graphic design class. It kind of comes from developing taste and aesthetics that comes over a lifetime and an 18 year old kid who only knows Jack Kirby is really not the person to go to to talk to about aesthetics. And the other problem was teachers were really negative about cartooning, it was clearly just junk not to be wasted, your time wasted on it and kind of the purpose of art school was to drill that out of you, to either teach you to be like a successful commercial artist or to encourage you to pursue artists, you know, at that time would have been much more you know about avant garde painting basically, non figurative, they're very uptight about figurative painting at that point, and it was very snobby. So by the time I left art school, I would have to say like where I went after that, my education came through looking at other artists, other cartoonists, the Hernandez brothers were a huge attorney. It would have been right around that time, 82, 83, you know, exactly. And do you feel a sense of competition, friendly rivalry, my abbreviated take of what your career arc was, that the arrival of Chris Ware pushed a lot of cartoonists in interesting directions. Do you have a particular, do you have any memories of, you know, looking at somebody's work and thinking, holy crap, I have to up my game? Yeah, that was Chris for sure. But it's funny, you know, I can list about several, it's like that narrative has overtaken the earlier narrative in my life, which was Chester Brown, because Chester Brown was really the person who if anyone, when I came in contact with them, basically served as the model of what I could do as an artist. I'd already been interested in, I was always starting to do my own cartooning when I met Chester, and I was already highly influenced by the Hernandez brothers. That was a real turning point for me. I discovered them in crumb almost at the same moment. I knew crumbs work earlier, but I wasn't interested in it, and it was just one of those dim cultural memories of something strange and dirty that you'd seen as a teenager. But I kind of discovered crumb and the Hernandez brothers for real around the same time, and that was a big influence on me realizing what I, you know, I wanted to be a cartoonist, but no idea really what to do. And then I could see what could be done. And then, you know, about a year or two later I met Chester, both of you being in Toronto area. We both lived in the same area, and I actually wrote him a letter, and then we became friends. And he started working at the company that I worked at, which was Vortex Comics. And we became friends, and we started to hang out together, and we spent, and Chester was enormously shy at that time, like he's a quiet person by nature, but, and I'm a very gregarious person, so we would go out, and I would just talk to him. Just to bring him out of his. Yeah, just ramble on, and, and, you know, if he hadn't been such a great cartoonist, I would not have invested that much time in this guy, because I would have just thought he was a withdrawn weirdo. It's like getting to know him, though, over the long process of time that it took before he kind of opened up was a period where I kind of, like, developed a lot. We both kind of developed a lot of talking about what we thought was good cartooning. As Chester opened up, we really started to formulate, like, exactly why we thought certain comics were good, what the rules were, why, you know, I remember we talked an awful lot about autobiography in those years, an awful lot about Harvey P. Carr and about Mindy Berry, a lot about, you know, the classic, you know, narration being, like, a mistake in comics that, you know, you tell things is a mistake, you show them, it's the correct way, ideas that, you know, I don't follow anymore, but at the time, you know, seemed like, you know, we had to, like, kind of craft rules on what would work. That was, and Chester was so accomplished, so smart and such an original thinker, that I, you know, I don't think people recognize, like, what an interestingly singular person, Chester is. I mean, you might say that he's a contrarian and that, like, it's the classic of, like, he's like, no one else I know, and you could say, like, well, that's because he's the opposite of everyone's. To some degree, he does think that way it's, like, he takes the devil's advocate view of everything, it seems. Do you think it comes naturally to him? I do. I think so. I, from our very brief conversations and from lots of exposure to his work, I've long been convinced that he's not human, but he's actually nailing it up somehow. He's definitely a strange character, but the funny thing is that it really works to his advantage is that he's one of the kindest people you've ever met. So for a person who has, like, a strange emotional range, for them to be so, and the emotions that do seem to be evident are kindness and friendliness and sort of an easy-going quality. It's, like, his emotions, it doesn't seem to have any of the negative emotions or any of the self-righteous emotions, which makes for a very good friend, and he also was a very good force to help me to think on my own. It's good to have a friend at a certain point in your life to question your basic assumptions on everything. So that when you say, like, any statement, his answer would be, "Well, why would you think that? Why does it have to be that way?" If you said, like, "Well, you've got to have policemen," and you'd say, "Do you have to have policemen?" That's very good, because then you say, "Well, I don't know. Let me think about that for a minute." And so that was at a young age, meaning Chester, and being, like, even though he's only like about a year or two older than me, he was much further evolved as an artist and clear in what he wanted to do, and doing great work, right, from the start, practically. So that was an enormous influence on me. But meaning Chris Ware came a few years later, I don't know, ten years later, something like that. It probably would have been around '93, '95, and his work was really... Yeah. And it was a funny kind of thing, because I'd read Chris's first issue from Fantographics, and I liked it, but I don't remember really being, like, bold over by it. I remember thinking it was good. I can actually remember saying to Chester at the time, "This is really good." And I think I read the second issue too, and I said, "But I don't know how long you can keep doing this kind of thing before it gets repetitive or something." It was a very funny comment when I think back on it now, because it's clearly like a very... It was a very stupid comment, but I didn't really recognize the force of the work until about, I don't know, sometime after that, I went down to Chicago and visited Chris. And I think it was meeting him and actually seeing his life and staying at his house and recognizing the depth of his commitment to the work that changed, how I felt about things. I think before I met him, I even thought he was just doing all that lettering on a computer. I just thought, "Oh, it's so slick." I didn't really give it any thought at all, and then recognized the high level of skill and commitment and intelligence that was going on in that work. Really, I came back from that trip. I think that was kind of like a, I don't know, road to Damascus kind of experience, where I literally was like kind of flabbergasted with that, like, "I've got to try harder." This is like, I've been like coasting along, you know, getting a certain kind of work that, you know, trying to some degree was probably more concerned with trying to tell a certain sort of story than how I was telling the story. And I think that really made me like, sit down and like, you know, try and pull myself up by my own bootstraps, whatever the phrase is, try harder. And it really was like, it was a significant turning point for me. Did you feel in a sense you were writing stories to fit your style of artwork, your visual style? No, I don't. I think I was, my artwork was, you know what the funny thing is, I've always kind of wondered if my artwork wasn't actually at odds with the stories I wanted to tell anyway. My artwork is like, it's light, it's very, it's built around charm, more than anything. A cartoony. Yeah. And it's based a lot on like early 20th century, clear line kind of New Yorker style drawing. It's certainly not like a style that you would pick if you wanted to tell, you know, angsty stories or something or, you know, when I started out, certainly I was concerned with like trying to get to the heart of like telling real stories, talking about, you know, some sense of the ring of truth. And certainly if you were crafting that from the start, you wouldn't pick like, you know, this kind of fruity, little like charming, whimsical style to tell it in. That would seem like, it would be at odds with the material. And time, I've, I've, don't worry about that anymore. I mean, I basically just think, you know, an artist's artwork serves their purpose and that's all there is to it. It's like they're handwriting it. So you get over that. You don't think about it at a certain point. I really think that as long as there's some cohesion between like that that must come from when you know what you're doing and, and you just do it, when that works, it works. It's kind of the intensity of why good cartooning does work. That's why all the good cartoonists like that I like, when I look at their work, it's of a whole, you know, I don't think like, oh, this Dan Kyle story would read better if a chroma drawn it. It's like that just doesn't even enter into the brain. They are, it's an essential element of cartooning that it all comes from one source. And so style is, style is a funny thing. I think style is important, but style really is simply the matter of, of the choices an artist make that lead to where the finished product is. That's the style. When you're young, you might say like I want to cop, you know, this look from this or that or whatever, you can absorb it, but eventually that stuff all falls away and there's just something there that is the style. I think a lot of artists hate to even talk about style because it has like a bad quality of like how you picked your hat or something, you know, it's like some fashion-y kind of question. Why did you pick those shoes, so, but, and they, and I think cartoonists like to think like style just happens, but it is chosen bit by bit over time. Little pieces, little decisions, you know, do I, am I going to continue drawing these potato noses? I'm like, you know, it's like, but eventually that is like, it's an essential element of who you are, but like, like wearing a suit for 20 years, if you put it on every morning, you don't think about wearing a suit anymore. It's just what you wear. So you don't linger on a sweatpants and a t-shirt when you're working at home, right? No, I do have a uniform at home that I work in, which is basically like, you know, I have like a, like a shop coat I work in and stuff, and I have a work hat, you know, stuff like that, but it's not like it's a really contrived uniform, it's just, it's comfortable, but still totally in seeking, in keeping with, you know, my look. Got you. Who do you consider your non-cartooning influences? Yeah, well, that's a big pile of artists, and it's funny because I'm the kind of person who's really interested in other art, and I'm not sure at certain point who's an influence anymore, who's just a favorite artist, but there is a group of artists that I have like that are my, like the most, I'm most deeply interested in, and I'm not sure many of them have influenced my drawing or my storytelling, but they're all I would call like object lessons or people that are, I like their lives as artists, their examples as artists, and I'm, you know, I probably won't be able to list them all perfectly off the top of my head, but certainly Edward Gory would be one of them, and I'm not really that interested in Gory's work in a sense. I mean, I went through a period when I was young, but I think it's because Gory himself is someone to emulate, someone who was so like a cultural, voraciously interested in culture. He read and watched everything. He crafted a life for himself that was about taking in culture. I find it endlessly fascinating that he went to every performance of Valentin's ballet, not just every show, but every day, every matinee, every evening show. That's a kind of a commitment to culture, to something you like that is highly impressive to me, to be that immersed in things, and to be Catholic in your taste, the fact that he was, you know, reading all, you know, reading traditional Chinese novels at the same time as watching The Golden Girls on TV. Like, there's something to me very appealing about that. And another one would be like, like, Darger. Darger is like, Darger would not, you could not see any influence of Darger on my work, but Darger, what appeals to me about him is like how much creating art was like necessary to be alive. It's like he would have literally died of loneliness if he hadn't had that inner world that he was working on. That inner world strikes me as like another essential element of why you would want to create art, is that you build an interior life that you're trying somehow to bring out into the real world. And that's why I think, as I said, I'm getting less interested in plot, is because I think I'm more interested in the idea of like just exploring that idea of an inner world which is made up of, I call it virtual memories, but, you know, feel free to do that. Yeah, exactly. It's like, your interior reality is complex and interesting, like how imagination and memory works and how you, you know, have this entire world inside your mind that doesn't really, you know, you never really get to talk about it in proper depth. People only have limited patience for listening to you go on and on about your own ideas, your own mind, your own memories. Art actually allows you to have that perfect experience of putting that down on paper without anyone growing tired and making you stop. I mean, they may stop reading. Are there prose writers who sort of emulate that model, something you're trying to achieve through comics? Well, I suppose. That's the obvious proof, examples. Yeah. See, that's the most obvious and certainly I've enjoyed his work, although, you know, ultimately I don't love him that much as a writer. It's more I'm interested, I guess, in and how he, how he's done it. The concept of what he is. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not sure that I would pull. I'm tempted to read these, my struggle books that have been getting so much press right now. Yeah. I can't remember the others. That's for me because I interviewed, uh, Ingmar Bergman's daughter from Norway last week. Uh, Carlova Kanasagard, yes, which I just assume the KN were America, but no, no, it's Kanasagard. And yeah, the, she praised the living hell out of them, but we also discussed the, the ethics of writing so directly from life. That's an interesting point. Yeah. I'm telling, I think I might read the first one and see how I, if I really enjoy it, uh, the interesting thing about that is you're to be so immersed in someone's life. Is it, is it that, is that the life you want to be immersed in? So I'll have to wait and see. Um, I, you know, when it comes to writing, I think actually the person who I most enjoy is Alice Monroe, but her work isn't the first person in a row. I've never read her. And I'm in Canada. So I'm going to have to pick her up while I'm here. Yeah. She's just remarkable. And she's a perfect example of an artist who followed her own thread. Um, and that thread continued to evolve in subtle ways. I think maybe her last book was her finest book, which is, you know, I was actually not expecting that. I think the book, before it, I'd read it and found it 50/50. But the last book, I was pretty amazed. I thought like, you know, this is her final book, at least according to her. And it was great, a great crowning achievement of a perfection, of a kind of a gem she's been polishing up her whole life. Um, so I, you know, but her work is not built on like endless digression at all. In fact, it's built on probably like boiling things down to very precise, beautiful little short stories, but so, you know, go either way. And the idea that your, well, that dominion isn't just an interior place for you. It's also something you've actually built out as a cardboard city that I think is a traveling exhibition. Yeah. At the moment, it's just getting ready to travel somewhere again. Yeah. It's the impetus for building a miniature scale of this city, your city of your imagination, I guess. Yeah. I mean, it's not really a great story. The truth of the matter is it was merely just done as a kind of an exercise where, um, not much, with not much more, um, like artistic goals and setting up a train set in the basement. Um, I just started to build the little buildings as part of, to make a long story short, I was making up the history of a city for what I thought might be a, a story I wanted to write and to figure out how that's a big topic, make up a whole, a big project, come up with the whole history of a city, imaginary place. So you have to start somewhere. You start with a few little businesses and I figure I just work them out one by one, eventually new ideas will connect together, et cetera, et cetera. And while I was working on somewhere in the early stages, I built one little building for fun, just, uh, I'm not really sure why I did it. I think I just wanted to make something three-dimensional for a change and I, and as I, once I made one or two of them, I realized I really liked the project. I liked doing it and I kept them crude deliberately because I knew I would never, much like, you know, talking about doing the comics in the sketchbook is like, if you keep the finish not too polished, it creates a better chance that you'll do more of it. Um, if I'd made the buildings really, really slick, I might have only made two of them by now, but as it stands, I must have a hundred or more. So, um, there's something about expediency that I think is good for creativity. And does the, the existing model itself help you along those lines, just in terms of understanding what you're building imagination? No. It really doesn't. If anything, it's just a fetish object. Okay. It's just fun. I think the real work happens in my notebooks about the city. That's where I've really been making, building the histories, making the connections and, and bit by bit, it has like, uh, flowered out into a more complex inner reality. I feel like I know the city fairly well now, certainly not far from, like, complete. There's a million details that have yet to emerge. But that's a lifetime project and it's like, that's kind of a project unto itself. The book that comes out of it will just be an aspect of that project, I think, and not the culmination of it. Unless, of course, you, you throw the whole nostalgia, old timey thing behind us, or pursuing the whole virtual reality kind of programming world, which I haven't really seen that. I assume you're still, um, averse to working with computers for your, your work. I am. You work with computers to the degree that a person has to deal with computers in the modern world. Into scanning and emailing things afterwards, but you're still drawing. Exactly. Everything's perfectly physical and that won't change. I can't, you know, there's to, to be honest, there's some advantages to not having gotten aboard with that. Um, certainly like a lot of cartoonists, the amount of time spent scanning your comic into the, uh, into the computer must be like an ordeal. Um, I'd much rather just pack it into a FedEx box, set it to drawn in quarterly and let them deal with all that stuff. I'm happy to stick with my old fashion methods and somehow or other it seems that I can, you know, I can continue to use like these, but are literally archaic methods to, uh, create the artwork now. Um, I'm sending people, you know, pieces of, like when I design a book, I'm sending people like a big stack of, of loose sheets of paper with, um, arrows pointing to do this, do that and text and like somebody sits there at a computer and turns that into, you know, the finished product. Again, it, it stunned me a few, I guess a year ago when I was interviewing Ben Catcher for the, the comics symposium and he mentioned that he does everything digitally now and that was just really beautiful. Yeah. Again, another guy you think of in this, this earlier aesthetic. I think the funny thing about Ben is, and I don't know him very well, but it seems to me like that, um, his, like the illusion of what his work is about is, is exactly the kind of thing that's misleading. I think that when you realize how forward looking he is, um, there's nothing old timing about what Ben does. It's just the subject matter is so, um, rooted in a sort of that shadowy world of an imagined past that you assume that he's like, would be that kind of guy who wouldn't get involved with computers. But I suspect the fact that he was a printer once must be a hint towards the fact that he's interested in technology. And he also had the, uh, the belief that no one would be interested in my original skill. I, I don't see why anybody. I just keep them on a filing cabinet, the entire room of people said, no, actually I'd, I'd love to buy one of your. Yeah, I know. Good luck. It went out of them. Yeah. Now we're recording during, uh, teacaff, the Toronto, uh, comic arts festival. I, it behooves me to ask, do you think of yourself as a Canadian cartoonist in particular? And, and what importance does that have? You have a book, the great national brotherhood of Canadian cartoonists, uh, another sketch book derived to comic, um, what does it mean to you to be a Canadian cartoonist in particular? Well, it's funny, you know, on some level I do and I don't, um, when it really comes to cartooning, I don't really think of myself in a nationalistic sense, like, I don't think that, you know, I'm a Canadian cartoonist and, um, Dan Klaus is a, an American cartoonist. I feel that because we came up at a certain time, like the, the peer group that I'm involved in, it didn't feel, um, there were any national lines about it. And it probably especially because Canada and the United States are culturally so similar. Um, I mean, I certainly felt like I was kind of part of a movement back in the 80s, where we were all kind of doing, coming from different sources, if anything you felt like you were mostly connected to the city you lived in. But there were little pockets of cartoonists, there were a couple of them in L.A. and then there was maybe one, a couple in Chicago, a couple in Toronto, somebody in Montreal. Um, it felt very much like you were separated only by distance and you were trying, you were working, not collectively, but in the same stew towards creating comics as art. Um, now it's so much more, so many more cartoonists out there, so much, um, it doesn't feel cohesive in that way anymore. But, um, when I think of myself as a cartoonist, it's more when I think of myself as an artist I suppose, which is that, um, and separate myself from, you know, the movement in quotes. Um, that's where I feel like my concerns and, um, the sort of the, um, the underpinnings of the work are Canadian, because that's where I'm from and that's who I am, I'm a Canadian. And I feel that these are, there are slight differences between the countries and, um, I'm not sure I could nail them down into a list of 10 things, but I do feel like that, that maybe like, um, when I, you know, when Chester and I are hanging around together, it feels certainly feels very different than when I'm hanging around with some of the American cartoonists. There's like, they certainly are. It's just the cultural touch downs? Yeah. Something feels different. It, um, I might even go so far to say that there's, they feel more, uh, there's, they're more forceful in some way. Um, that's always our stereotype that Canadians are polite. Yeah. I don't know if we're polite. Like, I really don't think Canadians are that polite, it's a funny thing, but they might be mousier. There's something in Canadian culture that seems to be timid, I suppose, and, um, and boring would be another good example too, like Canadians are often listed as dull, and I don't think it's an unfair comparison. Um, I mean, as a national character, I think we may have actually earned those, like, kind of timid and dull, um, traits by never really being able to define ourselves in any key way. By having, by a national identity, being a lack of a national identity is clearly, like, uh, you know, kind of a dull choice. It's, it's kind of humorous, but, um, but I do feel Canadian. I feel like shape, I feel probably, if anything, it really came down to it. I do feel somewhat of a regionalist. It's like Ontario is where I'm from. And that has informed my work. I'm certainly not informed by, like, you know, the whole country. It's such a wildly diverse spot. Um, I suppose all artists are regionalists to some degree, but I certainly feel very, um, like the Canada I grew up in is very impressed into who I am. And I do feel that is like, uh, that I am a Canadian artist in that sense. And that's why I've helped, uh, you know, set up these institutions to foster Canadian cartooning the Doug Wright Awards. That's why I've, like, you know, I've used it in my work. I've tried to make it overt to some degree. Um, I certainly have sat down and very consciously tried to craft a Canadian aesthetic into the design I'm doing. Um, I'm not sure Americans would recognize it, but, um, yeah, do you characterize it? Well, George Sprott would be a perfect example, whereas, um, there's, um, all the landscapes in the book are deliberately placed in the book. These big spreads to evoke, uh, a sense of, um, the Canadian identity with the land. That's why the story took place in the North. I mean, I, I kind of like piled on certain Canadiana that's, um, quite, um, cliched here in Canada. Um, the very design sense of the book where I used a lot of, um, sort of, I would call them heraldic symbols in the design. They're coats of arms, they're a little crowns, they're all this sort of stuff that's connected to, um, what I think of as the mother-corp kind of, uh, Canadian government design that is, like, infused all of, like, the 20th century of Canada. There's, for some reason it feels like everything in Canada was issued from the government somehow with a little, uh, you know, a little stamp and crown on the top. Um, I spent, I've been spending about the last 10 years gathering up, um, ephemera, Canadian, this quintessentially looks Canadian to me and they're trying to figure out what's Canadian about it and then boil that down into, like, a design, um, aesthetic that I try to use on things. It's, it's, it's not, it would not be instantly recognizable because I try to make it a point to never put like a maple leaf or a beaver on anything, but, but it's, there's certain elements there that I'm, I'd like to think that I'm, in my mind, I invented this idea of the, um, like the sort of the ministry of post-war Canadian dullness and that would pretty much design, like describe what kind of design I'm looking for. I think I will let you get back to it on that note. Seth, thank you so much for coming on the virtual memory ship. That was a pleasure. And that was Seth. I highly recommend that you check out his work. His standalone books like George Sprott and Wimbledon Green might make really good jumping on points and give you an idea of his style, at least his later style that we talked about in the, uh, in the course of our conversation. You might also dig his first full-length work. It's a good life if you don't weaken. You can find his work in better comic stores and bookstores, as well as through his publisher, drawn in quarterly. Now, since Seth is the, um, old timey guy we talked about, he does not have a website or, uh, or any online presence. So you're going to have to make the effort and engage in his work. I, you have to trust me. It's worth it. He's one of the finest cartoonists who's currently working and it really is fascinating to see over 20 plus years how his art has evolved and how the stories mean so much more to him now than the, the surface finish that was once so pivotal to what he was doing. Anyway, that is it for this week's virtual memory show. I am taking next week off because, well, I have a lot of work to do. Um, I'm preparing for the first board meeting for my new company and making a whole lot of business pitches in the immediate days after that and it really wouldn't be right to spend time on the podcast when something like that is come and do. But we'll be back the following Tuesday, July 1st with a conversation with St. John's College tutor, Peter Calcavitch. And we talk about the very interesting road he took to becoming a tutor. In the meantime, please hit up our websites, VMS pod.com or chimera obscura.com/vm. So you can make a donation to this ad free podcast, find past episodes and get an our email list. And if you've got ideas for guests, drop me a line at Groth G R O T H at chimera obscura.com. You can also find me at VMS pod on Twitter or our Facebook page, facebook.com/virtualmemorieshow. And please go to the iTunes store, look up the virtual memory show and leave a review and rating. More people do that. And better the chance that it'll get featured when somebody's searching for old timey guy comics. Until next time, I'm Gil Roth and I am tweaking on new vigil. Oh, and you are awesome. Keep it that way. Experience lives away. The innocence lives away. the world. [BLANK_AUDIO]