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.
