Like Norwegian cartoonist (and similarly mononym’d) Jason, Seth is a great cartoonist whose more recent work has gone from being published straight to paperbacks into fancy hardcovers with a higher price point. And, also like Jason, Seth’s work has gone from being superb back then (1990s-2010s) to boring now (2020s - although this probably has nothing to do with the fancier publications, it’s just an odd pattern I noticed).
Palookaville #25 follows the same format as #24 - a charmingly-designed small hardcover split into three sections: Nothing Lasts, Part 5; a photo essay on an art installation called Living Room Suite; and a couple of renditions of a self-contained, brief biography of a fictional artist called Owen Moore.
Nothing Lasts is definitely the worst comic Seth has made. It’s a rambling, self-indulgent, thoroughly unentertaining memoir of his youth where the underlying message is that he liked the world of his youth. He describes a brief fling he had with an older married woman when he was a teenager and then goes to art school in Toronto. Cue many, many dull pages of Seth describing old Toronto buildings and a world that no longer exists that he appreciated. The new addition to his style in this part is that he now likes putting pointless footnotes on nearly every page.
The photo essay is about a bronze set of 1960s furniture - a sofa, two chairs, and a TV - that he designed and now sits in front of the Art Gallery of Guelph. It’s cool to see Seth’s art emerging into the real world but the section feels like padding for this otherwise-slight book.
Owen Moore started out as a 10 page fictional biography of an artist living in Seth’s imaginary city Dominion in notebook form, before being commissioned by the art magazine The Walrus, when it was polished up into a more professional presentation. It’s about an artist with a semi-Oedipal complex who lives a rather dull existence but whose work finds an audience towards the end of Moore’s life. Both versions - the notebook version and the one that appeared in The Walrus - are reprinted here.
Owen Moore feels like a weak addendum to his earlier book The Great Northern Brotherhood of Canadian Cartoonists - as if it was a chapter of that book that was cut because it wasn’t very good. And it’s not. Seth used to write these kinds of stories much better - see Wimbledon Green, Clyde Fans - but he can’t seem to replicate that same magic anymore. I liked the Walrus version of Owen Moore’s art though - these were published in the 2010s, back when Seth’s art still looked great (his new art in Nothing Lasts is a poor facsimile of his iconic style).
“Nothing lasts” could be a fitting description of the former high quality of Seth’s comics. Maybe recognition has changed him, maybe age, maybe something else - but the Seth I loved who made such great books as It’s a Good Life… and Wimbledon Green seems to have gone now and this new Seth is only capable of making utterly tedious comics I can barely get through. Fans won’t be expecting pulse-pounding action from his work but Palookaville #25 is still an absolute snore-fest even by Seth’s standards.
No comments:
Post a Comment