It's a Good Life, If You Don't Weaken (Seth)

I’ve become interested in graphic novels lately. I’m not sure why – perhaps it’s the union of pictures and words that creates such a compelling medium -- two tools, used together to tell a story that wouldn’t be told the same way in any other format.

This novella, by Seth (Palookaville, Mister X), reinforces this new interest.

It’s written in the first person, and tells the story of Seth -- a Toronto cartoonist who becomes obsessed with a cartoonist from the 1950s named Jack Kalloway who signed his drawings ‘Kalo.’

Seth comes across a couple of drawings by Kalo in old copies of the New Yorker, and becomes intrigued by his style and his seemingly brief career.

He becomes even more interested when he finds out Kalo was from a small rural Ontario town, like him, and he begins trying to track down anything he can find on Kalo.

Seth’s interest in Kalo, he admits, may come from his attraction to the past, and the fact that almost anything that hearkens back to a bygone era appeals him.

Pages are dedicated to rambling soliloquy as Seth wanders through old industrial neighborhoods in Toronto, thinking out loud about what makes him tick.

I guess that obsession with old stuff is part of what connects me to the book. I see a lot of myself in Seth and his yearning for a time when things were simpler and better.
He’s scared of the future, which he sees as a societal evolution away from character and beauty.

“Life is about change,” his girlfriend tells him. “I mean, don’t you get excited just thinking about the future? So much will have changed by the time we’re old. It’ll be amazing. Think of the old people today and how much change they’ve seen.”

“Don’t even talk about it!” Seth retorts. “I look forward to the future with nothing but dread. Things are getting worse and worse every year. As awful as things are right now, I’d be more than happy if the world would stay relatively like this until I die. I can’t face the next fifty years.”

But then later, during a conversation with his friend Chet (Toronto cartoonist Chester Brown), that near-rage has subsided and he takes a much more thoughtful perspective on his appreciation for the past – though he arrives at the same conclusion.

“Look how pretty that old building looks against the night sky,” Seth says.

“It’s funny, there’s something in the decay of old things that provokes an evocative sadness for the vanished past. If those buildings were perfectly preserved it wouldn’t be the same.”

“It’s the difference between a dilapidated old farm house and a pristine deco hotel lobby. Somehow that lobby doesn’t convince you of the reality or the beauty of yesterday.

“I’d hate to think that my belief in the superiority of the past was really just a misplaced, over-rationalized aesthetic choice. No, forget I said that. Things are obviously getting worse every year.”

The conversations Seth has with Chet and his girlfriend give the story a human quality. Without those relationships it would verge on near-oppressive naval gazing, but it’s saved by their presence. They, along with the other characters in the book, also help us to see different sides of Seth. With his family he’s frustrated, with Chet he’s comfortable and gentle, with his girlfriend he’s a little more aggressive and possibly trying to prove himself.

Seth’s appreciation for the past is apparent in his illustrations as well as his words. Even Toronto, and Strathroy, Ont. where both he and Kalo lived, it turns out, are rendered in a simple, uncomplicated style that seems to be a throwback to the ‘30s or ‘50s.

Toronto is captured beautifully in the illustrations – but there no sign of the cold, post-modern all-glass office towers or condos that plague this city. Those are ignored, left behind while Seth records the decaying industrial buildings, mom-and-pop restaurants and forgotten local neighbourhoods. It’s almost a historic record of these locales, which sadly, seem to be disappearing from the face of this city as Starbucks and Indigo take over their spaces. Like Seth, I get sad thinking about it.

In his efforts to close in on Kalo, Seth is searching for something. Maybe it’s his own past, or the 1950s cartoonist’s skin he feels he should have occupied, misplaced as he feels in this time and place.

There’s no clear explanation of what he’s searching for or whether he finds it. Those truths are left to the reader to decide. The final, complete picture, though, is of a man’s exploration of nostalgia, discontent, and the realization of the truth behind what one old man shares with Seth.

“When you get to my age, you realize that everything mattered."