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Eric Hoffman and Dominick Grace (Eds.) Seth. Conversations.
Jan Baetens
Seth. Conversations
Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2015, XX + 230 pp., b/w ill. ISBN: 978-1-62486-130-5 (hardback)
After two previous volumes on Dave Sim and Chester Brown (both also published with UP Mississippi), this book is the third “conversations” volume coedited by Eric Hoffman and Dominick Grace, and once again the result of their collaboration is a challenging and extremely rich work on a major figure of modern comics. Seth. Conversations will undoubtedly set the standard for many years to come and should be compulsory reading for many groups of readers: those interested by the life and work of one of the three representatives of the “Toronto School” (the two others being Chester Brown and Joe Matt), but also those looking for a clever, hands-on insights on the difficulties and opportunities of making comics in historically very different periods (Seth is born in 1961, and his career, which spans more than three decades, touches upon various media).
The book could be divided in three major blocks. First, the editors give a brief but illuminating introduction that focuses on the world of comics and Seth discovered and contributed to change it. This part contains also a useful chronology, with all necessary information on the many publication formats of Seth’s work (the author is not a great fan on the “immediately published one shot graphic novel”, but prefers to slowly elaborate his work in serialized form). Second, it offers a good selection of the most important interviews given by Seth at various moments of his career (as a beginning artist, mid-career artist, fully accomplished artist). Each of these interviews, some of them quite long and detailed, address different aspects of Seth’s work, and the editors have managed to avoid any overlap between the texts. Finally, an in-depth interview conducted by the two editors helps not only to better understand where Seth is standing now (the large final interview was made in 2013), but also to return to many statements of older interviews, on which Seth is invited to give comments and nuances.
Seth is a fascinating interviewee, who has clear and original ideas on almost all aspects of his work. Of course, many questions confront the author with the singularities of his stylistic, aesthetic, and existential choices: his choice of the clear line style, for instance, but also his nostalgic looking back at the forties and the fifties, and eventually his decision to rebuild his own identity (the new name he has taken, and which is not just a pseudonym; the customized house in which he is living; his refusal of contemporary mass culture). But although Seth brings in many new insights in these issues, while ceaselessly stressing the intertwining of life and work, these parts of the interviews are not necessarily the most surprising ones of the book. Most readers know something about Seth’s world (and as he
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repeatedly claims, the notion of world making has become more and more key to his way of telling stories, the notion of narrative and that of the making of a universe having become almost synonymous in his approach). Even for those readers who are already very familiar with Seth’s work, these conversations prove extremely helpful to gain new insights in the author’s way of drawing, telling stories, publishing books, and bridging the gap between work and life.
Particularly stimulating are the numerous remarks on “rhythm”, a crucial notion in Seth’s vision of comics. This rhythm, he claims, has to do with the production of a particular tension between the panel and the page –hence for instance the wise decision of the editors to select full page illustrations rather than “pretty panels” (of which there would have been plenty of choice). Such a visual, print-based use of rhythm, which brings comics also close to poetry (but not to cinema, for instance), should also be understood in relationship with serialized publication formats, which force the author to reflect upon issues of closure and continuation as well as on issues of length but also of deadlines. The exceptional awareness of the multilayered nature of rhythm is one of the major threads of the book, which shifts very often (but to the great benefit of the reader) from a discussion of the work by Seth himself to broader reflections on the medium and on fellow comics artists (it should be noted here that Seth is not afraid of criticizing other artists when he thinks there way of working harms the quality of their work, a good example being his harsh critiques of some “hipster” works by Daniel Clowes, an artist he admires a lot nevertheless, and Dave Sim’s obsession with deadlines, for which he can’t find real artistic excuses). Next to rhythm and serialization or the relative difference of world making and story building, Seth discusses also the sociological and artistic status of the comics medium, which has been subject to change ever since he entered the field (after a rather traumatizing art school experience). Seth has many clever things to say on the problematic relationships between commercial drawing (which he knows very well through his work as a professional illustrator and designer) and artistic drawing (which he distinguishes sharply from commissioned work), but also, more generally, on the tension between comics (as a possible art form) and commercial pop culture (the often negative influence of which he analyzes very astutely in the work by other cartoonists). In the end, Seth. Conversations can also be read as a personal history of the comics. Seth is not only a collector, he has not only an exceptional memory, he is also a sharp and inspiring critic, if not theoretician of the whole medium. It is this human and critical polyphony that makes this book such great reading.
Jan Baetens is editor in chief of Image (&) Narrative.
