Seth

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I didn't find a thread, so here--

Kit - Can you talk more about Seth? What's the draw?

--Me

About Seth in general, or about Wimbledon Green? The draw generally is his line and the fact that all his work is about a certain kind of thoughtfulness, which if you like it is always pleasant to see being played out, regardless of what he's talking about. His work is pretty much always about nostalgia, of a kind, but actually about it rather than just being immersed in it. His one long-form work, It's A Good Life, If You Don't Weaken, is emblematic of this in that he faked it as being an autobiographical work about him trying to track the work of a particular New Yorker cartoonist that he loved. The book was, in fact, complete fiction, and he used the premise to examine the nature of this kind of obsession with artefacts of the past.

-- kit brash (kitbras...), February 9th, 2006.

― kenchen, Thursday, 9 February 2006 17:17 (nineteen years ago)

okay, I read It's a Good Life, etc., when it first came out (and part of Clyde Fans a few months ago) and wasn't terribly impressed by it. I generally like thoughtful writers (James, Sebald, Proust, etc.) but it seems like the advantage of comics is that while it is a less dense medium than text, the pictures allow it to present denser narratives. Seth just seems like the worst of both worlds: as scant narrative as literary fiction, but not that interesting visually. I appreciate the slow attention to nostalgia, but it doesn't seem as insightful or self-critical as when Dan Clowes does the same thing.

― kenchen, Thursday, 9 February 2006 17:20 (nineteen years ago)

The new book looks, on quick in-store flip-through, awesome visually, though! Plus I like what he's done to the Peanuts books.

― Casuistry (Chris P), Thursday, 9 February 2006 20:41 (nineteen years ago)

i like "it's a good life if you don't weaken" a lot! it's not up there with clowes' best but i still found the story pretty absorbing. i like his art too, there's an unforced cleanness to it that reminds me as much of crockett johnson as it does schulz. i think joe matt might be a better artist but i find his stuff pretty unreadable.

― J.D. (Justyn Dillingham), Thursday, 9 February 2006 22:34 (nineteen years ago)

Okay, actually I should clarify this--I like his art a lot (the Peanuts designs are awesome, and did anyone see the issue of Comic Art about him?), but it's not dense in the way that, say, Chris Ware is.

― kenchen, Thursday, 9 February 2006 22:36 (nineteen years ago)

fuck his art on those latter mr xs is weak - but hey, he develops. he's a bit of a pastiche guy tho', no? pinching and picking styles retaher than developing his own...(not necessarily a negative i guess)

― mullygrubbr (bulbs), Friday, 10 February 2006 06:02 (nineteen years ago)

Mr X was his first comics work ever, he was totally embarrassed by it for years (has enough distance now not to be embarrassed rather than actually liking it). I think he grew out of the pasticheing around Palookaville #2, just in time for Good Life - before that he was a) too young and b) doing so much commercial illustration that he had to be an ever-shifting magpie in most of his drawing, not leaving time to develop his own style for his personal work.

He still has an air of pastichery in what's become his own style, because he worked that New Yorker seam so deliberately - but it's a completely generic NY'r style, rather than any particular artist you can point to. His linework is closer to Peter Arno than anyone I can think of, but without the ragged dry-brush ends of lines, and the figurework isn't anything like Arno.

Some of his portraits in recent years, with the elongated faces, actually recall the wishy-washyness of his Vortex period actually, I think he does much better working in caricature.

― kit brash (kit brash), Friday, 10 February 2006 06:19 (nineteen years ago)

http://img147.imageshack.us/img147/7843/seth4pd.jpg

― cmdr riker, Friday, 10 February 2006 07:02 (nineteen years ago)

Of course, what makes Ware so great isn't at all the depth of his self-loathing, but rather the unlikely ways he comes up with recreating it.

― Casuistry (Chris P), Saturday, 11 February 2006 10:20 (nineteen years ago)

pssst!

He's not that great!

― Suedey (John Cei Douglas), Sunday, 12 February 2006 03:09 (nineteen years ago)

That comic up there though. That is GREBT

― Suedey (John Cei Douglas), Sunday, 12 February 2006 03:10 (nineteen years ago)

http://www.strippedbooks.com/comics/stripped07/comics-00.html

― Britain's Obtusest Shepherd (Alan), Monday, 13 February 2006 20:52 (nineteen years ago)

seven years pass...

http://www.randomhouse.ca/hazlitt/blog/hazlitt-offensive-seth

Where do you imagine all our lost T-shirts go?
I have not owned a t-shirt in 30 years.

― fit and working again, Tuesday, 29 October 2013 20:33 (twelve years ago)

I used to write better on ILX :(

― ͼѾͽ (sic), Wednesday, 30 October 2013 00:31 (twelve years ago)

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