Fake It ’Til You Keep Faking It

“Upon this spot, the morning after the terrible Allan-Bridge Train Disaster of 1912, this 1,000-pound stone was mysteriously discovered. According to local legend, it had not been there the day before.

“Though no remains were ever officially recovered, locals swore that this same spot was also where the lifeless body of the train’s brakeman had been seen in the fiery aftermath of the crash.

“In the decades following the tragedy, residents of The Ward have reported strange mists hovering over the rock, ghostly sightings on the rails, and mournful whispers from the surrounding trees. Also rumored is a voice that calls out, ‘Stop the train,’ each year on the anniversary of the crash. This plaque unveiled September 16, 1962.

— dedication to The Lost Brakeman

This is the marker bolted to a boulder in the front yard of a cartoonist named Seth—yes, just Seth—no last name. Many objects have stories. Why does a boulder need a story?

Entrance to the yard is barred by a towering wrought-iron archway, custom-made to read: omnis temporalis. All things are temporary. This archway leads to his turn-of-the-century house, which isn’t so much a house as it is a private island of Seth’s own making. There isn’t a stone that hasn’t been turned and given a character name and personal history.

Three illuminated signs hang on the front porch. There’s one for the Dominion Historical Society, a nod to the fictitious city of Dominion that often appears in Seth’s work. He recreated this town in miniature form in his basement, complete with more than 100 buildings. Another porch sign declares his status as a G.N.B. Double C Member—a reference to The Great Northern Brotherhood of Canadian Cartoonists, a graphic novel he created to document the fictional club. And finally, there’s a sign that announces your arrival at this house, dubbed Inkwell’s End, in Guelph, Ontario, where Seth has been playing meticulous homemaker for the past decade. I step up to the porch. PLEASE HELP YOURSELF to a souvenir free pen as a gift from Inkwell’s End, a plaque—another one—by the front door reads, offering a tray of dimes to insert into an antique Vendorama Ball Point Pen machine immediately below it. I plunk one in and a pen emerges. Compliments of Inkwell’s End is printed on its side in Seth’s trademark script. From the moment you enter his realm, he’s directing you—moving you through his story, his world, panel by panel.

I turn the mechanical twist doorbell. And there he is, springing to life from the 1940s—hair neatly cropped and slicked back, tiny circular tortoise-shell glasses framing his eyes, the white lab coat he works in protecting a stunning green suit in a classic cut.

He opens the door to a world that is all things past, present, and future, exquisitely crafted and customized. I look at my watch to see if I’m on time, and in a twist of absurdist fate, the battery is no more. It has stopped.

Guelph (pronounced “Gwelf”) is a town of roughly 132,000 inhabitants, about an hour and fifteen minutes’ drive from Toronto. The modern settlement was founded by novelist John Galt, and there’s a certain sense of remove to the place. One drives past rural stretches and forests on long highways leading to other places only to emerge into a landscape of chain motels, a mall with an H&M and Old Navy, a KFC/Taco Bell, and a Walmart. In other words: the type of place I imagine to be diametrically opposed to everything Seth stands for, given his work.

Inspired by The New Yorker cover artists of the mid-century, Seth made a name for himself with semi-autobiographical literary comics rendered in that classic style, most notably his Palookaville series, including It’s a Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken and the acclaimed Clyde

Fans. Perhaps this encroaching modern world is what he’s guarding against in his own home in Guelph’s historic neighborhood, The Ward. Many curtains are drawn, and custom stained glass windows with the words Inkwell’s End and Nothing Lasts set in beautiful hues, with an illustration of the house pull you deeper into this world as they seal off the one outside.

I sit down in the living room as Seth heads to the kitchen for coffee. He returns and politely requests the chair I have selected.

“I’m particular, as you can imagine,” he says. Even his speech recalls the cadence of yesteryear.

Seth readily acknowledges the incongruous status of his person in Guelph. There’s a bookstore in the nearby mall, where a clerk directed me to the graphic novel section that includes Clyde Fans—but they didn’t know the author lives roughly 10 minutes away.

“I do get stopped and talked to, but I think I might be better known as a kind of local eccentric—the guy in the hat, sort of thing,” he says. Sometimes people read about him in the newspaper and realize, “‘Oh, you’re an artist. I just thought you were a weirdo.’

“A famous cartoonist is kind of an oxymoron. I was just over in Spain, where I was getting the most tremendous treatment, like a real celebrity, and I didn’t have the heart to tell them that at home nobody knows who I am.”

Reading Seth’s work is like having a conversation with him. His voice resonates throughout his oeuvre, reverberating from page to person and back again—his dry humor, his charm, his unflinching, ruminative perspective on the darker realities of life and what it means to live in this world are omnipresent.

“Unlike some artists, I’ve made a very strong effort to personally connect myself to the work—it’s a persona as well. Very carefully, I’ve always been putting myself forward into the world as an image. It’s not something that happened by accident.”

Seth was born in Clinton, Ontario, across Lake Huron from Michigan, and, as a kid, he moved with his family from one small town to another. When he was still a baby, his older siblings had already grown up and left home, and his parents fought. Seth’s mother suffered from what he believes to have been postpartum depression after his birth, and was institutionalized. When she returned home, his parents’ routine of drinking and fighting gave way to a deep alienation between them. The family lived largely in isolation. And yet Seth says his parents took an intense interest in everything he did, and he was enormously interested

in them, too. “I was the ideal child in that I wanted to hear their stories over and over.”

His earliest narrative drawings (which he calls “proto-comics”) spawned from images he copied from a school reader. By fifth grade, he was drawing ripoffs of Peanuts strips. His father was a shop teacher with access to Ditto machines (early photocopiers, essentially), and he’d print Seth’s comics up so his son could distribute them at school. In a small town, Seth says, you are more or less labeled. He was The Kid Who Could Draw...