It’s the summer solstice. My friend Kathleen thinks it’s the right time to throw a house party. The weather, the mood and the fragrant aroma of spices wafting down from the Indian restaurants at the top of her street all work together to turn the event into an impromptu garden party. Perhaps it was Kathleen’s intent all along, this outdoor shindig, but there is something so spontaneous about the evening that I can’t help think it was the work of happenstance.

Gallery: Preview Seth´s latest work

While my daughter chases soap bubbles with the other two-year-olds I work my way through the cluster of friends and neighbours, and beneath the patio lanterns towards the back are the two most recognizable faces in the yard.

Chester Brown and Seth talk to each other next to a garden bed that runs along the fence separating the properties between my friend’s yard and her neighbour’s. It will be the same garden bed my daughter will eventually topple into, but I’ll hardly notice. My focus is on two of our generation’s most noted cartoonists. Seth and Chester Brown are friends and colleagues, and have occasionally depicted one another in their semi-autobiographical comic strips. Seth’s credits include his own strip Palooka-ville, which evolved into the award-winning graphic novel It’s a Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken. Alongside his celebrated work as a graphic novelist, he has also won accolades as a book designer and illustrator, with his work featured three times on the cover of The New Yorker. His latest books, The Collected Doug Wright and George Sprott 1894-1975, are due out in the spring.

I’ve cornered Seth and Chester Brown and there is no escape. My wife rescues my daughter. There is no one to rescue Seth.

Later when I call him for an interview with TORO he remembers the party. He remembers me and how I tried to get him to agree to doing a comic book on Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead.

Seth does the interview anyway.

Q: Gregory Gallant is as sophisticated and respectable enough name – why change to Seth?
A: I wouldn’t change it now, if it were up to me. It was a decision made long ago. Like most comic book people I had a relatively isolated childhood. I was a kid who spent a lot of time by himself, didn’t get along well with the other kids. I grew up in a small town and when I hit the big city it was a chance to start a new life – to rebrand myself. I think sometime in my early 20s, along with trying to put my entire childhood behind me – I mean, I didn’t sit down and say to myself, “Here’s a chance to create a whole new identity” – it was part of a process I was going through of trying to be somebody else, I think. At some point I just picked a new name.

You see, for the first and the only time in my life I felt connected to the youth culture. I was involved with the punk scene and the nightclub scene and I got heavily involved in creating a whole new persona for myself and eventually that also involved coming up with a new name. And the new name stuck around long enough that when I began my career as a cartoonist I was still in favour of that idea. Eventually, by the time I established myself as a cartoonist the name was connected to it. I wouldn’t have done it, in retrospect. My own name is fine. I don’t have any real problems with it any longer, but going back on it now is as lame as having a fake name.

Q: It would be like Prince changing his name to a symbol.
A: Or even worse, John Cougar going back in that long process to John Mellencamp, which was mortifying to have to phase it in through three different stages.

Q: How do you convince people your name is no longer Gregory but Seth?
A: You do it very aggressively is how you do it. Once you’ve decided you’re changing your name and it’s not like someone’s given you a nickname, it’s up to you. You tell everyone your name has changed and you force them to use it. And every time they use your old name, you correct them until eventually it becomes second nature.

Q: Unless, of course they’re your family.
A: Family too.

Q: Really?
A: I made my family change my name too. They don’t call me anything but Seth.

Q: So if you want to be called Seth, how is it possible it was so easy to find out your real name?
A: Initially I tried to bury the name. So I wouldn’t tell people my real name, but at some point I no longer cared about it. The whole thing seemed silly. So at some point it was a non-issue. If anybody asked me my name I would tell them. And now it always appears in my book somewhere – in the copyright or somewhere. It’s just an old affectation now. I don’t give a second thought to the fact that the name is available. I think a lot of people assume that Seth is just a professional name and in my real life I go by my old name, but it’s not true. I’ve been Seth for so long it is like a nickname that has stuck. It’s the name I’m used to.

Q: What does your wife call you?
A: She calls me Seth. She never met me in any other guise except Seth. The name Gregory would seem totally wrong from her.

Q: It’s a great name. I won’t ask where you got it because that’s your little secret. But I wish I thought of it myself.
A: [Laughs.]

Q: Now, how do you respond to this statement: “There are no such thing as graphic novels, only comic books”?
A: I would agree with the statement. “Graphic novel” is a red herring name – something that was come up with to provide a more respectable term for comic books.

I think comics are a lot like movies in that they are both 20th-century art forms, primarily. And that they started out as popular forms and that they had funny names: movies, comics. But movies always had the word “film” too, which was the more sophisticated term you could use. But comics really had nothing else, which is one of its problems. “Comic” or “funnies,” these kind of terms, much like “movies,” were popular names that came up to basically describe the overall effect of them: movies move, comics are comic.

But the problem with “comic” is that it’s not a very effective term. It really doesn’t describe much of what goes on. And once you get away from humour it is pretty much a misnomer. But “graphic novels” is not a better answer. At this point, much like my own fake name, you should just say, “Well, who cares?” They should just be “comics” and people should just be used to it. But the term “graphic novel” has stuck. I didn’t think it would have any legs but it seems to have caught on and now it’s an effective marketing tool, so I’ve gotten used to it.

Q: The term “literary comic book” gets tossed around too.
A: Yeah. That’s a bad term too. They’re all Frankenstein constructions. “Literary comic book” is also very limited in that it implies there’s a literary purpose to it. A lot of the comics for adults aren’t very literary in nature. Some of them are purely surreal or almost non-narrative. There are a lot of young cartoonists around that I certainly would not call their work literary. But it is clearly art – it’s not just popular work or genre work.

“Art comics” has started to come up in the last few years as a term. Which is also an awkward term but it does cover a lot of ground in that it implies these comics were produced to be art forms rather than commercial forms. I just usually stick to the term “comic book” or “cartooning.” I almost call all my books “picture novellas,” but that started out as a joke. I stuck with it because it’s got a nice antiquated sound to it.

Q: If titles alone could sell, everything would be called It’s a Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken. What inspired such a perfect linking of words?
A: [Laughs.] It’s an old saying, though it’s not the exact old saying. The actual saying is “It’s a great life, if you don’t weaken.” But my mother use to say it to me all the time and she naturally lessened it. I grew up with the lesser version which is, “It’s a good life,” which just seemed the natural title to me at some point when I was working on that book.

Q: Do you believe it’s a good life if you don’t weaken?
A: I do. I believe it very firmly. If there’s one thing my mother taught me it’s a certain stoicism. I do believe that it’s a beautiful world but you must have an inner resolve to appreciate life. It’s a combination of both recognizing the beauty and also having the ability, at the same time, to remain firm enough in the world to be able to enjoy it.

Q: I have no problem believing that an ex-punker could become a successful cartoonist, but I find it fascinating that an ex-punker and cartoonist has such a positive outlook.
A: Yeah, well, I think I’m basically a positive person. Even when I was a punk I was an enthusiastic punk. I wasn’t a “no future” punk.

Q: Nicest guy I ever met was a punk. Couldn’t get him to smoke a joint or take a drink.
A: [Laughs.] That’s funny.

Q: I always thought so too. So this seemingly endless meeting of movies and comics – is it natural that the two should collide?
A: Only commercially. I don’t think the forms have much to do with each other. People associate them with each other a lot because they’re a combination of word and image, so it seems natural that you would connect them somehow. But I don’t really think comics and film operate in the same manner at all. In fact I think they would almost be completely disconnected if it weren’t for what happened in the 1940s.

Let me digress for a moment:

The earliest phase of commercial cartooning would be the newspaper strip. And the early newspaper strip was not in any way connected to what was going on in film. It was probably more connected, if anything, to what was going on in vaudeville. It focused on the simple idea of telling jokes – a lot of times using stereotypes, a lot of ethnic humour aimed at a new immigrant class. If you look at those early comics almost all of them take place as if they are on a stage with the panel boarder being the proscenium arch, and the characters are almost always the same size. You never change the frame, you don’t have any close-ups or any establishing shots – all these film terms.

It’s in the ’40s that people like Milton Caniff comes along. Also a lot of the early comic book artists – these were the first generation to grow up with film – and they start to employ film techniques in cartooning. That’s when you start seeing things like close-ups, establishing shots, crane shots – all the language of film. And this stuff is very connected to cartooning. People are still use all those terms. Cartoonists will say, “We’ll cut to a close-up,” which is clearly directly related to film. But the truth is the mediums don’t operate in the same manner. Film is about capturing some quality of motion in the world and comics are a still medium entirely.

In the way that film is connected to photography, comics is not. Comics are a drawn language. If anything, they’re very abstracted. Cartooning is trying to get away from a realistic portrayal of life. I mean this in the visual sense. If you really think about it, even what you might call realistic styles of cartooning are actually very abstracted. They’re all symbols.

Even guys that drew superhero comic books and tried to make them look like real people – well, we only think of it as realism. It’s actually not very realistic at all. Look at how they’ve chosen to portray a nose, an eye or anything of the details in human life. They are just picture symbols. Noses and eyes don´t really look like that. We just accept them as realistic because some cartoon styles are less abstracted then others.

Superman appears to be more “real” in his depiction than Andy Capp. But really they are both equally composed of symbols we have learned to recognize as noses and feet. They’re symbols much like the way a written language is composed of symbols – symbols which you put together to create words and sentences. A picture language is composed of symbols that you put together to create an imagined reality.

And it’s a very still form. If anything, what comics are most related to is a combination of graphic design and poetry. Because poetry is about compression of time and it’s about rhythm, and comics are very connected to those two ideas. Almost everything in comics is about how you choose to deal with time and exactly how much you control a visual rhythm on the page. And graphic design, because obviously you’re trying to move around images that are shapes. You’re tying to move eyes around, trying to teach people how to move along the page, how to speed things up, slow things down. It’s all very much a graphic language as opposed to film, which all takes place on one flat picture plane in which the story unfolds over actual time – it is clearly a real visual language based entirely on motion. They have areas where they cross over, of course. I think the big reason people connect film to comics is because of the storyboards people often use to make film.

Q: The drawn symbols used to illustrate your book It’s a Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken might well serve filmmakers intent on translating that story to the screen.
A: I think it is the content alone is what’s being used when a comic is translated to film. What you wouldn’t really be translating into film would be the actually cartooning language. I think, for example, that Ghost World was a good film, but it has nothing really to do with the comic. It has to do with the content of the comic. You don’t even need to know that that ever was a comic. Because the language that’s employed in making the comic is a different language – much like a prose book to a film – it’s all about taking the story as oppose to how the story is told.

You don’t usually see a film that tries to translate the actual narrative structures of a novel, like how the dialogue is structured or an interior monologue or that sort of thing into the film. What they do is they take the content, the story of Catcher in the Rye, say, and then they figure out a screenplay for it on how you can portray it onscreen. And you can easily do that with It’s a Good Life – it’s just a story. The actual mechanics of how you tell a story in comics only relate to film in the sense of whether you want to use the same filmic terms, again, like long shots and close-ups.

But the real mechanics of how comics work is all just symbol-based, and that’s really just the technical stuff that doesn’t matter to anyone except the artist. The reader isn’t supposed to be paying attention to that. Let me put it this way: When I draw a person walking down a street, I’m drawing a series of symbols that you recognize as these images of a person and a street. But it’s really more about how I’m choosing to place all these images on the page that matters. It´s all done for the compositional effect. These decisions affect how the reader reads the story and what emotional or intellectual effect it has no them.

This is what cartooning is all about; it’s about storytelling and it’s about stylization. The actual content is from a different part of the brain – that’s the story I’m trying to tell and that I then take and I cartoon it. It’s like how you stage the play. That’s where theatre comes in. The story itself is something else. You can certainly take a play and turn it into a movie, but it’s not the same thing as the play. And that’s how I feel about cartooning.

Q: So, is animation closer to comics?
A: No. Animation is closer to film. Animation is all about motion. If you watch animation, even the most artiest animation, it’s almost always about two things: transformation or motion. Animators love to transform one image into another. It’s probably the most common effect you see in animation. If anything, it’s just a way to do drawn film. I find that a lot of people think animation and comics have a lot in common, but when you really sit down together you find cartoonists and animators have very little to talk about.

Q: And you’ve run into a few?
A: Definitely. The fields cross quite a lot.

Q: Does one form trump the other in terms of artistic merit?
A: I wouldn’t say so. I think all popular art forms are in some sort of competition for legitimacy. At different points different ones have a leg-up on the others. Film has a high leg-up on all the other art forms because film turned into the art form of the 20th century, surpassing everything else.

Comics were kept in their infancy for so long that for the longest time they would have definitely been secondary to animation. Even in animation you always had a serious wing around the world that was trying to produce work that wasn’t just meant for laughs. And up until the late ’60s comics had none of that. So comics have been a very late bloomer. But I would say that now, today, I believe that comics is the more exciting field than animation. Animation seems to have pretty much lost the battle. Except for the odd interesting work, they seem to be have taken over as a second-string movie industry – mostly producing children´s crap. The real gems of animation come out of the National Film Board and Eastern Europe. Places far from the commercial marketplace.

Q: Eastern European animation is scary.
A: [Laughs.] They are.

Q: We all remember when Itchy & Scratchy were cancelled on The Simpsons and replaced with an European cartoon....
A: [Laughs.] Yeah. Actually, The Simpsons may be the greatest achievement of commercial animation. It was pretty successful and a pretty smart show.

Q: Are you anticipating the upcoming release of Watchmen?
A: It’s of no interest to me in the sense that the book is of no interest to me either. It’s no different than if they were filming some other book that I read and didn’t care for. The fact that it’s a comic doesn’t connect it to me the way people expect it should.

When [The Dark Knight] came out the guy at the Xerox store I frequent kept asking, “Are you going to see it?” And just to be polite I’d say, “Oh yeah, eventually I’ll get around to seeing it,” though I had no intention of doing so. And then for the next three months every time I came in, “Have you seen it yet?” And I had to keep making an excuse. The truth is I’m just not interested in those kinds of films. It doesn’t really matter to me that they’re from the world of comics.

Q: Do you prefer your comics and film to be rooted more in reality than the fantastical?
A: No, not at all, although I do tend to think that the works I find most moving are works that are about real human life. But that doesn’t rule out the fantasy world. There are lots of films that fit in between those two worlds. The primary thing is it has to have some sense to me that the artist is describing something meaningful and real from their life. And that could come through in something like Alice in Wonderland, for example, where it’s an entirely absurd world. Generally, I find that is not the case with a lot of fantastical work.

This is not always true, but when people do something with a genre film, say, a horror film, and it turns out to be a really great piece of art, they tend to say it transcended the genre. And I think the reason why they say this is because we tend to think of genre works as being a set formula that people work within – sometimes they do a great job of working within the formula, but the formula is what is predominant. That’s why fans of genre work return to the same genre, because they want the stuff that makes up the genre.

Q: What does your friend Chester Brown has to say about his experience trying to get Yummy Fur: Ed the Happy Clown off the ground?
A: Well, I’m not even sure what’s current anymore. It seems as if that film’s been optioned as long as I’ve been alive. Is there any movement on that project?

Q: The little I know is that it’s still above board.
A: Yeah, well, I expect to be hearing just that as I’m going into the old folk’s home [laughs]. I think it could be a really good movie because it’s got a lot of great visual stuff in it and it’s very funny and it’s very black. But I hesitate to imagine it in a modern context with a lot of CGI and stuff. I could see that being pretty awful. I would personally prefer if it was very low-tech.

Q: So you wouldn’t want it to go the way of Pekar’s American Splendor.
A: I actually didn’t see American Splendor. When the time came I just couldn’t work up the energy to see the film.

Q: Are you a movie fan?
A: I love movies, but I must say I’m very arbitrary in what I choose to see. By all rights I should have gone to see American Splendor. People said it was OK. I just didn’t really care. I wasn’t that enthusiastic about Harvey’s work at that moment in time. It just didn’t excite me to see it and I felt as if I’d be going to see it because it was based on a comic, like required viewing.

This is the thing about what we were talking about with Watchmen – there’s almost this sense that if you’re a cartoonist you’re required to see all these films that are somehow connected to cartooning, but it’s not in my contract.

Q: You might remember that I once cornered you at a party and tried to convince you to take King Vidor’s movie version of The Fountainhead and make it into a comic. The German expressionism seems tailor-made for illustrating.
A: A movie to comic book? You mean like a comic version of a film? Well, I’m not a big one when it comes to the idea of translating one medium to the other. I tend to think it’s not really necessary. It’s not a fact. I’ve seen tons of great films based on other pieces of work, and sometimes, as you know, a good film is better than the book. But personally I have little interest in translating one form into another. But it’s not a rule. I wouldn’t say it’s never the case.

I certainly wouldn’t be interested in translating The Fountainhead, though, because I have such deep hatred for Ayn Rand and objectivism. As much as I like the idea of Howard Roark as the incorruptible architect, I can’t stomach any of the objectivist ideas behind it.

Q: It’s a book that falters with age.
A: I liked it when I was 19. I was very susceptible to the ideas at the age of 19, but time has not been kind to the ideas of objectivism.

Q: I was happy to find out that you have a real appreciation for Charles M. Schulz.
A: Schulz, more than any cartoonist of his generation or the generation that followed, succeeded in infusing that commercial medium with his own inner life. That was a great achievement at that point. It’s still a great achievement.

I think Peanuts is an unsurpassed work that really spoke to me, and showed me that what any art is about is about the inner world – the personal life of the artist. It’s not about trying to come up with a good concept or trying to create something flashy to get attention. It’s about trying to create something meaningful.

Q: Was he subversive?
A: In many ways he changed the whole world of cartooning. His earliest work would have been seen as very adult, very black, very sophisticated humour that was cutting edge in the ’50s and ’60s. Too much marketing changed that. In the first 20 years I don’t think anyone would have thought to give it to kids. Schulz is almost universally celebrated across all the different areas of the cartooning world from the people I consider my peers working in modern, adult cartooning to people working in Spider-Man comics.

Seth´s latest works, The Collected Doug Wright and George Sprott 1894-1975, will be released by Drawn and Quarterly in May.

Thom Ernst is a Toronto-based film writer and critic and the producer/interviewer of TVO´s long-running movie program, Saturday Night at the Movies.

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