Seth's cover for Secrets from the Vinyl Cafe by Stuart McLean

Seth, as I’ve said more than once, is an artist with many sides to him. It’s hard to see him “in the round” because he’s always off doing something odd in some obscure publication or out-of-the way museum. One of the nice things about the new incarnation of Palookaville as an annual modeled after the hard-covered, stiff-papered full-color luxury magazines of old is that it’ll make it easier to showcase the differnt strands of his work: his sketchbooks, photography, commercial art, card-board sculptures, essays writing and ad hoc ruminating can call be housed in one convenient location.

I hope in the future issues of Palookaville Seth will display his book designs and write about the process of making them. There are quite a few  book designs and album designs out there that are largely unknown, I suspect, to most fans of Seth’s comics.

For example, in the last decade Seth has done several book and album covers for Stuart McLean’s Vinyl Cafe spinoffs. The Vinyl Cafe is a weekly storytelling and song show that runs on CBC Radio — for those who aren’t familiar with it, it is sort of like Garrison Keillor’s show but with a very distinctive Canadian lilt. In fact, I think it’s McLean’s Canadianness that explains his Seth’s connection to Seth. As mentioned earlier Seth has a strong attachment to a tradition of Anglo-Canadian liberal nationalism that flourished in the 1960s and 1970s.

But beyond nationalism, although not unconnected with nationalism, McLean is also part of a distinctively Canadian tradition of folksy story-telling. It’s the tradition that includes Stephen Leacock, W.O. Mitchell, Alden Nowlan, Hugh Garner, W.P Kinsella, Greg Clark, Peter Gzowski, and many others.

Seth has an intriguingly divided reaction to this tradition of folksy storytelling. On the one hand, Seth’s own work doesn’t fall into the folksy camp: he’s much closer to being a post-modern trickster than an avuncular fireside yarn spinner. But Seth is clearly fascinated by the personality and persona of these homespun cracker barrel sages. George Sprott is a good example, as to a lesser extent is Wimbledon Green. For that matter Seth’s dad John Gallant, from what we see of him in Bannocks, Beans and Black Tea, is also a storyteller, although perhaps a bit too bleak and blunt to be cosily folksy.

I’ve just written an article for the Walrus which talks about Stuart McLean and the folksy tradition, which can be read here.

An excerpt:

Oral storytelling isn’t equipped to deal with the minute or the internal. The very nature of telling a story aloud means you have to keep the plot moving; you have to paint in broad strokes; you have to appeal to your listeners’ sense of the familiar and the expected; you have to repeat certain distinguishing epithets (in Homer, Odysseus is always clever; in the world of the Vinyl Cafe, Mary Turlington is always Dave’s nemesis). If the lyrical strain in Vinyl Cafe is rooted in the oral tradition of preaching, the farcical humour and flat characterization of the tales echoes the oldest narrative tradition we have, the storyteller who wants to get a few laughs by appealing to images everyone knows: the mulish husband, the overprotective mother, the kids who won’t listen to their elders.

Much of the appeal of the Dave and Morley stories comes not from their actual contents, but from the voice of the storyteller: McLean has one of the great radio voices, always shifting tones, by turns quivering and confident, mildly sardonic and soulfully earnest. Jimmy Stewart is an obvious influence, but McLean has crafted a style of folksy elocution that carries his own tangible twang.

A full account of Seth’s work would have to take into account the tradition of folksy storytelling as well as the cartoonist’s quite complicated response to this Canadian heritage. But in the meantime, I think my essay will be of interest to those who want to explore the distinctly Canadian backdrop against which Seth works.

Labels: Canadian identity, Seth, Stuart McLean