Guelph cartoonist Seth 'flabbergasted' to be included in new stamp series
'I did not expect that at any point I'd end up on a stamp,' Seth says
A new stamp series has been released by Canada Post featuring four Canadian graphic novelists.
The stamps include work by Chester Brown, Michel Rabagliati, cousins Jillian Tamaki and Mariko Tamaki and Seth.
Seth, who made his name with the award-winning Palookaville comic series, lives in Guelph, Ont., and spoke with Craig Norris, host of CBC Kitchener-Waterloo's The Morning Edition, about his career and what it's like to have been chosen to be on a stamp.
The audio of the interview is at the bottom of this article.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Craig Norris: Describe the new stamp that features your art.
Seth: Each of the stamps in this series shows the main character from your most popular or well-known book reading their own book. So they all have kind of a united look to them and look very nice in a package.
Norris: How did you feel when you found out you were going to be on a stamp?
Seth: It'd probably be a better story if I said I was angry or something, but of course I was extremely pleased.
That's actually, that's underselling it because, I guess I would be kind of flabbergasted, you know? It's the kind of thing that certainly when I started out my career, I did not expect that at any point I'd end up on a stamp, which was something that means a lot to me.
Norris: Talk a bit about the process. I mean, how does this happen? How do you find out that they want to do this?
Seth: Yeah, basically, if I recall, I think I just got a phone call.
Behind the scenes, you of course never have any idea how this works. There is some sort of a process where experts are brought in on different topics who suggest people and then at some point a subject is decided on.
So they decided on this graphic novel idea and then they brought in various people who decided who would be chosen. They winnowed it down.
And all this happens long, of course, before they ever call you. And then the phone rang. And you know, it's one of those things in life where you're just like, 'What?' And then I was like, you know, then you get off the phone later and you're like, 'Wow, that's amazing.'
Norris: Graphic novels, they are part of the reading zeitgeist now, but they weren't really when you started producing Palookaville, right? What was it about it that you wanted to tell stories in a way that may have been less tangible or maybe a bit more obscure at the time?
Seth: Well, like most cartoonists my age — I'm getting old now. I'm 62 — we grew up reading the mainstream comic books of Spiderman and Superman and all that sort of stuff.
And almost all of us wanted to grow up and draw those comics. But for a handful of us, we got to a certain age, like in our early 20s, and we kind of had lost interest to do funny animals or super heroes or any of the usual subject matter of comic books.
But I always say by that point you've been kind of tricked into being a cartoonist. You've spent your entire teen years drawing comics and learning the skills.
Certainly for myself in my early 20s, that was the new moment to figure out what did I want to do with comics then? And at that point, there's a handful of people who decided what they really wanted to do was try and tell stories for adults.
It was an exciting time because it was a very small number of artists doing this around the world and there was a kind of a fervour amongst us as if it was an art movement, I suppose. But none of us had any high ambitions in the sense that we expected to take the world by storm.
It was a long, uphill battle and certainly at different points it looked like the battle was lost.
The real surprise was that things have turned out the way they have and that graphic novels have become somewhat mainstream.
The whole medium, the whole market has changed dramatically in my lifetime and certainly I would not have predicted that.
Norris: Do you recall or do you remember a turning point when you felt like, Oh yeah, like, graphic novels, this is the thing now?
Seth: There wasn't an exact turning point, but the funny thing is, even after all these years, I'm not sure exactly I understand why it was. It was around the year 2000, because I remember right around that time, just about a year before, I've been sitting down with another, with actually one of the other stamp recipients, Chester Brown. And we'd been talking about how it looked like pretty much like the market was coming to an end.
The comic shops, many of them were closing. A lot of the publishers were going out of business. It really seemed like, OK, well, this was a mistake. We've certainly hitched our wagon to a dying medium.
But literally within a year, there was a strange turnaround where suddenly I feel like it was like a beachhead moment where something had happened that it just accumulated and a page was turned because suddenly you're seeing reviews of your work in the New York Times.
The sales have changed. Bookstores are selling the work instead of just comic shops. I would like to say that it was the result of Art Spiegelman's Maus winning the Pulitzer Prize, but that was, like, seven or eight years before that.
And right around that time there was a big documentary about the underground cartoonist Robert Crumb that got a lot of attention. But to be honest, I still think it's just sort of something that, you know, it was a cumulative moment.
Norris: What's next for you?
Seth: For me, as always, it's just continuing to work along on a body of work. You finish one book and you start another.
I'm in the middle of working on a big graphic novel right now and as always, I put out an issue, like a volume of my series Palookaville every couple of years, which is a little hardcover, which usually I'm serializing some other stories in as well.
It's the day-to-day struggle at the drawing board. That's what it's always about.
LISTEN | Guelph's Seth to be featured on new Canada Post stamp:
