Seth's latest volume of Palookaville grapples with fading memories

The Next Chapter15:25Cartoons, memories — and an inn in southern Ontario

Ontario cartoonist Seth joins The Next Chapter to talks about his first job and attempting to tell the stories of fading memories in his latest book, Palookaville #24.

With the 24th edition of his acclaimed comic book series Palookaville, Canadian cartoonist Seth set out to tell the story of his young adulthood by challenging the limits of his own memory.

Without embellishing moments he could not remember, Palookaville 24 recaptures the feelings of youth in three varied literary forms.

Seth is a cartoonist who hails from Guelph, Ont. He has contributed to publications like The New Yorker and New York Times Magazine and twice won the Doug Wright Award for best book. Seth has a large cult following for his 1990s comic book series Palookaville and his retro drawing style. His other work includes Clyde Fans, which was longlisted for the 2020 Scotiabank Giller Prize.

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Palookaville 24 signals the return of Seth's well-loved comic book series. The book begins with a memoir of Seth's adolescence, titled Nothing Lasts. Over the course of several summers in Seth's late teens, he takes us from summer job to summer job and presents the people he meets along the way.

Seth spoke with The Next Chapter's Ali Hassan about his process of remembering, writing and illustrating Palookaville 24.

So I know that Palookaville is kind of an umbrella term that you use for your work. Can you explain it a little bit more?

Back in the 80s when alternative comics, for lack of a better title, came up, the alternative comics were literally just a group of cartoonists who suddenly had literary pretensions – trying to make novels in the comics form. Everybody was doing their own little comic book and most of the titles that people chose were either a bit surreal or a bit tongue-in-cheek or something with a slight negative spin on it.

So for me, Palookaville was simply [that] I wanted to create a kind of blanket title that suggested a place. I certainly wanted to sound old fashioned too and Palookaville is, of course, a famous old saying from the past. But I wanted it to have a slightly negative spin too, Palookaville basically just means like the city of losers. 

Palookaville basically just means like the city of losers.- Seth

Let's start by talking about that first section, which is a continuation of your autobiography called Nothing Lasts. What happens in this installment? 

It's funny, the way that I'm writing this, this whole exercise was created to be not too calculated. So I wanted to write about my own life but I didn't want to turn it into the kind of thing where I sat down and wrote incredibly complicated notes and interviewed my friends to see what really happened.

I wanted it to be very much a recounting of my life from my memory.

When I'm writing the memoir, if I remember something I've forgotten I feel completely comfortable just saying, "oh wait a minute, I forgot to mention blah blah blah," and go back a little bit or cover ground twice. However it comes out I want it to have a freeness to it and the way I decided to structure that simply was to just tell the story based on places I've been in my life.

So I start with the house I was born in and by volume 24 of Palookaville, we've got to my first real job, which is in this inn on the lake down in Southwestern Ontario. 

What I'm trying to do here is to recreate as close as I can with words and pictures, the sense of being at this place.- Seth

This was a central point in my life. It's your first experience of being out in the world as a sort of an adult and interacting with people in a world outside of just school.

It turns into a bit of a coming of age story and more of that in part two because it involves a kind of a romantic affair as well, but we just get to the edge of that at the end of the story. But mostly what I'm trying to do here is to recreate as close as I can with words and pictures, the sense of being at this place.

I pause a lot to just talk about the sensations working there or the area, what the area itself felt like or the people. I'm not so worried about the plot, I mean, obviously in your own life there isn't a plot, although we certainly make up a story, we put it into a sequence – but mostly I'm trying to just get the feeling of what this was like and this is all expressed through memory.

And memory is not very accurate.

That's what I found really compelling about that first section, this idea of memory. I wrote a memoir last year and it was like an incredible exercise going back and trying to remember. So I found the way you write almost freeing to sort of say, "Oh wait a second, I'm not sure if that did happen."

There's a tendency to fix things up; it's the natural impulse when you're telling a story to make connections even if you don't remember them. So I'm trying hard not to do that, to fill in details that I don't actually remember.

The thing about that that's so interesting too, is it throws all your memories into doubt. I think about memory a lot, but the one that really gets me is just how much credence can I give to any of it?

The boat you worked on the lake for the natural resources department, you're measuring the number of fish and you're spending hours in a boat with one person. You talk for hours, and then you can't really remember what you spoke about for all those hours. 

If you're a person who likes to talk, and I do, I'm a very social person, your life is made-up of memorable conversations except that you don't actually remember the conversations.

You just remember the experience of the great times you had with these friends or that particular person you went out for drinks with and again in the comics there was a great tendency to just make that up. Let's do three pages of me talking on the lake with my friend and I can write some dialogue, that's not a problem.

But it seemed more potent actually to just put the empty word balloons in to bring to the fore the fact that you don't remember this stuff. What you do remember is the underlying element of a conversation. In this case, what I remembered most from this friend Brian was the kindness he displayed towards me as a slightly older teenager.

That's what's remained, not the conversations themselves.

The third and final section of the book is five stories from your sketchbook, and there are stories based on the names of flowers. So explain to us how you went about creating those. 

These are stories from my sketchbook and so they were not created with a great deal of calculation, mostly what I use sketchbooks for are just to explore ideas. It's just for me and I find that this is usually where you learn to do things you wouldn't naturally do.

When you're only working on projects that you know you're going to publish or someone's hired you to do them, you tend to be more conservative – you do what you know will work. It's risky to fiddle around with ideas that are going to fail if you're on a deadline. In the sketchbook, you can always have the wonderful chance that they'll work out or they won't. And so these are exactly that sort of thing. 

Don't think about it, don't give yourself time to write a story, just immediately take whatever comes to mind.- Seth

I sometimes write lists in my sketchbook and I had had a couple of old flower catalogues around from the 60s for nurseries and I was just writing down the names of the flowers because they were really nice, evocative names like golden autumn or green ice and after I wrote them down, I just thought why not pick out five of these names and use them as a title for a story and just dive in.

Don't think about it, don't give yourself time to write a story, just immediately take whatever comes to mind. Palookaville exists, essentially, for me to publish work that isn't overly calculated. In those three sections you've got a memoir that I've been working on over a long period of time, this puppet show, which is unconventional for me, and then you've got work from my sketchbook.

Palookavilles are always kind of like that, it's just whatever rises to the surface of the body of stuff I'm working on.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.