Vintage Seth: Comics against Nostalgia

The nostalgia of old photographs is the perception that mortality is at some point to be stopped in its tracks. The figures in them seem so vulnerable, so unknowing of what we know about them, of the knowledge in store for them. We could know this about ourselves, if we could turn the force of nostalgia toward an anticipation of the fact that every moment is always stopped from every other.[1]

–Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film

In a discussion of film’s temporality, and specifically of the relationship between the image of the performer onscreen and the viewer’s awareness of time’s passage since that image’s capture, Stanley Cavell offers the above analogy explaining the nostalgic response to an old photograph via the temporal distance between observer and observed. For Cavell, nostalgia results when we know something about the future of the observed subject—in this case, everything contained within the camera frame—that that subject cannot know for itself, while simultaneously perceiving the subject as momentarily out of time, not subject to mortality if only for the instant of our perception. The individuals and objects that populate an old photograph call attention to themselves as something other than what we know or imagine they became, and are therefore testaments to time’s inevitable progress just as we see them, at the instant of perception, oddly juxtaposed with that progress by the frozen quality of the image. They are static, caught in a moment “stopped from every other,” yet we know that the moment passed long ago, irrecoverably. Cavell notes that we viewers are equally susceptible to time’s progress, being just as “vulnerable,” just as "unknowing” of what the future holds, as are the subjects of the aged image, even if we may not be capable of turning “the force of nostalgia” toward our own implication in that system.

Cavell likens this condition to the distinction between the seeming recurrences of time as presented by a clock and the march toward decay illustrated in film. “The roundness of clocks is convenient,” he explains, “but it naturally misleads us about something clocks tell, because its hands repossess their old positions every day and every night. The reels on a projector, like the bulbs of an hourglass, repeat something else: that as the past fills up, the future thins; and that the end, already there against the axle, when the times come for its running, seems to pick up speed” (Cavell, The World Viewed, 75). Film is the more truthful register of temporality, in that it acknowledges and even dramatizes the foreclosing of future possibility marked by time’s passage. The film will end, of course, but so too will the lives of its performers, its viewers, and, eventually, the world in which both exist. Viewers understand this, if not always at the conscious then at least at the phenomenological level, and so we experience nostalgia toward the image even as we may not register our own participation in that march of aging and loss.

Cavell’s formulation offers a characteristically perceptive, alternately beautiful and tragic account of a contemporary response to an older image. But what do we make of a photograph like the one above (fig. 1), depicting Canadian cartoonist Gregory Gallant, better known by his pen name, Seth? Published in 2017, as the author photo placed at the end of volume 23 of Seth’s anthology comics series Palookaville, the image appears designed to frustrate the viewer’s temporal experience of it. Its sepia tones seem to mark its provenance as much earlier, and combined with its subject’s vintage suit, glasses, and fedora, as well as the antique books, paintings, telephone, and radio that dominate the background, the photograph is easily mistaken for one taken in the early-to-mid-twentieth century rather than the early twenty-first. We could interpret it in light of the temporal nostalgia Cavell describes, but its faux agedness complicates the process, thwarting our sense of just how much the subject has aged since the photograph was taken. Is it possible to be nostalgic for this image, its appearance belying the fact that its contents still exist, barely changed, in the present? And if so, is the nostalgic viewer then responding to a broader idea of loss, ventriloquized through outdated fashions and objects? Is Seth revealing his own vulnerability, foreshadowing his own eventual absence through the conspicuous display of his collections, which, through their obvious age, suggest the absence of their previous owners? And perhaps the most fundamental question in an era of commodified “vintage” objects and retro Instagram filters: is the entire image an elaborate pose, or a more critical embodiment of a past that is still with us through the persistence of its objects?

For those familiar with Seth’s work, the image is not so confounding. Seth is well known for his fascination with the cultural objects of mid-century North America—mostly those produced just before and after the Second World War—from those everyday things designed to last that have ironically become outdated to ephemeral materials like newspaper comics and magazines that were never intended to be preserved, which his comics take as both narrative and visual inspiration. His plots, for instance, often focus on the lives of collectors and their lonely attempts to preserve a material heritage appreciated by a scant few connoisseurs, some of them deluded into believing that the personal archives they amass might stall the receding of the past, but most of them admitting what Jared Gardner describes as the comics collector’s inevitable realization that “[t]o be an ephemeralist is to accept history (including the history of the self) as ephemeral.”[2] Seth’s characters display an attraction to a vanishing past threatened by contemporary culture’s stubborn indifference to it in ways that find their corollary in the environments they inhabit; just as Seth’s panels and plots linger on well-designed yet decidedly antiquated postcards, toys, comic books, and even office equipment, they also carefully render the small towns of Southern Ontario where Seth spent his childhood, and the gradual evaporation of mom-and-pop storefronts that formerly dominated their main streets. Seth’s comics thus serve as a meditation on themes of loss and preservation by conjuring an early twentieth-century, modernist moment through its beautiful, disappearing objects and environments.

Though such an emphasis on past aesthetics has become a powerful strain in contemporary comics, no cartoonist is more closely associated with this brand of resigned antiquarianism than Seth. This is, after all, the person who once remarked that “[n]othing is really as interesting to me as the past. . . . When I go out, if I’m walking down the street and it’s a nice sunny day, I’m feeling the overlays of the other sunny days from the past that have remained in my memory.”[3] Seth’s public persona plays an outsized role in this association, as the above photograph attests. Practically every profile remarks upon the artist’s habit of wearing only vintage clothing, his vast collections of midcentury popular ephemera, and his avowed antipathy toward the aesthetics of the present: in effect, his self-presentation as an anachronism. Seth has long expressed ambivalence about this characterization, worrying in a 2013 interview over “some of the worst elements on display of that persona I built . . . the Mister Nostalgia, Mister Old-timey.”[4] Yet he also takes pains to describe his persona as a rejoinder to what he perceives as the poverty of contemporary aesthetics:

While I personally have no desire to live through the Depression or World War II, I do think that culturally the quality of many things was superior, especially design. Things were created for actual humans (with genuine care and effort). You cannot look at a popular medium-priced radio or clock from that period and compare it with the same popular medium-priced item from today and not come away convinced that things are just much shittier today.[5]

This is more than an affinity for vintage fashions and materials; rather, it is an attempt to construct an identity that is fundamentally oppositional, embracing the aesthetics of an early twentieth-century moment in an effort to live differently. And yet, the fastidiousness with which Seth has committed to this effort has cemented his reputation as someone who exists in another era altogether.

Too often, Seth’s persona is chalked up to nostalgia, though not in the Cavellian sense of that term. Critics and casual readers alike regularly label Seth’s admiration of past aesthetics as an emotional investment in a past he can never recapture that subsumes all criticism of that investment, its intensity, and its objects.[6] As Dominick Grace argues, “Seth’s nostalgia has become a truism, a largely unexamined assertion about how his work privileges the past over the present.”[7] Similarly, the stereotype of Seth as “Mister Old-timey” also echoes a common objection to contemporary evocations of the past—from the market for “heritage” clothing based on vintage patterns and cuts to the popularity of historical costume dramas like Mad Men (2007-2015) or the films of Wes Anderson—which holds that such phenomena prioritize replication and surfaces over understanding and depth. Rather than Cavell’s notion of nostalgia as an awareness of lost time, they suggest Fredric Jameson’s account of the “nostalgia film,” which characterizes works like American Graffiti (1973) as “approach[ing] the ‘past’ through stylistic connotation, conveying ‘pastness’ by the glossy qualities of the image, and ‘1930s-ness’ or ‘1950s-ness’ by the attributes of fashion.”[8] Nostalgia here describes the pleasure that emerges from the sight of fashions familiar yet long-gone; the nostalgia film nurtures a sense of comfort through representations that reference the past visually rather than immersing one in it phenomenologically. Most importantly, it is an undemanding form of consumption more akin to fantasy than historical excavation.

Yet to view Seth as this kind of nostalgist is to miss the point not just of his self-fashioning, but also of his work as a whole. Rather than giving a shallow appearance of “pastness,” Seth’s comics, like his clothing, utilize an unabashedly antiquated style that expertly connotes the early twentieth century through a deliberate form of anachronism. Adopting the visual registers of a bygone era—one that, as we will see, recalls the aesthetics of a modernist moment that readers of this journal will know well—they illustrate the fact and consequences of the gap between past and present aesthetics as well as the rich, protracted, and sometimes painful experience of the past that outdated objects can elicit.

Antiquated Appearances

Much like the author photograph that began this essay, Seth’s comics are designed to look old. They bear an overt resemblance to the work of early New Yorker cartoonists like Peter Arno in both their linework—recognizable by thick brushstrokes that sharply outline figures and backgrounds alike, creating an illusion of depth that paradoxically appears flat by depicting characters and objects crowded against one another within each panel—and their color palette, largely composed of blue or gray ink washes that underscore the muted atmosphere of Seth’s storylines. It is a style that, in Daniel Marrone’s formulation, “is meticulous but decidedly unfussy,” reminiscent of a swath of once-prominent comics, from 1920s-era single-panel New Yorker cartoons to the casual yet crisply penciled children’s humor comic books of the 1950s, known for their combination of anarchic energy and languid elegance, highbrow humor and common pratfalls (Marrone, Forging the Path, 29).

Crucially, however, Seth’s style is no simple homage, and instead represents a vital strain of critique inherent in contemporary comics that I term “the anachronistic aesthetic.” Popularized though by no means invented in the late 1990s by artists like Seth and Chris Ware, the anachronistic aesthetic represents a concentrated effort to adopt the styles of early twentieth-century cartooning in order to achieve a range of effects, from highlighting comics history’s patterns of exclusion and stereotype to promoting the aesthetic value of an earlier moment in that history that many contemporary comics readers either deride as irredeemably out of fashion or view solely in terms of economic value (that is, as a commodity to be bought and sold among collectors of popular print). Practitioners employ an anachronistic style that troubles the line between past and present, but do so not to venerate past artists or to reap commercial rewards by capitalizing upon broader cultural interests in vintage styles. This strain of contemporary cartooning thus pursues a form of expression fundamentally different from what Heike Jenss describes as the objective of the vintage object: the fostering of a contemporary appreciation of older forms “that are precisely valued for their materialization of time and ‘datedness.’”[9] Rather, the anachronistic aesthetic is profoundly critical, subversive, and suspicious of contemporary trends; its artists’ prodigious knowledge of comics history imbues their work with a range of influences while also ensuring that those artists know well the problems latent and manifest in the work of their predecessors. Many of its most celebrated practitioners no doubt love the examples upon which they base their individual drawing styles, but they are just as likely to channel that admiration into a more acerbic critique of past and present alike. In this way, the anachronistic comic draws much of its force through a distinctly modernist friction with its contemporary moment—borrowing, in a sense, Pound’s imperative to “make it new”—manifesting datedness in a way that refuses to romanticize the past in which its adopted style initially appeared. It is, in other words, a modernist form of critique of the modernist period, exemplified through the aesthetics of modernist design.

To illustrate the anachronistic aesthetic in its full complexity requires a much longer work than the present essay. But Seth’s Clyde Fans, a sprawling family saga focused on the contentious relationship between two brothers, Abe and Simon Matchcard, and the inevitable demise of their family’s electric fan business, exemplifies the artist’s anachronism in both form and content, and so demonstrates how the anachronistic aesthetic functions in practice. Serialized from 1997–2017 in Palookaville and collected in book form in 2019, Clyde Fans exemplifies the turn toward anachronism that Seth’s art took during that period; whereas the earliest chapters feature the thin, wavering lines that distinguish Seth’s breakthrough It’s a Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken (also serialized in Palookaville, from 1993-1996),[10] the second half of the book is done in broader, thicker strokes, with more quintessentially “cartoony” figuration as characters retain their key features but now resemble much more closely their counterparts in early and mid-twentieth-century humor comics (fig. 2).

Seth underscores his style’s anachronism through his detailed depictions of exterior and interior spaces, from those down-at-the-heels Ontario towns that make up the Toronto-based Clyde Fans Company’s commercial territory to the now-defunct Clyde Fans offices above which sits the Matchcard family home, where Simon lives with his mother until her death, and then remains on his own, surrounded by objects that have dominated the house for decades, until Abe takes up residence in Simon’s final years and stays on after his brother’s death. Like the style in which those depictions are rendered, the family home appears as an anachronism during the present-day action of the comic, preserved against any changes occurring beyond its walls but clearly out of step with the culture that bears down upon it. As the boastful yet beaten Abe explains early in the book, after the failure of his business, “I thought I was a man in step with my times. I didn’t realize I was looking backward.”[11] Ironically, he speaks these lines while wandering the halls of the family home, surrounded by old photographs, antique furniture, and useless fan parts, his resignation at having been forgotten echoing the objects he encounters. And while he brightens at the thought of long-gone popular entertainment, as in one sequence where, after noting that he never “warmed up to the television,” he lists the various radio shows that absorbed him as a younger man, otherwise wistful sequences like this one are delivered in the midst of decaying rooms and broken antiques. Here Seth pivots from a view of Abe’s smile as he remembers his favorite radio shows to a panel emphasizing his hunched frame as he shuffles into the defunct Clyde Fans offices, littered with scraps of paper, bottles, and cobwebs as a visual reminder that the past, while still richly present in Abe’s mind, is also materially evoked by a barely-used space cluttered with unwanted objects (fig. 3). From the outset, Seth’s comic’s anachronism is both visually and narratively confirmed.

Later in the book, Simon mocks his youthful efforts to “‘fix’ myself in a moment of time” as a way of feeling more connected to the past and present simultaneously—in effect, to see himself as a conduit between then and now in a way that is phenomenologically enriching rather than, simply, pathetic. In those moments, he “would concentrate and think, ‘I am now in this moment. This is me. In five minutes I will be passing the tea-shop and I will have traveled forward in time.” Such concentration provokes a series of thought experiments on the experience of time: “Was that earlier person me as well? Two Simons separated by a wall of time? Am I today the same entity that shared my name then?” Yet any pleasure he might derive from this sense of being in two places at once is short-lived, as he undercuts any potential reverie by admitting that he “know[s] that this is a meaningless mental game.” Defeated and embarrassed, Simon argues that he is obviously linked to his past selves “(and the future selves) in an unbreakable chain,” but that that link has a definitive endpoint, leading “inevitably to some dull oblivion” (Seth, Clyde Fans, 200–201).

Simon’s pronouncements, at once self-aggrandizing and self-effacing, center him in precisely the same system that Cavell describes as belonging to the old movie or photograph. Simon recognizes himself within the progression of time, that foreclosure of one’s own future that Cavell proposes few people can ever truly accept or even discern when they view the aged image, by juxtaposing the “dull oblivion” that awaits him with the possibility of an accumulation of “earlier selves” that mark the past as continually present. He can live in both the past and present simultaneously, but not forever. In this way, he dramatizes the condition of the objects he collects—books, family photographs, and, most prominently, novelty postcards, with whose acquisition and cataloging he fills his days—which also persist even as their age marks them as products of bygone eras, and as their broader unpopularity marks them further as culturally irrelevant. The anachronistic self thus becomes itself a kind of object, a set of living memories that affirm Henry Jenkins’s contention that “Seth may not be a nostalgia artist, but he is a memory artist,” a collector whose comics about collecting and their depictions of antiques illustrate a fascination with how memory is rendered in visual form, serving as a mediator between the memory and the physical object that propels it into the present.[12]

What these sequences from Clyde Fans have in common is their taking seriously the phenomenological effects of everyday objects and entertainments, specifically those that, through a combination of age and design, oppose the physical trappings of the contemporary and launch those who appreciate them back into the past. Even when they lack clear investment value, these objects stand in opposition to what Wendy A. Woloson refers to as crap, or those “consumer goods that are typically low priced, poorly made, composed of inferior materials, lacking in meaningful purpose, and not meant to last.”[13] By contrast, the objects that permeate the Matchcard household, and practically every other domestic space present in Seth’s comics, are overripe with meaningful purpose and beaming with sound design, persisting through the years in a way that connects their owners to their childhoods, their homes and hometowns, and themselves. If Simon comes to view his current situation as a link in an unbreakable chain of selves, it is a recognition achieved partially through the memories spurred by his collections, which bring that chain to consciousness in the first place.

This is why one of the most interesting sections of the collected Clyde Fans is the book’s front matter, much of which collects the covers and title pages of the individual Palookaville issues in which the serial first appeared. Serving no narrative function, several of these pages “reproduce” the Clyde Fans Company’s advertising efforts. Two images are particularly striking (fig. 4):

Here Seth gives us an actual ashtray featuring the Clyde Fans Company’s contact information, alongside a small company calendar dated February 1957, well before the business shuttered and presumably in its glory days, before the widespread use of air conditioning. Both objects are fake in the sense of purporting to be the products of a fictional business, yet they are obviously real, forged from a combination of old and new materials. As Barbara Postema points out, these photographs further the comic’s larger mission of “insist[ing] on the realness of its world.”[14] And like Seth’s author photo, they possess a specificity that exceeds the broader, generic category of “vintage.” In Cavellian terms, the force of these false antiques does not emerge through a perception of the objects as frozen in time, but rather through an awareness that they are simultaneously preserved in an original moment (February 1957) yet were forged and now reside in the contemporary. In other words, they are fabricated anachronisms, created to evince a time that no longer exists through an aesthetic that is so clearly different from what one finds in contemporary products.

The Trouble of Old Things

If Seth’s anachronism, and the clash between past and present it foregrounds, has too often been understood as a marker of nostalgia, or an uncritical melancholy that holds that the present is never as fulfilling as the past, one can at least understand why critics have had this reaction. Nearly all of Seth’s protagonists, many of whom bear a clear resemblance to Seth, share his interest in old comics and design, and those characters loudly express their hatred of contemporary culture. Those moments of frustration are punctuated by downbeat reflections on the vanished past, as characters come to realize the futility of their pursuits, their estrangement from a contemporary culture that mocks them as affectatious fops who cannot recognize that they perceive every mid-century ashtray, every yellowed Jazz Age periodical, as an overdetermined site of meaning in danger of passing out of existence. These individuals are modernity’s true melancholics, never satisfied but never ending their quests for the satisfaction that only old objects can bring them.

And yet, as Jonathan Flatley points out, “some melancholias are the opposite of depressing, functioning as the very mechanism through which one may be interested in the world.”[15] Indeed, what readers might perceive as an unbearable bleakness, in which Seth’s anachronistic aesthetic serves as a morose reminder of contemporary society’s indifference to the past, is better understood as a critically aware manipulation of the look of the past that aims to push audiences to recognize what power the past holds, for better or worse, over the present. By this formulation, Seth’s use of anachronism as both a visual style and a narrative trope does not reflect a conservative longing for the good old days. As Seth explained in a 2004 interview, such a conception of the past is dangerously revisionist, and fails to appreciate the past for the aesthetic attributes of its objects:

I have no illusions about the superiority of the past. People have always been miserable and life has always been difficult. . . . The modern world is very ugly and pop culture is so mind-numbingly dumb that you have to make a conscious effort to shut it out. That’s why I’m considered a “nostalgia guy.” I just like things from the past better. I don’t want to live in 1932, but I sure wish some of the elements of that time had survived into this time. (Bryan Miller, “An Interview with Seth,” 70)

In Clyde Fans, we see this attitude in Seth’s alternately loving and hostile depiction of the collections among which Simon spends his days; in one extended sequence of over five pages, each containing twenty-four symmetrical panels arranged to a grid, Simon takes a painstaking inventory of his dead mother’s room, from the perfume bottles that “exemplify the clean Art Deco stylings of the 1920s and ‘30s” to a collection of Inuit carved figurines, and arrives at the conclusion that “a lifetime could be spent tracing out the subtleties of this simple room,” as one hunts for “a secret message spelled out in boxes and bottles and broken shards” (Seth, Clyde Fans, 282, 284, 286). Simon experiences these objects as a mixture of detritus and beauty that, however incompletely, offers a way of understanding his mother and the past in which she existed. Simon is undoubtedly interested in this world even as it deepens his melancholy, trapping him in a confined space that remains more satisfying than the world outside.

Yet Seth also counts among the Matchcard collections things that signify more troubling social attitudes, and here we find the most painful evidence of a past that, for all the good design that Simon perceives in its objects, nonetheless spawned more insidious items that anachronistic artists like Seth are compelled to represent as honestly as possible without suggesting an acceptance or admiration of them. On the failed sales trip that dooms the rest of his career with the company, Simon buys a racist minstrel doll that, years later, taunts him from its shelf, and upon which Simon vents his frustrations.[16] While we can certainly ask why Simon keeps the doll around, its appearance underscores the fact that the anachronistic aesthetic does not blandly represent or even romanticize the popular culture of the past, but rather exposes its more sinister elements to critique. Simon’s doll is a reminder of why any nostalgia for the past must necessarily guard against romanticizing. It exemplifies how the anachronistic aesthetic depicts its material with a necessary ambivalence that rejects the surface nostalgia of vintage style or Jameson’s “nostalgia films” in favor of a modernist, Cavellian experience in which time simultaneously rushes and freezes, estranging us from the past while also enveloping us within it. Marrone, in his perceptive account of how Seth’s art forges through its style an impression of authenticity, argues that Seth achieves his signature aesthetic by “using style as a historicizing discourse” (Marrone, Forging the Path, 20). What the past signifies to Seth, then, and what it means for the anachronistic aesthetic that imbues his art, is a form of communication that registers the materiality of prior eras without uncritically accepting their politics. The anachronistic aesthetic allows readers to engage with the past and their own relationships to it, and Seth’s work, from Clyde Fans to his author photo, demonstrates why the look of the past is fundamental to our ability to see it for what it was and, just as importantly, for what it continues to be.

Notes