Confronting Memory: Palookaville 21-22

Seth's long-running Palookaville series has been revitalized by its move to a hardcover collection of the latest segment of the long-running "Clyde Fans" serial as well as intriguing new material. Going away from the pamphlet may have started as a matter of economic necessity (especially since each issue was merely the next installment of "Clyde Fans" and thus not exactly capable of drawing in new readers), but it's become an outlet for Seth's beautiful design sense and eclectic creative abilities.

Palookaville 21's handsome, embossed cover contains three major creative endeavors by Seth. I'll comment on Clyde Fans last in this piece, but I was quite taken by Seth's "Rubber Stamp Diary". In a conversation with Ivan Brunetti where they commiserated on just how much labor it took to do a daily comics diary, Seth hit upon the idea of making up a set of rubber stamps that contained a number of typical poses. That provided a shortcut for all sorts of comics, freeing Seth up to concentrate on the actual thoughts he wanted to get down. Seth has the reputation of fetishizing the past, of treating his "old-time" appearance and interests as a sort of affectation. Reading his more personal comics reveals that this isn't the truth at all. Rather, Seth is interested in exploring the reaches of memory and the power of aesthetic experiences as apprehended by our senses and how they are retained (if at all). Walking on train tracks, seeing birds flit about, feeling spring air and experiencing the majesty of a thunderstorm are all powerful experiences for him. Some of them are powerful because they provide a sort of continuity of aesthetic memory, a sense of there being one continuous moment. Some of them are powerful simply because they allow him to be in a single discrete moment almost outside of time. The rhythm of the rubber stamp drawings add to that sense of continuity, of seeking out these experiences when he chooses to enter the outside world.

In Palookaville 22, we get a look at the barber shop that he helped design with his wife. It is at once slightly worn-looking and achingly beautiful. With flourishes like her membership in "The Royal Order Of The Golden Comb", its giant mascot being "The Secret King of Guelph", and tastefully spare adornments throughout the shop, it's less a shop that Seth experienced and more a shop that he imagined once existed. In fact, he drew a strip about its (fake) secret history, much like The Great Northern Brotherhood of Canadian Cartoonists. It's nostalgia for a time and place that never existed.

Palookaville 21 introduces the first installment of "Nothing Lasts", an autobiographical account of Seth's childhood told by way of chronicling all of the places that he lived. This certainly puts the lie to the notion of Seth as a nostalgia fiend, because the tenor of these strips is highly melancholy. Like in his "Rubber Stamp Diary", Seth does maintain a certain affection for certain places and things, but it's more for the memories associated with them in time than the actual objects or places. #21 details his childhood, a lonely one that saw him recognize that his place on the social pecking order was rather low, which led him to choose solitude. At home, his distant and frequently angry father was a source of fear; only his mother was a constant companion. That was true for his mother as well, which made Seth wonder what her own mental state was like during that time.

The second part details his teenage years, spent drawing and reading comics and avoiding other teenagers as much as possible. There's a fascinating story about him gaining a comics pen-pal, a person who essentially saved his teen years from total isolation and loneliness--until they grew apart. His friend grew up, but Seth did not, leading to anger on Seth's part in particular.Seth brings up the excitement and shame he felt about women and girls, rather than the possibility of any kind of real relationship. The strips are drawn Wimbledon Green-style: simple, small panels and stripped-down. Seth's own self-caricature (especially as a mop-topped teen) is especially effective and amusing. In may ways, this strip is less a memoir than a tribute to his mother; his love for her and how much he still misses her is palpable on nearly every page. It's also an exercise in what he remembers about each place he lived and why, which occasionally leads to him being mystified as to why certain memories are so clear and others are washed away.

Seth has been working on "Clyde Fans" since 1997. He designed it as a deliberately slow-moving narrative, one where every image was significant in getting across its themes. The journey of reading the narrative unveils its themes in a way that transcends its actual plot. The plot is simple: an elderly man named Abe Matchcard ponders the failed fan business he took over from his father. Along the way, he recalls his strained relationship with his younger brother, the sensitive and painfully introverted Simon. The first three parts of the story saw Abe bullying his younger brother, with a traumatic sales call in 1957 essentially leading Simon to retreat from public life altogether. Part four sees Abe begin to confront his past when he closes down a factory, essentially kicking off the beginning of the end of his career in business.

This is a work of fiction that has some autobiographical elements. Seth's father didn't sell fans, nor did he leave home in the manner in which Abe & Simon's dad did. However, the obsessiveness over the past (especially images of the past, as Simon does with his old postcard collection), the clinging to their mother who died a long and sad death and the feeling of being out of step with the times and other people certainly resonate with the explicitly autobiographical stories in the book. Indeed, the latter aid in fleshing out the themes of the former, especially with regard to "Nothing Lasts".

In many respects, the relationship between Simon and Abe is a way of Seth exploring different aspects of his personality. He describes himself as being gregarious but socially inept as a child, keenly aware of his place on the social totem pole and willing to inflict abuse on those unlucky enough to be lower on the pole than he. This describes Abe quite well, especially with regard to how little actual empathy he was able to summon up for either his customers as a salesman or his workers as a factory manager. Simon is a reflection of Seth's retreat from humanity and his tendency to be a hermit even now. Both are obsessed with the past, with Simon poring over his postcards and Abe mechanically recalling an old sales quiz as they think about their failures. Simon thinks about the disastrous sales call that caused him to withdraw and what he perceived as the monstrous treatment he received at the hands of his brother. All Abe thought about was his father leaving for good, his desire to do well enough to somehow bring him back, and the many failed relationships he had in the interim. His father leaving killed something inside of him. The brothers confront each other about this in a series of absolutely masterful pages in #22, with random postcard images being inserted as part of the narrative at key junctures. Every page is a triumph of design, reflecting melancholy and the desire for that past that never truly existed. "Clyde Fans" is a story about radical honesty blasting through the haze of nostalgia, no matter how painful that honest examination might be. Whether or not coming to terms with their past helps either brother is yet to be revealed.

Sequart Reprints: Comic Art #8, #9

The forces that have made possible a new golden age in comics publishing have also led to similar riches in publications about comics. The Comics Journal is still the model for such publications, but it's been forced to adapt to a new generation of comics-related magazines. Windy Corner is my favorite of these publications for its eccentricity and focus on artists writing about artists. Comics Comics stands out for its tabloid format and distinct editorial point of view far outside of any orthodoxy. In many respects, the most ambitious magazine of this kind has been Comic Art, edited by Todd Hignite. In its older, periodical form, Comic Art distinguished itself with its production values, the depth of its analysis, and the worldwide search for interesting and sometimes forgotten cartoonists to profile.

With the last two issues, Comic Art became even more ambitious. It switched to an annual, bound format; issues #8 and #9 are around 200 pages each. Additionally, each issue has a bonus publication by a prominent cartoonist attached to it. The result is a sumptuous feast for the eyes for comics fans and for comics historians in particular. Those who aren't students of the genre may find some of the articles a slog to read, but the illustrations themselves (as arranged by designer and cartoonist Jonathan Bennett) are top-notch. What follows are some observations about the two issues.

* Perhaps unintentionally, these two issues feel like a RAW reunion, with extensive profiles on Richard McGuire, Jerry Moriarty, Kaz and Drew Friedman. The interview with McGuire was probably the single most stunning article in these two issues, due in no small part to McGuire's peerless and instantly affecting sense of graphic design. The interview with McGuire leads off with a reprint of his classic strip "Here", a work that was a direct influence on Chris Ware's diagramatic comics. The Moriarty piece led off issue #9, and the artist essentially narrated his own progress as an artist, commenting on his own work. It felt like it could have been a chapter in a sequel to In The Studio, Hignite's coffee table book that had artists talking about their own work.

* The best-written pieces in the issues were by Ben Schwartz, who wrote about Kaz and Friedman. Apart from being remarkably thorough histories of those two artists (both of whom were students at the School of Visual Arts at the same time), Schwartz crucially contextualizes the work of both men. While the interests and styles of the artists couldn't be any more different, both created comics that were intrinsically connected to a time and a place: New York City in the late 70s and early 80s. Schwartz is careful to analyze the actual content of the images, how it was influenced by the artist's surroundings, and how those images commented on larger cultural issues. Friedman used an hyperrealistic style to both expose and celebrate ugliness, while Kaz went the abstract route. Schwartz then took great pains to interview a number of figures crucial to their stories, adding further context.

* There are plenty of comics in these issues as well. There are new pieces by Dan Zettwoch, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Tim Hensley (who drew the demented cover for #9) and a comics essay by Zak Sally. That latter piece, "The Man Who Killed Wally Wood", is another triumph. It absorbs the tropes of the detective genre into an autobiographical account of meeting a man who published the great former EC artist late in his career--but wouldn't let Wood collect those strips. It's a story of inspiration and desperation, one familiar to many cartoonists, and Sally's straight-ahead, clipped prose and washed-out pencils are an ideal match.

* There's a lot of attention paid in these volumes to classic strip and magazine cartooning. Tom DeHaven's essay on Chester Gould was gripping because it presented and defended a strong & personal point of view on the best eras of Dick Tracy. He articulated precisely why he preferred those eras and backed it up with page after page of illustrations and examples. The production values of Comic Art make this sort of essay possible.

* Most of the other articles on classic cartoonists are written from a more academic perspective, like Theirry Smolderen's exhaustively researched history of the word balloon and essay on Lyonel Feininger. The former article is really for the most hardcore of academics on the subject, but the latter is a revealing profile on the fine artist who began his career as an illustrator and cartoonist. In both articles, Smolderen's research unearthed all sorts of rare images and correspondence.

* There really is a sort of murderer's row of great writers about comics in these pages. The great Donald Phelps (author of Reading The Funnies and one of the first serious comics critics) contributes essays on Edd Cartier and George Clark. Phelps in particular makes a convincing case for the importance of the latter artist, analyzing both the era and the creator and contextualizing the kind of family satire he was pushing through in his strips. He was less convincing in his painstaking profile on pulp artist Cartier, whose work had more to do with illustration than comics.

* Another member of that "murderer's row" is Jeet Heer. Yet another essay seeking to provide context for the inspirations of cartoonists was his article on Navajo Country and its influence on George Herriman, Frank King and other artists who made the trek out to the American southwest in the 1920s. This was before trains made it easier to see things like the Grand Canyon and Monument Park. Heer also wrote an article about the famed New Yorker cartoonist Gluyas Williams and his friendship with writer E.B. White. Williams' work was subtle and refined to an extreme degree, revealing a lot about the personality of the cartoonist as a result.

* There's really something for any kind of fan of comics in these issues. Douglas Wolk broke down why he found Jim Starlin's Adam Warlock to be so strangely alluring. There's a long feature on German avant-garde cartoonist Anke Feuchtenberger that's another triumph. Ken Parille wrote a feature on Abner Dean that delved deep into analyses of particular drawings (including their psychological impact). There are features on the prank art familiar to any long-time comic book reader, the long-buried teenage comics of S. Clay Wilson, the Mystery Men strips of Richard Taylor, German publication Simplicissimus, French humor magazine La Rire and more. I especially enjoyed Adrian Tomine interviewing Gilbert Hernandez about why he liked former Tarzan artist Jesse Marsh's work so much.

* Lastly, the small booklets by Seth ("Forty Cartoon Books of Interest") and Ivan Brunetti ("Cartooning") are both fantastic. I've reviewed the latter book elsewhere, but Seth's book is a testament to a lifetime of collecting. He begins the book with a strip on his obsession and how he misses the "thrill of the hunt" in dusty old bookstores (obviated by the internet). The book itself shows us an illustration from a cartoon book and his thoughts on it. None of them are all that obscure, yet he also avoided making obvious selections as well.

Seth's essay reminded me why I enjoy reading cartoonists talking about other cartoonists, and it's perhaps the one thing I'd like to see more of in Comic Art. The main critique that's been made in other corners about Comic Art is that it eschews negative critiques. I don't really see that as a pertinent critique, because that's simply not the magazine's mission. All I ask for from a comics essay is an author who is willing to truly engage the material he's analyzing and do the hard work of unpacking it. When you combine this willingness from its writers with its production values, it's no wonder why the release of a new issue is always so eagerly anticipated

Digging Deeper: Melvin Monster and Moomin

Rob reviews two intriguing reprint projects from Drawn & Quarterly: MELVIN MONSTER VOL I and MOOMIN VOL IV.



In this, the Golden Age of Reprints, we've started to get all sorts of heretofore unlikely and obscure comics getting loving reissues. While Fantagraphics' reprinting of PEANUTS kicked things off and there have been other long-running and beloved series getting rereleases, this is also a time when publishers are taking chances and printing some less obvious choices. Drawn & Quarterly in particular has been issuing forgotten series or comics unfamiliar to American audiences for quite some time. Indeed, the Drawn & Quarterly anthology in years past reintroduced such classics as Gasoline Alley as well as the work of Doug Wright.

D&Q has really gone to another level by taking a risk and reprinting Tove Jansson's classic MOOMIN series, with great success, as well as starting the John Stanley Library. Seth's design for Stanley's shorter and lesser-known comics is not unlike a prestige children's line of forty years ago, complete with an embossed cover, a "John Stanley Library" seal on the back, playful endpapers, etc. Rather than reprinting the series on glossy paper (the bane of many reprint series, especially when originals can't be found), it's on paper that uncannily mimics the original pages. As a designer, Seth sets the emotional tone for his projects with the endpapers and repurposed images from the original art. For PEANUTS, he's reclaimed the strip's contemplative and melancholy aspects, using dark tones in the endpapers and stripping the characters away from familiar background shots. PEANUTS, partly through it being so thoroughly marketed over the years, had become shorthand for sentimentality as opposed to more complex emotions, and it felt as though Seth needed to correct for this.



In MELVIN MONSTER, on the other hand, Seth seems to be attempting to create an alternate reality where John Stanley's books have always been children's classics, read by millions in perpetuity. It's as though we've reached through a time machine to pluck out a newly-published volume from 1965. The first endpapers we see reinforce the "JSL" brand with lots of funny drawings of the title character; it's both slightly stuffy (indicating to parents the brand name) and endearing (letting children know the emotional tone of the book). The next few pages tell the reader that while this comic is funny, it also involves monsters and vaguely disturbing images--the way Seth has black-ink drawings on charcoal-gray backgrounds, with only the eyes colored bright white, creates an atmosphere that is somehow both goofy and slightly scary.



Getting to the stories themselves, the hook of the series is a young monster boy who is a constant disappointment to his parents because he wants to be good, go to school, not be destructive, etc. Stanley gets a lot of mileage out of this very simple shtick, as the indomitable Melvin has to find ways to outwit his parents and everyone around him. The situational gags are better than some of the cheaper visual gags. It's funny that his mother is "Mummy" and is dressed up in bandages and his father is "Baddy" and is a hulking Frankenstein-like monster; it's funnier to see him innocently outwit the parade of creatures (and people) trying to kill him. It's even funnier when he winds up in "human bean land" where "everybody is nice and kind", only to be tossed down into a manhole, chased by a car and whacked by a woman carrying a purse. The punchline layered on top of that betrayal is that Melvin interpreted these actions as people trying to make him feel at home!

The best sequence of the book is where his parents send him to the cellar as punishment--a place where even they don't go. Stanley throws all sorts of sight gags in, like being told to watch out for a steep third step, only to find that there are no steps at all after the third one. Melvin wavers between being a scared little boy (calling for his guardian demon, whose help is dubious) and an invincible innocent, stumbling into adventure after adventure and inadvertently escaping harm. When his father winds up in the cellar later on, it's sweet (but unstated) revenge. The stories in this volume (reprinting the first three issues of the original comic book) vary from longer adventure stories to shorter bits that establish life in Melvin's house, like the furry arm in his wall that acts as his alarm clock but also plays checkers with Melvin during the night.

Stanley the writer is clever, but what sells the work is Stanley the artist. His line is simple and his figures are delightfully cartoony. His characters are remarkably expressive despite the simplicity of their design; like Schulz, Stanley, with just a squiggle or two, could completely change the mood of a page. In the Monsterville sequences, Stanley throws in eye pop after eye pop (Will Elder-style), punning on monster cliches with either funny drawings or funny labels. What I like best about his art is the way he propels Melvin from scene to scene, creating constant but seamless action. I'm really looking forward to future releases in the Stanley library, especially his teenager comics. There's a breeziness to his character design that I find irresistible, and such comics are really in his wheelhouse as a cartoonist. It's a tribute to his skill and ingenuity that he was able to pull off a slightly more visceral and wacky style in MELVIN MONSTER.



This was the first volume of the collected MOOMIN strips that I'd read, and as it turns out four of the five stories were written by Lars, as opposed to Tove, Jansson. Tove still drew the stories that were featured in a British daily newspaper, and they still possessed a remarkable amount of gentle charm and wit. Jansson's line is remarkable simple and graceful in creating her family of hippo-like Moomintrolls. She got more out of less than any cartoonist this side of Charles Schulz. Unlike Schulz, Jansson's work also had a number of clever decorative touches. In many of her strips, she used things like umbrellas, canes, flutes, pens and lamps to form the vertical interior panel borders, subtly reinforcing the story's themes. Jannson first gained fame as a children's book illustrator with her Moominfamily, but these strips were actually aimed at adults.



While restraint was certainly Tove's watchword as a cartoonist, the stories themselves had a surprising amount of bite. While "Moomin Goes Wild West" is the weakest of the five storylines in this book (due in part to the reliance on stereotypical western humor as the Moomins go back in time), it does wind up redeeming itself by revealing that the wild west adventures they experienced were all part of a cynical, money-making con. "Snorkmaiden Goes Rococo" is another slightly formulaic story spoofing the overromanticization of the age of enlightenment. The book really picks up with "The Conscientious Moomins", a hilarious spoof of manners and "duty" that felt like a direct blow to philosophers like Kant. Jansson depicts a great deal of chaotic bufoonery in her drawings, yet her strips were always clear and never cluttered. Like Schulz, Jansson rarely relied on funny drawings to get across her gags, preferring to let her art tell the story and the gags flow naturally from character and situation.

The book saves its best for last with "Moomin and the Comet" and "Moomin And the Golden Tail". The former is a surprisingly grim, apocalyptic tale of how the various denizens of Moominvalley deal with the arrival of a potentially deadly comet. The satire of parasites, opportunists and last-second religious converts is pointed but still gentle; even the biggest phonies in these stories tended to be treated more with pity than scorn. The latter story was written by Tove and is incredibly rich in characterization and acidic in tone. When Moomin accidentally acquires a golden tail and receives unexpected fame, he has to face the negative consequences such a life brings. It's obvious that this was a commentary on Jansson's own life as an unexpectedly huge international success; the cutting remarks on managers and worldwide merchandising rights sounded like they were coming from the voice of experience. Despite that success, it was obvious that Jansson related much more to the carefree, bohemian lifestyle of the Moomins and their friends rather than any attempts at "bettering" themselves or putting on aristrocratic airs.

Rescuing these strips from obscurity was truly a public service on D&Q's part. It's encouraging that this big risk has paid off so handsomely for the small publisher; the Moomin books have become their biggest sellers. It's interesting to see a boutique publisher like D&Q suddenly flourish in the book market, especially with collections aimed at children and old-time strip fans. It's only logical that the publisher will branch out and starting reprinting Jansson's actual children's picture books, which will be a departure of sorts since they've rarely strayed far from comics in their publishing history. I think the biggest reason why their reprints aimed at children have been so successful is that these have been labors of love that have paid off for both designer and publisher, rather than cynical money grabs. The care and detail in these projects shows and no doubt draws in the curious reader. With more Stanley volumes and Jansson reprints on the way, readers will have much to look forward to.

Unreliable Narration: George Sprott, 1894-1975

Rob reviews the revised "graphic novella" by Seth, GEORGE SPROTT: 1894-1975 (Drawn & Quarterly). This is an expanded version of the strip that originally was serialized in the New York Times Sunday Magazine.

As seen in the New York Times Sunday magazine, Seth's GEORGE SPROTT was a sort of distillation of the storytelling techniques he used in his delightful (but slightly melancholy) WIMBLEDON GREEN combined with the same sort of themes found in his current long-running serial, "Clyde Fans". The original 20-part serial was composed such that each page could be read as a discrete unit but also fit as part of a larger narrative. That narrative, such as it was, contained frequent digressions into the history of certain buildings and long interviews with people who knew the titular character. The handsome new release for Drawn & Quarterly fleshes out certain aspects of Sprott, provides a bit more breathing room with incidental illustrations and even concretizes them with photos of Seth-built cardboard buildings.

Seth is labeled a nostalgist in the way he tends to idolize the past. I've always thought that for him, it wasn't so much idolizing past values, but rather a sense of immersion in an aesthetic that always felt tied to a particular time and place. That's why the buildings of importance in GEORGE SPROTT are given so much development and "characterization"; to Seth, they are crucial pieces of the story. These buildings are both repositories of specific experiences at specific times and aesthetically beautiful in and of themselves. George Sprott is just one man living in the fictional Canadian town of Dominion, a town so real and vibrant to Seth that he felt compelled to recreate it as a series of models. For Seth, his aesthetic battle is between generic and specific. One gets the sense that through mass production and globalization, the individual aesthetic of local communities is being obliterated, and along with it the quirky panache that Seth reveres. This theme of the shrinking importance and influence of individuals in the face of an increasingly bland culture resonates throughout GEORGE SPROTT, recapitulating the themes that have always been present in Seth's comics.

What separates GEORGE SPROTT from other slice-of-life studies is the apologetic, sheepish narrator who is far from omniscient. While the narrator does move the story forward (with a number of digressions) as Sprott's last day on earth is detailed, they apologize not only for leaving out details, but for failing to pithily explain who Sprott really was to the audience. The reality is that all narrators are unreliable, with none moreso than those who narrate their own stories. Putting together a biography is an act of trying to overlay a narrative on top of a life--but a story is not a life lived, but rather a retroactive interpretation of that experience. One can talk about a life, around a life, give facts, figures & dates--but such an approach doesn't really provide true insight. Having a narrator who knew all sorts of stuff about Sprott but who wasn't in any real position to tell us what it all meant was a refreshing approach, and one that allowed the reader to approach the story more on their own terms.

Following the visual style of WIMBLEDON GREEN fits nicely with that approach, because as the narrator is constructing the story of a life out of overly-simplistic parts, so does Seth the artist draw his figures as simply-drawn geometric figures. Circles, squares and triangles make up nearly every figure and building as there's a minimum of rendering, an interesting departure for an artist whose dense brushwork creates so much atmosphere. By simplifying his figures, Seth reduces the reader's tendency to linger too long on individual images, instead propelling them along the page as we follow the simple figures. At the same time, the reader is immersed in the atmosphere of the piece, as the use of color is crucial in creating mood. Seth masterfully evokes this atmosphere with that brush, giving the simple figures a certain power, all while creating a total environment where every element is designed to convey the overall emotions of the piece. The effect of the metallic blue and the reddish brown color overlays feels like we're looking at an old photograph, starting to fade. The new material in the book consists of anecdotes that can run a few pages long, and these are all done in tan, as though we're looking at a crumbling piece of newspaper. Of course, the slickness of design, the way the colors pop and the quality of the paper add a certain tension to this illusion; it's somehow both new and old.

If the reader is kept at a distance from Sprott, it's because the character deliberately pushed aside troubling feelings by adhering to a strict set of daily rituals. The irony here of course is that Sprott as a younger man fancied himself an adventurer, a rascal and a lover--a man who lived by his whims and felt no compunctions about spontaneity, even if that wound up hurting others. That robust, handsome man had become obese, living in the past as his employment with a TV show and weekly lecture had him constantly recounting his younger, more vital days. His only remaining skill was that of raconteur, trying to entertain but never to interact. Like all of Seth's characters, he's now a man trapped in the wrong time who squandered his opportunities to make the lives of others better and is now trying to chase away demons of guilt.

Of course, Seth makes sure never to make it that simple. We get all kinds of accounts about Sprott, from intimates to those who only knew him from his TV show or lectures. Those stories wind up telling us little about Sprott but lots about them, especially since so many of the accounts seem to contradict each other. The sharpest comparison is between his illegitimate daughter, who never knew him, hated him for this and then perpetuated her feelings onto her children; and his niece, whom he heaped affection on. His niece was the one person still taking care of him late in his life, and it's implied that Sprott heaped affection and attention on her because he realized it was too late with his daughter. Whatever the reason (guilt, regret, a desperation to connect), a connection was formed; there's one remarkable drawing of his niece as a child sitting in his lap, an utterly contented look on her face.

There's never a real sense of mystery to be found in this story, another deliberate move by Seth. We understand early on why Sprott feels regretful and whom he hurt and how. There's something about details being revealed to the reader that concretizes the experience all the more, making us both pity and feel shame for Sprott. In the end, the narrator doesn't pretend to try to wrap things up or make sense of his life. We don't know if George's affection for his niece proved to be some form of redemption, or if that concept has any meaning at all in this context. From a purely materialist standpoint, the strip about a collector TV ephemera proudly showing us his Sprott collection was both touching and pathetic. Touching in that in some small way, Sprott won't be forgotten--but pathetic that he will only be remembered as a sort of trivial fetish. The scattered array of panels toward the end that represent Sprott's last moments recapitulated the way his life was represented in the book: fragmented, episodic and filled with meanings that are not easily teased out.