Runciter reviewed Clyde Fans by Seth
Beautiful, Challenging & Incomplete
3 stars
I have to establish my credibility here before continuing: I'm a devoted "comics" person, with a special fondness for the alternative artists (call 'em "cartoonists") that I read and enjoyed in the 1990s, among them Richard Sala, Dan Clowes, Julie Doucet, and the resolutely Canadian Seth / Gregory Gallant.
I reread his collected edition of It's a Good Life If You Don't Weaken every December and have gained many moments of amusement from his (sadly minimal) output. He can expertly drive a fluid line, set a scene (often wintry and melancholy), and evoke the reality of nostalgia's diminishing returns as the Cool Past retreats ever further, leaving us trapped in the Lame Present. Our horn-rimmed glasses and big band 78s won't save us, but the past shown in grainy black-and-white street scenes still beckons.
I bought the handsomely-presented Clyde Fans, Book 1 not knowing that it was the …
I have to establish my credibility here before continuing: I'm a devoted "comics" person, with a special fondness for the alternative artists (call 'em "cartoonists") that I read and enjoyed in the 1990s, among them Richard Sala, Dan Clowes, Julie Doucet, and the resolutely Canadian Seth / Gregory Gallant.
I reread his collected edition of It's a Good Life If You Don't Weaken every December and have gained many moments of amusement from his (sadly minimal) output. He can expertly drive a fluid line, set a scene (often wintry and melancholy), and evoke the reality of nostalgia's diminishing returns as the Cool Past retreats ever further, leaving us trapped in the Lame Present. Our horn-rimmed glasses and big band 78s won't save us, but the past shown in grainy black-and-white street scenes still beckons.
I bought the handsomely-presented Clyde Fans, Book 1 not knowing that it was the first half of a duo of books that was never completed - rather, the final, collected Clyde Fans saga was later published in its own prestige edition, and this ain't it. Due to my own error and oversight, I have half of a story that is, by all early impressions, fairly oblique and open-ended in any form.
Beautifully drawn with a delicate and confident line and told with balanced page layouts, the first portion of the book is essentially a wandering monologue on the value and philosophy of traveling sales, told by an long-retired old man as he shuffles from one overstuffed apartment room to another, going about his daily rituals and ruminating over might-have-beens. Bluntly: not thrilling to read, no matter how it looks. The second and superior half flashes back to 1957 and follows an increasingly isolated and despondent Clyde Fans salesman as he fails once, twice, and thrice to make a sale (wandering through the quaintly-envisaged lanes and avenues of Dominion, Seth's own Land of Make Believe).
The second half of the book saved Clyde Fans, Book 1 from the "donate" pile, or rather, at least until I can obtain a collected edition of the entire story. Which I do want to read from start to finish.
