Palookaville #21: No. 21

[Seth is a] master of [his] craft . . . [with] a nostalgic, deeply introspective world view . . . Palookaville #20 is as bittersweet and beautiful as they come. --Brad Mackay, The Globe and Mail

He's a poet of the things we tend to pass without a second look: dying towns off the main highways, doomed small businesses, ungainly loners. He can invest more character and poignancy in a drawing of a gas station than most artists can in a human portrait. --Ian McGilis, Montreal Gazette

[Seth is a] master of [his] craft . . . [with] a nostalgic, deeply introspective world view . . . Palookaville #20 is as bittersweet and beautiful as they come. --Brad Mackay, The Globe and Mail
He's a poet of the things we tend to pass without a second look: dying towns off the main highways, doomed small businesses, ungainly loners. He can invest more character and poignancy in a drawing of a gas station than most artists can in a human portrait. --Ian McGilis, Montreal Gazette

Tinged with an undeniable melancholy, these are stories that capture that acute pain that comes from looking back at yourself, the mixture of pathos and helpless desire to change some of what you went through, not to make it better, but just to make it slightly less uncomfortable...but what emerges is a dual sense that we are formed unfortunately early as people and that the letting go that marks the passage from youth to adulthood is only the most memorable of an endless series of the same. -- National Post

Seth's seemingly autobiographical stories drew immediate acclaim when he began Palookaville two decades ago. His heartbreakingly melancholy return to that mode shows how completely he has mastered his craft in the ensuing two decades. -- Booklist

Reading Seth, the great Canadian cartoonist who dresses and draws like a man out of time, is an act of ever-shifting reconciliation . . . Seth keeps sliding and eliding our feel for the past -- which in turn challenges our perspective on the present. Missed kisses, or conversations unspoken, or paths untraceable, keep lapping back from our personal histories, beating against our assumptions of accumulated wisdom. Washington Post

Tinged with an undeniable melancholy, these are stories that capture that acute pain that comes from looking back at yourself, the mixture of pathos and helpless desire to change some of what you went through, not to make it better, but just to make it slightly less uncomfortable...but what emerges is a dual sense that we are formed unfortunately early as people and that the letting go that marks the passage from youth to adulthood is only the most memorable of an endless series of the same. National Post

Seth's seemingly autobiographical stories drew immediate acclaim when he began Palookaville two decades ago. His heartbreakingly melancholy return to that mode shows how completely he has mastered his craft in the ensuing two decades. Booklist

Reading Seth, the great Canadian cartoonist who dresses and draws like a man out of time, is an act of ever-shifting reconciliation . . . Seth keeps sliding and eliding our feel for the past -- which in turn challenges our perspective on the present. Missed kisses, or conversations unspoken, or paths untraceable, keep lapping back from our personal histories, beating against our assumptions of accumulated wisdom. --Washington Post

Tinged with an undeniable melancholy, these are stories that capture that acute pain that comes from looking back at yourself, the mixture of pathos and helpless desire to change some of what you went through, not to make it better, but just to make it slightly less uncomfortable...but what emerges is a dual sense that we are formed unfortunately early as people and that the letting go that marks the passage from youth to adulthood is only the most memorable of an endless series of the same. --National Post

Seth's seemingly autobiographical stories drew immediate acclaim when he began Palookaville two decades ago. His heartbreakingly melancholy return to that mode shows how completely he has mastered his craft in the ensuing two decades. --Booklist