It's true that Seth pulled the wool over the eyes of an inordinate number of readers with his "autobiographical" novel It's A Good Life If You Don't Weaken when it was originally serialised in Palooka-Ville. By keeping secret the fact that Kalo, the cartoonist for whom Seth searches throughout the novel, was a literal device, he probably sent hundreds of readers to pouring through old copies of 1950s gag anthologies all in a quest to find some evidence of the ever-elusive Kalo.
Admit it though, it's a pretty pleasant image: the cartoonist, whose enthusiasm for old-style gag cartooning is so great that it literally oozes from every line he puts on the page, writes a book that compels an audience largely indifferent to that aspect of comics' history to spend hours of their time in a fruitless search to learn more about a fictional character by examining the real history of the medium. It's not just clever, it's brilliant and it's what makes the book such a stunning accomplishment.
Well, that and the fact that it's so elegantly drawn and supremely paced. It's A Good Life If You Don't Weaken is a book with such an arc of quietude that you feel as if you can almost believe that the seasons are changing as you sit and read the story. Just as you believe that Kalo really did make it big for that one shining moment in The New Yorker.
Still, I don't know why he had to break the spell on the greatest comic ever written about comics in a men's magazine like Details that wouldn't recognise a talent like Kalo's to save their lives. Ideally, Seth might have said nothing for the rest of his life and we all could have looked for Kalo together, forever.
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