Seth on Respectable Street

From Tom Spurgeon, the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto is adding work by cartoonist Seth to its permanent collection. He'll also have his own exhibition at the gallery opening on June 29 and running through October 16, with an in-person Q&A on the evening of June 30. I'd be there if I happened to be in town (and I'll certainly attend the exhibition if I make it to Toronto before October).

Seth started out in independent comics about fifteen years ago and has since expanded his work to illustrations appearing in magazines such as The New Yorker and to books. The style he's nurtured is an old-fashioned one that looks as though it would be comfortable in the cartooning mainstream of the 1930s and '40s. It's extremely warm and reassuring and, as far as I'm concerned anyway, endlessly appealing.

I don't know as much about Seth as I'd like to, but his career seems to be very much a situation of talent receiving the notice it deserves. I'm not sure he's ever had a large audience for his comics. The primary publisher of that work is a small Canadian company called Drawn & Quarterly, which has built a reputation for putting out personal--sometimes idiosyncratic--work, often of quite high quality. There's some info on Seth to be found in an excerpt from an interview with The Comics Journal and a shorter but still in-depth interview at Newsarama.