Radiant Comics

I’m back from the comic shop this week and I got two new comics plus a trade paperback cover collection:

And now for a review of something I’ve read recently.

”The Great Northern Brotherhood of Canadian Cartoonists” by Seth

This is the latest graphic novel by one of my favorite cartoonists. The single named Seth. His work is usually steeped in nostalgia and a longing for things in the past. This book is no exception to that.

”The Great Northern Brotherhood of Canadian Cartoonists” is the name for a fictional club that Seth has invented for this book. Since Seth’s love of the past includes things that never actually were he created a past in which Canadian cartoonists were so beloved and successful that they created their own clubs, four of them, all around Canada. They’re much like the Society of Illustrators club building in NYC and much like that society their heyday was long ago.

Seth takes us on a tour of one of ”The Great Northern Brotherhood of Canadian Cartoonists” houses and revels in showing us the great and lesser cartoonists of the past. Rooms that hold original art, photos, and memorabilia. As in all Seth’s work there is a strong feeling of times gone by and glorying in the past that is occasionally punctured but a bit of reality thrown in. If there are some warts that can show up then Seth shows us them too. He creates a glorious past for Canadian cartooning but also humanizes it a bit.

I’m also a big fan of Seth’s art. This is one of his “Sketchbook” graphic novels so the art is not as polished as his other work but it’s pretty darn finished. It’s not sketchy in the least. He did this one in his usual “Bigfoot” cartoony style and used a nine panel layout grid. It’s all straight forward and very well done.

Like I said Seth is one of my favorite cartoonists so I knew I was going to like this. So if you want to take a nostalgic trip through a fiction history of Canadian cartooning this is the book for you. You’ll probably end up like I did in wishing it was all true.