COMICS:IN THE POPULAR imagination, comics are most often associated with fast-moving narratives, packed with action and incident, but in fact the medium is inherently static, each comic's story being a series of still images, one after the other, with all motion and change being created in the mind of the reader. Few cartoonists have used this stasis more often or more effectively than Seth, whose protagonists often seem so averse to motion that they have become incapable of it.
George Sprott,minor television celebrity and sometime arctic explorer, is a perfect Seth protagonist: nostalgic; selfish in minor, undramatic ways; capable of moments of insight but not wise by any definition. Sprott is a large man physically and in personality, but the overwhelming impression his life gives is one of smallness. His fame, his achievements, his understanding of life and the people he knew, and, most of all, the ripples left behind by his passing, all of these are small, as the narrator repeatedly emphasises: "For a few months after George died, those who knew him well could still strongly feel him nearby. But now, all these years later, they do not feel his presence in the world any more."
The narration is one of the many delights of this subtle and masterly work. Third-person omniscient narration is difficult to carry off, and it's even harder to make your omniscient narrator unreliable, but George Sprott's narrator has, by his (her?) own admission, a somewhat patchy record of Sprott's life and a haphazard way of presenting the facts at his or her disposal: "Oh, wait – I already mentioned that, didn't I? . . . Damn! This is no good! I've entirely failed to give you any of the flavour of these events. I'm sorry."
This kind of trick might be merely tiresome in a prose novel, but George Sprottis a comic book, or, in Seth's phrase, a "picture novella". It is not just through the narrator's descriptions but also through the events we see that we come to understand Sprott's life, a slightly messy life, full of loose ends and conflicts left unresolved because they were never truly brought out into the open.
Without the narrator intervening, we see Sprott as a child overhearing his parents’ arguments, as a young man inventing a story to one-up a fellow seminarian, as an older man sitting in a camp in the Canadian Arctic listening to the same song over and over again because all his other records have cracked in the cold. We see, too, the reactions of various people interviewed for their reminiscences: colleagues, friends, relatives, fans, even the bellhop at the hotel where he used to live. Some of them are hostile and some admiring, but most show a mixture of warmth and indifference that underlines once more the insignificance of Sprott’s life.
The many small panels, and the subpages within many of the pages, recall the work of Chris Ware, but Seth's layouts are more straightforward and less intensely designed than Ware's, and this is not a flaw; the greater simplicity of Seth's sequencing allows his ideas and his draughtsmanship to shine through. And his draughtsmanship is exquisite, reminiscent of New Yorkercartoons in their heyday of 60 years ago, but with an additional use of muted colours to signal shifts of mood and register.
The boldly retro design of the cover and the recurring image of the icy poles both point to George Sprott's central theme: that Sprott's character is frozen, standing still as the world changes and decays around him. This point is made most explicitly by a short sequence showing George ageing as he delivers the sign-off line of his TV show in different periods of its run. "May the sun never melt your igloo," he says, as if hoping for the world to stay frozen in place.
Katherine Farmar is a freelance writer and the author, with Ben Murnane, of Dublin on a Shoestring
