What a great interview when you are allowed into the world of one of Canada’s most famous contemporary cartoonists. SETH, aka Gregory Gallant, is a man who lives at Inkwell’s End which is a house decked out from stem to stern in the 1940’s. Memorabilia is neatly and meticulously organized throughout his home, but it is utterly vast and ranges from old rotary telephones which are still used, to what we now consider mid-century modern furniture, to appliances that we once saw our grandparents use. Comic books are everywhere!

Seth is a classic New Yorker cartoonist and left the Ontario College of Art in 1983, determined to establish his own persona. His first job was at Vortex Comics but he evolved to collate the entire collection of Charles Schultz comic series, Peanuts and collated the. body of work from John Stanley (Little Lulu) and the well-known Canadian cartoonist, Doug Wright.

Witty and full of humour, Seth has gone on to grace the cover of the erudite New Yorker Magazine three times and then pushed along to write 23 novellas of Palookaville, an imaginary city where Seth’s adventures abound. These novels have been written in 8 different languages around the world. Closely followed by novel Clyde Fans.

In 2014, the National Film Board of Canada produced a film of another imaginary city by Seth called Dominion which captured the best film at the Ottawa Film Festival that year. 

Recently, Seth was named one of the 100 top cartoonists in the 20th century. He also bagged the $10,000 Harbourfront Prize in 2013.

In 2019, this artist exhibited a wildly popular exhibition at the Art Gallery of Guelph showcasing his fictitious city Dominion along with abundant artwork as a retrospective. During the interview, Seth informed me that he will be casting a four-part bronze series which will be unveiled at the Guelph Sculpture park hopefully this fall. Seth has created a world for us as he lives in a parallel reality some of us may long for – no pop culture, little technology and limited gadgets in our lives. The past is gone but the memory is still a pleasure.