Seth on Thoreau MacDonald and Kramers Ergot 7

not Seth. Thoreau MacDonald

Well, I guess that was the right month for me to fall off a cliff, since almost everyone else writing about comics online seemed to take a late-summer vacation as well. (I did visit NYC and MoCCA for the first time, but a dying hard drive deserves more blame for the radio silence.) And now, after my sloth coincided with absolutely nothing happening, I get to return as Disney buys Marvel and DC's proprietors violently shake its organizational Etch-a-Sketch. I doon't have anything new to say about either of those things yet, though. This post is about the past.

Around the end of last year, I spoke with Seth for this Eye Weekly piece on Kramers Ergot 7. Background-y interviews normally remain on my tape recorder, not archived online, but his description of the KE editorial process and heartfelt elaboration on Thoreau MacDonald in this one made me reconsider. I hope he gets a chance to write that book about the man. We talked just after Seth was filmed for a possible NFB documentary; there's a slight parallel to the framing device of his new book George Sprott in that, but perhaps not one that he enjoyed.

(Note: I still edited out large chunks of the conversation, devoted to aspects of Kramers 7 that soon became common knowledge or me rambling about Matt Baker, for reasons of banality.)

*****

CR: How are you? How was being filmed?

Seth: Oh, I don’t want to talk about it. I’m exhausted, to tell you the truth. It’s not really a very pleasant experience in a way. It’s not the filmmaker’s fault. I just don’t really care for that much attention being focused on me.

Is it for that NFB documentary?

Exactly.

Is that a feature-length thing, or…

It is, and we’ll see what happens, I don’t know. There’s still a little time to go ‘til they get it together. Maybe it’ll work out. I feel nervous about it, I’ll tell you that. But it's out of my hands, so there's only so much I can do about it.

I guess you're sort of helpless, but you don't have to do anything.

It's a funny thing, you know - a documentary when you're watching it you feel like it's just someone filming someone, but it's incredible when they're actually filming you how much pressure you feel to...perform. Which is really difficult, because I'm not an actor. Having a camera aimed at you and having people constantly talking to you, asking you questions...it's worse than being on stage, actually. I know this, I'll never agree to do another one.

...

Have you ever worked on something approaching that size before, or…because I’m assuming nothing in the book will be blown up.

I guess – yeah, exactly. I guess I’d worked on a few things in the National Post when it first started – I did a few comic strips there that were like the size of two pages of the newspaper put together. But I think at that point I wasn’t using the space to the optimum, how I might like to have used it, because of the fact that I was working in the newspaper you had to deal with an editor and even though they weren’t interfering with the work I didn’t have that sense of complete freedom, that I could do whatever I want. And also the deadlines were a hell of a lot tighter. So this was the first real opportunity to do something that big and have the time to work on it to do whatever I wanted.

Right. I’ve seen very small jpegs of the pages – did you change something from what you would normally do in a page of Clyde Fans or whatever?

Oh yeah, for sure. I mean, the thing that excited me about working on this is that I wanted to do something that was super-dense. I wanted to be able to get 120 or 150 panels on a page. That’s what I was really excited about.

That’s what you can see in the samples, a million tiny panels on this landscape.

Every once in a while, you’ll see a few comic pages of your work gathered up somewhere in a catalogue or something, sort of just stacked up. I like the way that looks, they’ll shrink them down and you’ll see there’s a lot of little panels stuck together because of that. Normally when I’m working on my own comics, I don’t usually go over 20 panels on a page, and even that’s really pushing it. Just for clarity’s sake, I don’t want to go any smaller than that on the page. When you’ve suddenly got a page as big as a newspaper page you’ve got the same clarity you’d have in a comic book, but you can really expand out, and to me that’s what was exciting. For some people it was like, “here’s a chance to do a really big drawing,” or to do some comics that have very large elements to them. That’s great too.

I expect that there'll be a mix of people doing very, uh, elaborate fragmented things and then people doing ridiculously huge splash pages.

Yeah, exactly. It’s tempting. If I’d had another couple of pages I might’ve considered putting some huge images in there too. But even as it was, by the time I came on the project Sammy only had one page to offer to me, so as I started to work it out I had to say to him “I cannot possibly do this without two pages.” I got two pages, but I think it would’ve been pushing my luck to ask for four. Basically it came down to – to get the amount of story into it and the level of density I wanted, there wasn’t going to be any space for giant drawings.

What were they like as editors? Did they just assign you a certain number of pages and then act completely hands-off, or…

Yeah, exactly. I think they were rigorous in their – what came in had to be up to whatever standards they wanted. I guess I’m just lucky that whatever I sent them, they liked it, because I think they did reject a thing or two. It just wasn’t using the space in any manner that made it worthwhile, I don’t really know the details. But they certainly didn’t get involved in any sort of preliminary stages, making you send them a pencil version of the strip or anything. I think with most of the cartoonists that they asked they trusted them to know what to do, which is usually a good policy, I think.

I saw in one piece about it that there was an unnamed cartoonist who had to redo their pages, which sounds horrible, but…

It happens. I mean, in a situation like this where you’re working with so many artists there’s definitely going to be a case where something’s gonnna come in that you just don’t care for. I’ve had that happen myself with other anthologies and things I’ve worked in. You always end up hating the editor, but, I mean, that’s their job, that’s what they gotta do.

...

[loses train of thought, apologizes] I’ve googled around and I’ve looked at some of MacDonald’s drawings and I saw that he was colour blind, which is interesting…what made you choose or alight on him as a subject for the strip?

I think it just has to do with the growing interest I’ve had in his work over the past…eight years, I suppose. I’ve been progressively more and more interested in what he did and finding that, you know, you have certain paths you go down in your interests. Thoreau MacDonald is an artist I’ve been very interested in and I knew that eventually I would get around to doing some piece of work on him. It’s part of the process of…you go from being interested to being influenced and then starting to dig into their past, discovering their work in more detail. That usually leads to some project or other, when it’s an artist that’s at the top of your list of things you’re interested in. I certainly find lots of artists and cartoonists of the past that I have a passing interest in, but a few of them will stick around and become more personal, where you sort of take them on as your own, and he’s certainly fallen into that category for me. I would probably put him at the top of my list for the last five years or so, as someone whose work and life I’ve been very interested in. And I just see it as part of an ongoing project. I’ve written about him, I’ve certainly collected his work, I’ve done a strip about him now…I imagine that probably it’s going to end up somewhere down the road doing a book about him. The work appeals to me on a very basic level: I think it’s beautiful work, it’s really sensitive and solitary and it relates to the cartoonist’s art. And I think as a person he’s fascinating, because he was a very humble and self-effacing but – a very deep person. Even looking into him I’m having a hard time figuring out the details of his private life. I mean, there’s a couple diaries published that are very interesting, which is where I got a lot of the information for these strips, but I still don’t know the real intimate details of his life. He seems to have been an unmarried man, but I’ve heard some clues that there was some woman he lived with for years. The funny thing is that there’s just no source material to look this stuff up, so I’m seeing this as part of an ongoing process where I’m probably going to continue looking into him. There might even be material for another strip in there too. But certainly I think a big book of his work is somewhere in the works in my mind, somewhere down the road.

I thought it was…almost Greek levels of tragedy to be the son of this Group of Seven painter and to end up colour blind.

[chuckles] Well, the funny thing is, I’ve seen a few of his paintings and he did well for someone who was colour blind. What’s great about him, I think, is that he didn’t try to compete in the exact same sphere. His work is more about drawing, which I think is probably why I was more attracted to him. I mean, I certainly enjoy the work of his father and the Group of Seven in general…I like their work, especially Lawren Harris, but I think Thoreau’s work spoke to me more than any of them just because it’s close to the actual trade of a cartoonist. He’s working in simple black-and-white images. He’s using them the way a cartoonist uses them. It’s more about a cartoon language or an iconographic language than it is about trying to draw nature. He’s using black-and-white drawing – and he used to say it himself, he never went out into the field and drew - what he would do is come back into his studio and draw from memory. And I think that kind of ink drawing - where you’re creating iconic images to stimulate the viewer’s memory and make them plug in the actual details - that’s very similar to a cartoonist’s art. That’s what attracted me to him.

I just looked on Google Image Search, basically, and unfortunately there isn’t a lot there—

Yeah, it’s funny that there isn’t, actually.

It’s striking how he did these very abstract – well, not very abstract, but unexpectedly abstract renderings of wildlife and the natural environment.

He was a fascinating character. The work really appeals to me, and he was a great graphic designer, but personally too, reading his diaries, he was a very sensitive and humble person, which is always very appealing when you’re reading about someone. Occasionally you’ll read about some particular genius like Frank Lloyd Wright or something and you will think it’s kind of great that they were such an asshole, but generally I think we’re drawn to people that we would want to like and he seems like a person that I would like.

And so those diaries are basically the only primary sources on him?

Well, they’re the only primary sources I have access to. I come across slight bits of information that I don’t have my hands on, a few old magazine articles and stuff, but generally there doesn’t seem to be any written material that really goes into the details. Because he was a nice person I have a feeling that the majority of people did what he would’ve liked, and that’s that they didn’t write about him much. He didn’t want that kind of attention. I think to find out the real details of his life would mean going out and interviewing some people who have first-hand information. I know a great deal about his life up until 1960 or something but I have no idea about the details of his personal life, or what went on between that period and when he died in the ‘80s. I’m very curious, but I don’t have access to anyone who knew him personally, so I don’t really know.