Clyde Fans: Book One

DRAWN & QUARTERLY, 160 PAGES, $19.95.

BEING OUT OF step with the latest fashion is usually snubbed, but for comic artist Seth, who's in his early forties, anachronism is a virtue. A line in the first volume of Clyde Fans, his latest graphic novel, which chronicles the rise and fall of two brothers in the electric-fan business, sums up the mood of his best work. Looking over to one of his nearby clocks, retired salesman and store owner Abraham Matchcard warns the reader, "Pay no attention whatsoever to the clocks. I'd be very surprised if any of them are still wound or working."

"I'm interested in creating a sense of place closed off from time," Seth explains. "I have this fascination with the early twentieth century." Currently writing and drawing Clyde Fans volume two, he's been doing comics since the mid-80s, serializing his work for his periodical Palookaville, as well as illustrating for The New Yorker and recently designing all 25 books of Charles Schulz's anthologized Peanuts strips, the second of which will be out this fall. Asked who's his favorite Peanuts character, he replies in a tentative tone, "I relate to Linus, but of course I have a friend who says I'm Lucy, the cruel one."

In person Seth's quirkily charming, with a decidedly old-fashioned look. He sports a fedora hat, shirt and tie, with two to three pens in his breast pocket.

"It has to do with growing up with old parents," he clarifies. His parents were in their forties when he was born, "being associated with their time." Seth doesn't think people were necessarily better off in the past than today. His interest is strictly esthetic, whether it's for 1930s movies and music or, more idiosyncratically, getting rapt about the design and craft that used to go into making aspirin bottles.

"A lot of the time I'm shaking my head, how did it get like this?" he asks dispiritedly. "Movies have gotten crass, jeans ads look like sex ads and hiphop grates on my nerves. We've all been convinced that this cheap junk is really desirable."

He got the idea for Clyde Fans from a Toronto storefront with the same name he used to walk by. The place was always empty, the lights out.

"I'd look in," he recalls, "[and] against the back wall I could dimly see photographs of two men."

That became the starting point for the fictive story of Abraham and Simon, their separate plights featured respectively in the first and second parts of volume one.

We start out spending a day with Abraham in 1997, years after he's closed the shop but still lives in the adjoining house. It's unusual storytelling: He tours his home and talks to the reader for 70 pages, all of it drawn in pale blues and drab grays.

"I'm asking a lot from the reader, and hopefully it's interesting," Seth concedes, "but sitting in your room all day could be much more fascinating than how you went out and screwed some girl. It all depends on how you tell the story."

No surprise, Seth is a big fan of the late filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu, best-known for his non-eventful tales of being over the hill. "It's so understated," he says of one scene in Tokyo Story, "just this awkward little small talk; there's a depth of observation on how people interact."

Likewise, Abraham doesn't seem to say much, yet a whole life passes in between the lines. He tells jokes, recalls a tough sales trip, talks about his brother and how the rise of air-conditioning made his own line of business obsolete. "Those fragments prove," he points to invoices, "that I once existed. [They] probably have a more meaningful relationship with the outside world than I do."

Part two skips back 40 years, as Simon goes to a small town on a sales trip but is too shy to close a single deal. "He has a fantasy world he's involved with," says Seth, explaining what turns out to be the most disquieting scene, "I call it Simon-land." Simon sits alone in his hotel room and stares at a picture of a lighthouse on the wall, and next thing you know he's there in the picture, climbing the stairs and looking out the window. But what he sees outside is even more surreal—an old woman in a living room, muttering his name in her sleep.

When asked what he's looking to achieve, Seth gives a textbook answer: "The purpose of art is to convey the experience of being in the world." Clyde Fans' triumph is that it conveys the loneliness of not being part of this world. o