IT’S A GOOD LIFE, IF YOU DON’T WEAKEN 319
as an Outstanding Graphic Novel or Collection award. Th e Ignatz is a festival prize
designed and designated by the Small Press Expo, to (according to the organization’s
Web site) “recognize outstanding work that challenges popular notions of what comics
can achieve, both as an art form and as a means of personal expression.” Th e award is
determined by popular vote of the attendees (both professional and fans) of the festival
and is highly regarded within the industry; 1997 was a breakout year for Seth, whose
series Palookaville was still relatively new at the time, though it was selling well for
Drawn and Quarterly.
Palookaville has also generated considerable controversy because some have felt
that its content was all too close to that of Seth’s own life. It is a comic book with
a decidedly autobiographical focus; the stories within its covers are about Seth and
his interactions with fellow (at that time) Toronto-based autobiographical cartoonists
Chester Brown and Joe Matt , daily life and events, childhood memories, collecting,
and other such things. On its face, It’s A Good Life, if You Don’t Weaken is the story
(presented as if it were fact) of a cartoonist—ostensibly Seth himself—searching for
more information about another cartoonist, Jack “Kalo” Kalloway, whose illustrations
in Th e New Yorker he stumbled across while inspired to fi nd out more about Whitney
Darrow Jr. Seth himself went on to create illustrations for Th e New Yorker later in his
own career, and so the similarities between the two men, reading Seth’s history and
Kalo’s own, are striking.
Th e relatively unknown Kalo catches Seth’s already nostalgic eye with his simple
lines and clean style, which evoke a forgotten heyday of illustrators and single-panel
work. To say that Seth’s works are, as a collective whole, enamored of a lost history
is simultaneously too simple and squarely at the very center of much of what he
does. Nostalgia plays a major role in Seth’s work, as does his own personal history. In
his more recent work, the autobiographical aspects have taken a secondary role in his
treatment of history as a lost past, such as stories about salesmen who are outpaced
by technological advances or about collectors, much like himself, sifting through old
magazines and bookstores in low light.
As Seth’s narrative search to fi nd more Kalo illustrations takes him through places
in Canada that evoke his own childhood, such as a stop in Strathroy, he fi nds that the
object of his research was a Canadian who lived (and died) in the same town in which
Seth himself lived as a child. In the narrative, Seth collects and saves these illustrations,
combing through used bookstores and sifting through old copies of Esquire and Th e
New Yorker. Th ey are reproduced at the end of the book, along with a photo of Kallo-
way during the time when he lived and worked in New York City, during the late 1940s
to early 1950s, before he returned to Canada, where he married and had his daughter,
and stopped cartooning in favor of settling down and founding what proved to be a
family-based real estate business.
Seth speaks to both Kalo’s daughter and, in the fi nal scene of the book, to Kalo’s
own mother, living in a retirement community in Strathroy. Seth’s research leads him
in other directions as well; while at the library researching Kalo his path crosses with
