Career
Seth's first published comics work was providing the artwork to the Vortex Comics series Mister X, shortly after Los Bros Hernandez left. He left after issue #13, and went into illustration for a few years. In 1990, he began his own series, Palooka-ville, which was one of the first series to be published by Montréal, Canada-based Drawn and Quarterly. It became part of a miniature boom in non-genre alternative comics from Canada in the 1990s. Seth, Chester Brown, and Joe Matt not only also began their own semi-autobiographical series at the same time, but were friends and sometimes depicted each other in their stories. Palooka-Ville began as a low-key chronicle of the artist's daily life but moved on to longer and more ambitious stories, including what was later collected as the graphic novel It's a Good Life, If You Don't Weaken—an apparently autobiographical tale that was later revealed to be fiction.
He is also a magazine illustrator and book designer, perhaps best known for his work designing the complete collection of Charles M. Schulz's classic comic strip Peanuts. The books, released by Fantagraphics Books in 25 separate volumes (so far) combine Seth's signature aesthetic with Schulz's minimalistic comic creation. Similarly, he is designing the Collected Doug Wright, and the John Stanley Library.
He provided the artwork of Aimee Mann's 2001 album Lost in Space.
Clyde Fans, the story of two brothers whose trade in electric fans suffers and eventually goes out of business from the failure to adapt to the rise of air conditioning, was serialized in Palooka-ville. Seth's short graphic novel Wimbledon Green, about an eccentric comic-book collector, was published in November 2005.
In April 2006, Penguin Classics released the revised Portable Dorothy Parker, with a jacket and French flaps designed and illustrated by Seth. He said, "It’s fun when you care about the project, definitely. In fact, I’ve been a commercial illustrator for years, besides being a cartoonist, and that's not fun. That's like the kind of thing, I find, you're just selling style in a way."
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