It's a Good Life, If You Don't Weaken: A Picture Novella

AUTHOR: Seth (pseudonym of Gregory Gallant)

ARTIST: Seth (illustrator)

PUBLISHER: Drawn and Quarterly

FIRST SERIAL PUBLICATION: 1993-1996

FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION: 1996

Publication History

It’s a Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken was originally published in the comic book series Palooka-Ville (1991-2003), issues 4-9, between 1993 and 1996. Drawn and Quarterly in Montreal, Canada, published it as a single book in 1996 and has produced several subsequent editions.

Plot

In It’s a Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken, the fictionalized protagonist and narrator, Seth, is a frustrated cartoonist who appreciates the beauty of certain objects and art styles not often valued by others, including old architecture and the comics styles of the past. The narrative opens with Seth’s visit with his mother and brother, during which he experiences a sense of displacement, accompanied by the knowledge that he has grown up and must move beyond his own youth and past. When he discovers the cartoon work of Jack “Kalo” Kalloway in an independent bookstore, he embarks on a search to uncover more of Kalo’s comics, life, and career. During his search, he meets an attractive, intelligent woman named Ruthie, and they begin dating. Ruthie takes an interest in Seth’s quest and is able to provide him with more clues that eventually lead him to a meeting with Kalo’s surviving family members.

As Seth discovers more about Kalo, the antihero in Seth explores and discovers his own philosophical ideas about humanity, his nostalgia, and the world. He discusses his aesthetic values and his feelings of failure and loneliness with his friend Chet. Seth realizes that his artistic obsessions and general angst about the world often play roles in ending his relationships with women, while his devotion to his art only grows stronger. His disconnection from women is made obvious when he fails to maintain his relationship with Ruthie for no apparent reason.

Both Ruthie and Chet provide critiques of Seth’s behavior as he works through his own alienation and feelings of inadequacy. Clearly, Seth feels deeper connections with the deceased Kalo, elements of the vanished past, and his art than with most of the people in his life. In the end, there is a parallel struck between Kalo the cartoonist and Seth the protagonist, and their similarities and differences further reveal the life of a cartoonist.

Characters

•Seth, the protagonist and narrator, is a fictionalized version of the author, a Canadian cartoonist living in Toronto who dresses in 1940’s-style attire. He loves many elements of the vanishing and vanished past, including old architecture, jazz music, retro fashions, bookstores, comic books, and the cartoon and illustration styles of the 1930’s and 1940’s, specifically as featured in The New Yorker. His interests are treated as obsessions, as they lead him on a search for more information on the mostly unknown cartoonist Jack Kalloway.

•Chet is Seth’s best friend, also a cartoonist, who has long hair and a funky style. While he and Seth have contrasting tastes and beliefs, their friendship is clearly based on their similar appreciation of cartooning. He works as a sounding board for Seth’s preoccupations, his worry about his “vague depression,” and his concerns about dating and women.

•Seth’s mother is a minor character. She is a generous person who volunteers in the community, loves her two sons without seeing their flaws, and is happy to cook for them. She does not understand why neither of them have married.

•Stephen, Seth’s brother, is an overweight, fun-loving adult who seems more boy than man. He is slovenly, lives in his mother’s home, tells silly jokes that annoy Seth, dresses carelessly, and seems oblivious to the world around him.

•Ruthie is a dark-haired, attractive woman who is briefly involved with Seth. She is a student who enjoys reading and is majoring in French. Ultimately, she becomes yet another of Seth’s failed possible relationships.

•Jack Kalloway, a.k.a. Kalo, is a dead Canadian cartoonist who once had a few cartoons in The New Yorker. Seth discovers his work while looking at comics in a bookstore and becomes interested in his style and career.

•Susie is Kalo’s daughter, an attractive woman with black hair. A realtor and a businesswoman, she does not know the side of her father that was a cartoonist.

•Ken is an old friend of Kalo who says that his real talent was for business, not cartooning.

•Mrs. Kalloway is Kalo’s mother. She describes her son, “Jackie,” as being interested in drawing and reading and loving comics, just like Seth.

•Boris is one of Seth’s cats and the “best thing that ever happened” to him.

Artistic Style

The style is evocative of the New Yorker cartoons of the 1930’s and 1940’s, with entirely hand-drawn images and hand-lettered text. The story is told in traditional comic frames and panels, drawn in black line with muted gray-blue on dark beige paper, with much attention to shadows, architecture, and landscape. This creates a mood that captures the ennui of the protagonist and accentuates his nostalgia for a lost time, serving as a tribute to a fading, past world. Mostly blue shading adds to the depth of the drawings and to their evocation of earlier cartoon styles and old catalog illustrations.

Background landscapes, architecture, and Canadian sites of interest add another dimension to the story, unfolding time via the use of Japanese-style seasonal panoramas that create a sense of the world that the protagonist experiences. This includes details of streetscapes, storefronts, objects, clothing, and landscaping. The backgrounds are often evocative of the narrator’s emotional experiences and capture the sense of memory and a fading world that is thematically predominant.

Themes

It’s a Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken is concerned with the history of comics and cartoons, The New Yorker cartoonists, the daily life of the artist, the general ennui of being an adult and forming relationships, and a sadness for the “vanished past.” The title, a common saying that Seth often heard repeated by his mother, links the book thematically to the past and to personal existentialism.

Late in the book, the protagonist defines the “good life” as “going from one children’s parade to another.” Attention is paid to objects and to collecting, to the philosophical questions of everyday life, and to the strangeness of a changing, evolving world.

Additionally, the theme of obsessive collecting versus establishing deeper adult relationships adds to the story, working as a type of bildungsroman of the heterosexual male artist contemplating his failed sexual relationships and trying to grow as an artist. The novella also has a postmodern metafictional element: The narrative comments on the medium in which it is told, exploring comics and comics styling; and the fictionalized Seth, the protagonist of the narrative, is also the author and illustrator of the book itself.

Impact

This work, published in the Modern Age of comics, had a significant effect on what would shortly become a boom in memoir-style graphic novels. Focused thematically on comics and the history of cartooning, it argues for the importance of the genre and its worthiness as a subject for serious study and exploration. Its unique elements include drawings of old cartoons and a glossary of notable cartoonists. The artistic style reinforces the value of “old world” comics that featured hand drawing and lettering.

It’s a Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken presents a kind of literary and artistic critical analysis of comics via its characters, who critique many kinds of cartooning, both thematically and aesthetically. Targets of this critique include the treatment of women in comics, typical plots and jokes, and superhero protagonists. Because this graphic novel does not have a high-action plot but instead features the emotional, philosophical, and aesthetic concerns of an antihero protagonist, it offered groundbreaking possibilities for the genre. Additionally, unlike many memoir-based graphic novels that followed, the trials and actions of the protagonist are not dramatic, nor do they serve to make him “special,” as either hero or victim. The story resists any impulse to turn melodramatic or sentimental. While there is nostalgia for certain elements of beauty in the past, that very notion is critiqued as well. The book also contributed to the reputation of the Canadian publishing house Drawn and Quarterly, begun by Chris Oliveros, which has set a standard for excellence in comics art.

Further Reading

Gallant, John, and Seth. Bannock, Beans, and Black Tea: The Life of a Young Boy Growing Up in the Great Depression (2004).

Seth. Clyde Fans: Book One (2004).

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Vernacular Drawings: Sketchbooks (2001).

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Wimbledon Green (2005).

Bibliography

Grenville, Bruce, et al., eds. Krazy! The Delirious World of Anime and Comics and Video Games and Art. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008.

Hannon, Gerald. “Retro Man.” Toronto Life, November 29, 2010, p. 1-5. http://www.torontolife.com/features/retro-man.

Hignite, Todd. In the Studio: Visits with Contemporary Cartoonists. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006.

Mullins, Katie. “Questioning Comics: Women and Autocritique in Seth’s It’s a Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken.” Canadian Literature 203 (Winter, 2009): 11-29.

Schneider, Greice. “Comics and Everyday Life: From Ennui to Contemplation.” European Comic Art 3, no. 1 (2010): 37-63.