“I think I like the idea that the world could be more interesting than it is.” – Seth
You wouldn't notice the three-storey house by the railway viaduct unless you were looking for it. Tucked by the elevated tracks just a few blocks from this small city's downtown, its red-brick exterior is unprepossessing. The confusing confluence of roads and car traffic at its front means a driver's attention is likely going to be elsewhere. Accidents happen here, you think. But for the former Gregory Gallant, Inkwell's End – that's the moniker he has etched into the glass on the front door – is a kind of Shangri-la. Or, as this Citizen Kane fan would likely prefer, Xanadu.
Inside, it's surprisingly quiet, faintly hermetic. A train goes by five, maybe six times a day, but the vibrations are gentle, almost comforting, and, in tandem with the drowsy demeanour of Orange and Henry, two fat cats who also call Inkwell's End home, they only serve to emphasize the stillness.
Which is all to the good for the former Gregory Gallant. “I like the sound,” he says.
Let's dispense with Gregory Gallant – he hasn't been called that for more than a quarter-century, and he turns 47 in September. To Tania, his wife of seven years, to his friends, his brothers and sisters, even to his 92-year-old dad, a long-retired high-school shop teacher living in Prince Edward Island, he is Seth. Not Seth Gallant, mind you. Just … Seth.
“I changed it simply because I was looking for a pretentious-sounding pseudonym,” he explained during an interview at Inkwell's End one recent sunny day.
“In retrospect, I wish I hadn't done it. It's a stupid name.” But Seth it is and Seth it shall be, probably even after death hath parted him from Tania and the planet.
His real name, in fact, “sounds fake” to him now, and besides, it's too late for a Mellencamp/Cougar/Cougar-Mellencamp/Mellencamp switcheroo. Because, well, he's Seth, one of the world's most highly regarded and best-loved graphic novelists, illustrators and book designers.
He's the guy who's done three covers for The New Yorker; designed all 25 volumes of The Complete Peanuts ; is often spoken of in the same breath as Robert Crumb and Art Spiegelman; has just published, with Montreal's Drawn & Quarterly Press, his latest masterpiece, a $29.95 hardcover “picture novella” called George Sprott, 1894-1975 that The New York Times originally commissioned in 2006 as a 25-part weekly serial for its Sunday magazine.
Seth probably looked more like a Seth in the early 1980s. This would have been after he busted loose from the Ontario towns of his childhood (Clinton, Strathroy, Tilbury) to attend art college in Toronto and live as “a punky club kid with a scary pre-Goth look” who liked to drink and drug and “wanted a name to go along with all that.” Today, he's a decidedly dapper-looking gent – if, that is, you believe the fashions of 1937 represent the sine qua non of male haberdashery.
With his dark, brilliantined hair and round, horn-rimmed glasses, Seth clearly does. Shorts, T-shirts, jeans – the staples of casual 21st-century masculinity – are nowhere to be found in Seth's Xanadu. But vintage suits, patterned silk ties, fedoras, topcoats, wingtips and crisp white dress shirts? This is the place.
Seth easily admits his current look was entirely contrived at first – the result of “a phasing over from being a punk to being kind of a punk in a suit to being a guy listening to old jazz and then being someone who decided he wanted to completely wrap himself up in the world of pre-1940. I've done this several times in my life, made a switch and decided to force it. This time it was, ‘Okay, now I'm going to be an old-fashioned guy.'” After a while, it just became second nature to look like a brown-eyed handsome man heading out to the Zoot Suit riots of 1943.
