George Sprott:
1894-1975, A Picture Novella by the Cartoonist Seth (96 giant-sized
12x14-inch pages, in various duotones; hardback, $24.95) is a faux biography,
like others of Seth’s oeuvre, this one answering the question: Who was George
Sprott? — Arctic explorer, tv host, raconteur, beloved uncle? Or opportunist,
philanderer, deadbeat father, self-centered bore? Sprott lays the foundation
for his tv career by exploring the Canadian Arctic and filming his trips. After
which he mostly bores people by telling and re-telling his adventures. Instead
of exploiting the vast dimension of the book’s pages, Seth, who also sometimes
answers to the name Gregory Gallant,
fills the expanses with uniform grids of minuscule panels, sometimes as many as
42 per page, many depicting talking heads in close-up. Throughout, Seth tells
his tale as much by book design as by the traditional means inherent in
sequential visual storytelling. With this tome as exemplar, Publishers Weekly dubs Seth “one of the
form’s masters,” and I agree. Sean Howe in Entertainment
Weekly (July 17) says, “It’s hard to believe that [the character] Sprott
never actually existed.” But whatever happened to the rest of Seth’s Clyde Fans?
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