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George Sprott, 1894-1975 (2009)

by Seth(Favorite Author)

4.09 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

1897299516 (ISBN13: 9781897299517)

languge

English

genre

Graphic Novels & Comics

publisher

Drawn and Quarterly

review 1: I think the conception of this is awesome. Having just read Building Stories by his close friend and mentor Chris Ware, I see a conversation across texts. Both are works that look to explode story representation, in various ways. We have this large book format from Seth (as with Ware and his box of variously formatted books and magazines and posters), as he tries to capture a mundane (not an exciting or famous or "important" life (as Ware does with his three women in Building Stories), just a normal person, whom we see is essentially forgotten even within the very industry (local Canadian tv nature show on the Arctic) he worked on for decades. Not a saint by any means, essentially boring and self centered as a person... so the challenge is: how do you represent such a life... more? (You might even ask why?!). Seth also wrote a precursor to this book about Sprott, where Sprott figures in as a minor character, Wimbledon Green, a funny story about the quirky, self-involved world of comic book collectors. There Seth credits Ware with providing a model for representing a life in fragments, and while Wimbledon Green was funnier, this book is more ambitious, a life represented by multiple interview fragments from family and friends and colleagues, a page on the tv station's shows on the day he died, images of his various women, his tv station... pictures of the vast snowy Arctic he apparently loved and made films traveling to over the years... we see his cold relationships with his mother, his wife and various women, his one child fathered with an Inuit woman he never saw again... Sprott is not a guy you "like" in the FB sense, but the challenge of making such a story is something Seth makes interesting, and it touches on his signature nostalgia for the always fading past, for all that gets lost that collectors (and we have them speaking in this book) learn to value, the artifacts of a fleeting, lost past. Why read it? Gorgeous art, brilliantly drawn, great dialogue. Why? For an example of how to write a biography from fragments, not a smooth, seemingly seamless narrative as too many biographies are, a sort of hybrid work. The image of the "lost child" haunts the story and is touching, in spite of the fact that we can't quite see how it touches the aloof Sprott. A forum on storytelling, how to tell a story.
review 2: It's Seth, so you kinda know what you're going to get. Real life told real well. I read it in one sitting, and I think you really need to to get the scope. It's a story that jumps around a lot, and mainly concentrates on his life and death, mostly death. I've never been a huge fan of Seth, but always appreciated what he's trying to do. At the end, I was a little depressed, and was probably manipulated to feel thus. What do it all mean ? Anyway, the format , story and art are up to his usual high standards. less

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