The Great Northern Brotherhood of Canadian Cartoonists

In this strange, unsatisfying ramble Seth, who corners us like an under-utilised room attendant in a minor stately home, spins us the interminable, winding non-story of the The Great Northern Brotherhood of Canadian Cartoonists.

It’s a stout tactile little volume that owes a lot to 2008’s Wimbledon Green, also from Drawn and Quarterly. If you missed it, Wimbledon Green was an extended improv from Seth, lifted with little or no polish from his sketchbook.

In its introduction Seth warns that it wasn’t written for an audience, had no structure or plan behind it and that the drawings were a bit rough. Fair warning, I thought and noting the £15 price tag, spent the money on fags.

However when Wimbledon Green turned up in remainder book stores – and, well, at £3, I’d have been a fool not to – to my surprise I found myself tickled pink by the tales of the Greatest Comic Book Collector in the World.

For all its haphazard lack of planning and finesse Wimbledon Green is a great, whacky and whimsical read and I recommend it, especially if you can get it cheap. It’s set in a world of heroic comics collectors, double crossed trades and grades and incredible attributive skills. Check it out!

The Great Northern Brotherhood of Canadian Cartoonists seems to be the same sort of beast as Wimbledon Green; not only does it come from ‘the sketchbook of the cartoonist Seth’,  it’s another pseudo-history of an alternative world where comics and cartoons briefly receive the respect and study afforded to other media.

The Great Northern Brotherhood of Canadian Cartoonists is the name of the professional association/clubhouse of Canuck practitioners of the Ninth Art – and Seth guides us through its imaginary hallways, pointing out architectural detail and regaling us with anecdotes from the lives of made-up Canadian cartoonists.

Now in some circumstances I could eat this up – Will Eisner’s The Dreamer for instance, A Drifting Life by Yoshihiro Tatsumi. These are rambling, winding comics of no interest to anyone but your obsessive comics type and I loved them.

Not much happens for sure, in fact mostly a bunch of blokes sit about drawing, but if you like to know about comics history they’re great. They tell you about the things that happened around Eisner and Tatsumi and to some of us that’s interesting.

The problem with The Great Northern Brotherhood of Canadian Cartoonists is that it’s not true and when it’s not true, when it’s about blokes sitting about drawing, and about the things they didn’t draw then it’s just not that interesting. Maybe it can be for a page or two, but it goes on and on. Pages and pages and pages about characters that never existed and cartoonists who never drew.

At some level it’s a flight of fancy that might have worked – there’s a melancholy nostalgia to it we’ve seen in Seth’s previous comics, and that ache for a time that’s never existed is fairly beguiling, but in the end Seth doesn’t have a range of interesting characters or stories to tell, just a long long list of strips and cartoons that never were.