Palookaville #25

by Seth, Tracy Hurren (Editor)

Genres: Comics

112 pages, Hardcover

Published April 21, 2026

About the author

Seth, born Gregory Gallant in Clinton, Ontario, is a Canadian cartoonist celebrated for his distinctive visual style, deep sense of nostalgia, and influential contributions to contemporary comics. Known for the long-running series Palookaville and the widely acclaimed graphic novel It’s a Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken, he developed an aesthetic shaped by mid-20th-century magazine cartooning, particularly from The New Yorker, which he blends with themes rooted in Southern Ontario’s cultural memory. After studying at the Ontario College of Art and becoming part of Toronto’s punk-influenced creative scene, he adopted the pen name Seth and began gaining recognition through his work on Mister X. His friendships with fellow cartoonists Chester Brown and Joe Matt formed a notable circle within autobiographical comics of the early 1990s, where each depicted the others in their work. With Palookaville, published by Drawn & Quarterly, Seth refined his signature atmosphere of reflection, melancholy, and visual elegance. Beyond cartooning, he is an accomplished designer and illustrator, responsible for the celebrated book design of the ongoing complete Peanuts collection from Fantagraphics, as well as archival editions of Doug Wright and John Stanley. His graphic novels Clyde Fans, Wimbledon Green, and George Sprott explore memory, identity, and the passage of time through richly composed drawings and narrative restraint. Seth also constructs detailed cardboard architectural models of his imagined city, Dominion, which have been exhibited in major Canadian art institutions. He continues to live and work in Guelph, Ontario, noted for his influential role in shaping literary comics.

Reviews

[Dominick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Seth's meditations on time, art and stillness are becoming more distilled as his career progresses. As usual in this hardcover format for Palookaville there are three sections, a chapter of the ongoing Nothing Lasts graphic novel, a photo essay on Seth's art installation outside the Guelph Art Gallery, and a short story (in finished and sketchbook versions) about Dominion artist Owen Moore. One one level, this latter is a slight tale building to a rather laborious pun, but on another, it's a remarkable meditation on art and psychology. Seth go-tos such as a mother fixation and art that celebrates city spaces (I know these seem very distinct) are of course present. The piece is remarkably bleak, despite its focus on a putatively respected artist, and for me the most interesting segment. I suspect that Nothing Lasts, like Clyde Fans, will impress me more when it is finished, because it is hard to read this sort of deliberate, introspective story in installments coming out a year, or more, after each other. Nevertheless, Seth's late style (I guess that's what it is, by now) is remarkably economical in its visual choices, and all the more effective for it (I think). Great work, if you are willing to meet the artist where he is, rather than expecting him to come to you.

[Sam Quixote · Rating 1 out of 5]

Like Norwegian cartoonist (and similarly mononym’d) Jason, Seth is a great cartoonist whose more recent work has gone from being published straight to paperbacks into fancy hardcovers with a higher price point. And, also like Jason, Seth’s work has gone from being superb back then (1990s-2010s) to boring now (2020s - although this probably has nothing to do with the fancier publications, it’s just an odd pattern I noticed).

Palookaville #25 follows the same format as #24 - a charmingly-designed small hardcover split into three sections: Nothing Lasts, Part 5; a photo essay on an art installation called Living Room Suite; and a couple of renditions of a self-contained, brief biography of a fictional artist called Owen Moore.

Nothing Lasts is definitely the worst comic Seth has made. It’s a rambling, self-indulgent, thoroughly unentertaining memoir of his youth where the underlying message is that he liked the world of his youth. He describes a brief fling he had with an older married woman when he was a teenager and then goes to art school in Toronto. Cue many, many dull pages of Seth describing old Toronto buildings and a world that no longer exists that he appreciated. The new addition to his style in this part is that he now likes putting pointless footnotes on nearly every page.

The photo essay is about a bronze set of 1960s furniture - a sofa, two chairs, and a TV - that he designed and now sits in front of the Art Gallery of Guelph. It’s cool to see Seth’s art emerging into the real world but the section feels like padding for this otherwise-slight book.

Owen Moore started out as a 10 page fictional biography of an artist living in Seth’s imaginary city Dominion in notebook form, before being commissioned by the art magazine The Walrus, when it was polished up into a more professional presentation. It’s about an artist with a semi-Oedipal complex who lives a rather dull existence but whose work finds an audience towards the end of Moore’s life. Both versions - the notebook version and the one that appeared in The Walrus - are reprinted here.

Owen Moore feels like a weak addendum to his earlier book The Great Northern Brotherhood of Canadian Cartoonists - as if it was a chapter of that book that was cut because it wasn’t very good. And it’s not. Seth used to write these kinds of stories much better - see Wimbledon Green, Clyde Fans - but he can’t seem to replicate that same magic anymore. I liked the Walrus version of Owen Moore’s art though - these were published in the 2010s, back when Seth’s art still looked great (his new art in Nothing Lasts is a poor facsimile of his iconic style).

“Nothing lasts” could be a fitting description of the former high quality of Seth’s comics. Maybe recognition has changed him, maybe age, maybe something else - but the Seth I loved who made such great books as It’s a Good Life… and Wimbledon Green seems to have gone now and this new Seth is only capable of making utterly tedious comics I can barely get through. Fans won’t be expecting pulse-pounding action from his work but Palookaville #25 is still an absolute snore-fest even by Seth’s standards.

[Regis Philbert · Rating 5 out of 5]

The latest issue of this long running hardcover "comic book" from Seth features another gorgeous chapter of the graphic memoir "Nothing Lasts" and a new short story about forgotten painter, "Owen Moore," originally serialized in The Walrus magazine, presented here along with the prelim sketch version from Seth's notebooks; a rare glimpse behind the covers! More process stuff includes a middle section of photographs and drawings detailing the creation of his life-size sculpture "Living Room Suite" which I drive by everyday outside the Art Gallery of Guelph. Fascinating!

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

I groaned through the first chapter but I settled in since it's such a quick read.