George Sprott: (1894-1975) »

Seth is the cartoonist of Clyde Fans; It’s a Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken; Wimbledon Green; Bannock, Beans, and Black Tea; and Vernacular Drawings; the designer of the New York Times bestselling Peanuts collections; and a New Yorker illustrator. He lives in Guelph, Ontario.

First serialized in The New York Times Magazine “Funny Pages”

The celebrated cartoonist and New Yorker illustrator Seth weaves the fictional tale of George Sprott, the host of a long-running television program. The events forming the patchwork of George’s life are pieced together from the tenuous memories of several informants, who often have contradictory impressions. His estranged daughter describes the man as an unforgivable lout, whereas his niece remembers him fondly. His former assistant recalls a trip to the Arctic during which George abandoned him for two months, while George himself remembers that trip as the time he began writing letters to a former love, from whom he never received replies.

Invoking a sense of both memory and its loss, George Sprott is heavy with the charming, melancholic nostalgia that distinguishes Seth’s work. Characters lamenting societal progression in general share the pages with images of antiquated objects—proof of events and individuals rarely documented and barely remembered. Likewise, George’s own opinions are embedded with regret and a sense of the injustice of aging in this bleak reminder of the inevitable slipping away of lives, along with the fading culture of their days.

The New York Times - Douglas Wolk

…approaches its subject from dozens of angles, from "interviews" with his intimates to immense, silent drawings of ice floes, all rendered in the painstakingly simple, bold brush strokes of midcentury illustration—a style of which Seth is the chief contemporary caretaker. As with most of his work, it's a memorial to a lost age of localism and craft, even as it's painfully alert to the dangerous allure of nostalgia.