This delivers a fairly amazing sense of place and time ( )

Seth needed 20 years to complete his longest work. Not that he spent all his time working on it - he published other things in the meantime but for 14 issues of his comic book Palookaville (which took the 20 years between 1998 and 2017), the main story in each issue was Clyde Fans.

The 5 parts of the story span 40 years although some of the flashbacks go even further in time - from the founding of the business by the father to its final collapse. The story opens at the end and then goes back to fill in the gaps - not linearly but jumping in time.

At the opening, it is 1997 (contemporary to when this part was written) and Abe Matchcard is an old man, living in what used to be the Clyde Fans building and telling the reader about the company his father founded (and then absconded from it and the family) and its history since that day. Once upon a time, it was a thriving business - Electric Fans were in vogue and sold well and "Clyde Fans" had the best products out there. Abe's brother, Simon, was supposed to take care of the business but for reasons which were not yet revealed, he ended up a recluse instead. So Abe stepped up, grew the business - and then watched it collapse when he ignored the rise of air conditioning.

For all intents and purposes, the book could have stopped here - we know the story now, right? But that's where the details come into play - the next 4 parts fill in the things that were just hinted at (or not even hinted at in some places) - from 1957 when we finally learn what happened to Simon (parts 2 and 5) through 1966 in part 3 where the business starts falling and the boys' mother needs to be put into a nursing home to 1975 in part 4 where Abe needs to admit defeat and close the factory. And in between all of that life are the musings of Abe (and Simon in his parts of the novel) about business and people and age. The circling back at the end, filling the last of the puzzle pieces in the very last pages of the novel works unexpectedly well - even though you know what must happen, seeing it happening is emotional.

What emerges is not just a history of a family and a business but the history of small businesses - what happens when new technology comes? What happens when the big stores and companies take over? Nothing good - unless you are willing to change and even if you used to be a risk-taker, remaining one, always being ready to change gets progressively harder. Business and family are weaved together inseparably - and despite the novel being about the business, it is also a family saga. And almost anyone can recognize parts of their own in it.

If you look at the first and last pages of the novel, you will see a change in the style - the art gets more confident as time passes, more mature. But you won't see that change as the novel progresses - it happens gradually, without abrupt changes. Not that the first pages are bad but there is a hesitancy there - more than in the later parts of the novel anyway.

Possibly because of its publication history and probably partly because it was moving so slow, the comics and graphic work awards never gave it even a nod. But the mainstream noticed it when it finally emerged completed - the Giller prize jury longlisted it in 2020 - the first (and only one so far I think) graphic novel to be even considered for the award - a novel is a novel, regardless of its form.

Even if you had never read a graphic novel before, try this one. A story is a story regardless of how you tell it and Seth knows how to tell a story. ( )

Another beautiful work from Seth, but so bleak and depressing. ( )

Simon and Abe Matchcard are brothers, second generation Canadian business owners struggling to save the family business of selling oscillating fans in a world switching to air-conditioning, written and illustrated by Seth, a renowned cartoonist. The story, told in graphic form, is a classic one, exploring the decline of small scale businesses and family life, in this case, the disappearance of the father/founder and its profound and lasting impact. The book moves back and forth between three periods: 1957, 1975 and 1997, starting with Simon's disastrous first sales trip, leading to his reluctance to leave the house and care for their aging mother. The book's focus on success and failure degenerates into tedium: Simon's complete withdrawal from society, living upstairs from the shuttered store, their mother's decline into dementia, Abe dealing with his own recriminations of past transgressions, and Simon's wandering in a rural wilderness.

Don't skip the afterword. ( )

Nostalgia for a time and place in Southern Ontario that I did not directly experience, but can remember remembering. There's so much detail here in the storytelling, the page design, the illustrations. And a deeply melancholic and touching story. ( )