CBC interviews Seth about inclusion in Canada Post stamp series

A new stamp series has been released by Canada Post featuring four Canadian graphic novelists.

The stamps include work by Chester Brown, Michel Rabagliati, cousins Jillian Tamaki and Mariko Tamaki and Seth.

Seth, who made his name with the award-winning Palookaville comic series, lives in Guelph, Ont., and spoke with Craig Norris, host of CBC Kitchener-Waterloo's The Morning Edition, about his career and what it's like to have been chosen to be on a stamp.

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Craig Norris: Describe the new stamp that features your art.

Seth: Each of the stamps in this series shows the main character from your most popular or well-known book reading their own book. So they all have kind of a united look to them and look very nice in a package.

Norris: How did you feel when you found out you were going to be on a stamp?

Seth: It'd probably be a better story if I said I was angry or something, but of course I was extremely pleased.

That's actually, that's underselling it because, I guess I would be kind of flabbergasted, you know? It's the kind of thing that certainly when I started out my career, I did not expect that at any point I'd end up on a stamp, which was something that means a lot to me.

Norris: Talk a bit about the process. I mean, how does this happen? How do you find out that they want to do this?

Seth: Yeah, basically, if I recall, I think I just got a phone call.

Behind the scenes, you of course never have any idea how this works. There is some sort of a process where experts are brought in on different topics who suggest people and then at some point a subject is decided on. So they decided on this graphic novel idea and then they brought in various people who decided who would be chosen. They winnowed it down.

And all this happens long, of course, before they ever call you. And then the phone rang. And you know, it's one of those things in life where you're just like, 'What?' And then I was like, you know, then you get off the phone later and you're like, 'Wow, that's amazing.'

Norris: Graphic novels, they are part of the reading zeitgeist now, but they weren't really when you started producing Palookaville, right? What was it about it that you wanted to tell stories in a way that may have been less tangible or maybe a bit more obscure at the time?

Seth: Well, like most cartoonists my age — I'm getting old now. I'm 62 — we grew up reading the mainstream comic books of Spiderman and Superman and all that sort of stuff.

And almost all of us wanted to grow up and draw those comics. But for a handful of us, we got to a certain age, like in our early 20s, and we kind of had lost interest to do funny animals or super heroes or any of the usual subject matter of comic books. But I always say by that point you've been kind of tricked into being a cartoonist. You've spent your entire teen years drawing comics and learning the skills.

Certainly for myself in my early 20s, that was the new moment to figure out what did I want to do with comics then? And at that point, there's a handful of people who decided what they really wanted to do was try and tell stories for adults. It was an exciting time because it was a very small number of artists doing this around the world and there was a kind of a fervour amongst us as if it was an art movement, I suppose. But none of us had any high ambitions in the sense that we expected to take the world by storm.

Read the rest of the interview and check out the audio version here!