Secure Clyde Fans Drafted By Seth Displayed In Manuscript

selfcontained universe of nostalgia and stillness”, Masterpiece Clyde Fans/

Seth real name Gregory Gallant is a Canadian cartoonist whose artistic style is said to remind of The New Yorker cartoons of thess.
Inspired by a real business that was once in operation in Toronto, his graphic novel Clyde Fans follows a nonlinear plot and two very different brothers extraverted Abe and introverted Simon, whose father left them his business selling electric fans.
The pair responds differently to the changing business environment, social demands and times and, in this story, we trace their lives through the life of a company that came to define them and their family, following them through their hopes and dreams, initial successes, bankruptcies, family tragedies and growing desperation fuelled by years of buried pride and reluctance to welcome the future.
This reflective picture novel takes a very close look at nostalgia and asks whether there is something precious being lost every time we decide to walk with the changing times, or ahead of them.
From the wisdom of the old age to “commercial” loneliness and misunderstandings faced in ones youth, the novel asks what is “success”, and what is “failure” in life What is the nature of time and what it means to finally come to grips with its passage How time changes us, or does not Clyde Fans is a deeplyfelt work about human memories, making sense of the past and the anguish of passing years and lost hopes, a tribute to one oncecommercially successful and ambitious little world that is no more.


The book starts in, but then events also move to,and to, In, we follow one aging exsalesman who goes through his daily routine and, while he does so, he talks to us about his past, his career and what it takes to succeed in a highly pressurised environment of sales and deal closures, that kind of an environment where true sincerity, friendship and human warmth are hard to come by.
As he talks, we begin to understand that he, Abe Matchcard, inherited his business from his father, who, in turn, opened his shop “Clyde Fans” in.
Much “sales” wisdom is imparted to us, while we get to understand the loneliness of the profession and the power of habit: “A good sale is not unlike a military manoeuvre.
Researched, studied, yet still spontaneous” Seth,:“Its funny how long a man can simply keep doing what hes always done no matter how futile” Seth,:“The life of a salesman is a life of waiting between pitches” Seth,:and “youll get nothing in life if you wont ask for it”Seth,:.
We learn that persistence counts in business and sales, but it so happens that it was failure to adapt that signalled Clyde Fans downfall.
When airconditioning started to appear, Clyde Fans missed the opportunity to stock this new technology too,

There is something of Richard Yatesvibe to this novel, maybe because Seth wanted to portray the world of his parents and to capture some of the consequences of the Age of Anxiety world.
One theme here could be the new generations feelings of being incapable or fearful of keeping up with their parents zeal for commerce and hardwork ethic when so much had changed in the world and it was not peoples decency, character or hardwork that began to matter or valued in the world of business anymore, but how fast can one talk, how fast can one sell, and whether future employees have the appearance of being hardworking, productive and respectable people.


The novels blue/darkgreen images are effective in conveying a range of emotions, ideas and thoughts of the characters.
How do we process memories Why do we make certain decision in life or, maybe, dont make them, and what makes “us” in the business world Seths work does get quite metaphysical by the end.


Clyde Fans means to say that behind every small business there are, or once were, real people with their real stories of hope, dreams of prosperity, and their share of successes and failures.
Clyde Fans is a profound work full of philosophical questions about life and the meaning we attach to our daily jobs.
I have followed this family drama about two elderly brothers "dull and grey" since it began twentythree years ago in Palookaville, and it is nice to find it all finally collected under one cover.
It's more a tone piece than a story, with the five parts skipping around the decades between thes ands.


The first chunk consists of the older brother wandering around a building intalking to himself about the history of his family's shuttered business and his experience in sales.
Lowkey, but engaging in its way,

The second part jumps back toand has the introverted younger brother wandering around Dominion, Canada Seth's fictional city for which he spent a decade building a real life scale model, failing at becoming a traveling salesman.
It's a pretty interesting study of a man slowly falling apart,

Alas, the book starts falling apart for me in the third section as we are thrust into a week ofto experience the decline in mental health of the younger brother and their mother.
Dream sequences, delusions and dementia dominate, The older brother really starts leaning into being the cold asshole he is totally revealed to be in the next sequence set in.


The final part returns toto crawl deep inside the younger brother's head following his failure at sales, It's pretty much unreadable for me, and almost leaves me wondering why I bothered with the book, but really it's mostly about the art.
I just really like Seth's style, El tiempo que pasa, la nostalgia, personajes varados en sí mismos, la cruda realidad, Unas imágenes y una manera de narrar una historia más que original, Esto es Seth. O te gusta o no te gusta, pero el tío impresiona y siempre te hace sentir algo, Que de eso es de lo que se trata, O no A masterful work about a failing family business and the ensuing erosion of sibling relations and ones sanity

Twenty years in the making, Clyde Fans peels back the optimism of midtwentieth century capitalism.
The legendary Canadian cartoonist Seth lovingly shows the rituals, hopes, and delusions of a middle class that has long ceased to exist in North Americagarrulous men in wool suits extolling the virtues of their wares to taciturn shopkeepers with an eye on the door.
Much like the myth of an evergrowing economy, the Clyde Fans family unit is a fraudthe patriarch has abandoned the business to mismatched sons, one who strives to keep the business afloat and the other who retreats into the arms of the remaining parent.


Abe and Simon Matchcard are brothers, the second generation struggling to save their archaic family business of selling oscillating fans in a world switching to airconditioning.
At the center of Clyde Fanss center is Simon, who flirts with becoming a salesman as a lastditch effort to leave the protective walls of the family home but is ultimately unable to escape Abes critical voice in his head.
As the business crumbles, so does any remaining relationship between the brothers, both of whom choose very different life paths but still end up utterly unhappy.


Seths intimate storytelling and gorgeous art allow urban landscapes and detailed period objects to tell their own stories as the brothers struggle to keep from suffocating in an airless city home.
An epic time capsule of a story line that begs rereading, The Great Canadian Novel, filled with enough pathos, loneliness, and rare moments of beauty for at least twenty years of graphic art.
A quick note before I write about this book: I've had it with this site's godforsaken star system and am going to experiment with dropping them.
I'd love to have a scale out of ato grade on, but the just feel so cheap and unsubtle and I give one star to the experience of giving three to a book I like, because three looks like shit and everyone knows it.
But four is a lie sometimes and five is something I need to think about more closely, because when I think about it distantly all books are fivestar books because they are books and I love books.
But that is insane and I am after cultivating some better defined standards moving

forward, Something like clarity around what my actual taste is, and how to talk about it, So that's it for me, no this year,

Anyway here's my review:

While in some ways Clyde Fans is an impressive contribution to graphic literatureformally complex, it accomplishes some of the narrative depth too frequently lacking in this kind of workit is also a punishingly dull story about a little shit of a man and his scrambled ghost of a younger brother, taking place in three timelines,, and.


The story is more or less a portrait of the two men, older brother Abe who knows how to work the world to his advantage and younger brother Simon who does not.
I could not have found Abe less interesting if he had been in line ahead of me at the pharmacy, and listening to him, in the Clyde Fans's opening sequence, preen about what a good faker of sincerity he was, was tiresome.
Most men like this, men who think they are fooling you, aren't, but if there's one quality that binds them, it is how bleatingly, needily, godawful dull they are.
This book is a bit like that,

When I got to the Blackpersoninawatermelon figurine I sort of lost my will, tbh, I powered through the rest of what had begun to feel more and more tonedeaf, more and more like a book for straight old white men, waiting for its straight old white male author to do something with this crude, cruel, cliched imagery, make sense of it being there, make art of it, but it never comes together.
In fact there is an additional racist figurine, and while this one does have a role to play in the story, I would argue that any doll can haunt you in the house where you're dying.
Doesn't have to be racist,

And then once Abe the older brother launched into his truly loathsome, pathetic reminiscences about all the "young girls" he'd tricked into or paid for sex, I became resigned to my suspicion that I wasn't going to find a lot of love for this book in my own heart.


Hardly any of the reviews I've read mention the racist imagery, and even when they do, they seem to like it, like this, from The AV Club:

"One of the most unsettling scenes occurs when Simon talks to a pickaninny figurine that sits on his shelf, which speaks in empty word balloons while staring intensely at nothing.
Simon projects all of his insecurities onto the talking toy, and while we dont see the words hes hearing in his mind, his reactions reinforce this idea that the pickaninny is there to tear down Simon and make him feel unworthy.
This racial commentary acknowledges the ways that white people feed a system that keeps marginalized communities down and prevents society from making positive changes for all.
"

For my money that's a stretch, That is QUITE a stretch, actually, for my money,

The art, as always from Seth, is really topshelf stuff, which just makes it all the more bitter a pill to swallow that this novel is quite bad, a life of the mind about men whose minds are not interesting or interested, in life or each other or anything beyond the tiny crumbling scope of their private, doomed, invisible industry.


In conclusion, if it is possible for you to love this book, I either envy you the experience or probably don't want to get to know you too well.
I don't know what Seth thinks about this book but it feels like a misfire to me, I hope he does more stuff and quickly because of the group that once included himself, Ware, Joe Matt, and Chester Brown, he's among the easier of them to love, and as long as he's creating he's still growing, which is all I'm really interested in.






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