I really liked the fictitious biography of Canadian television host George Sprott. It was a fun read with a unreliable narrator and it was very reliable. Amazing writing and artwork by Seth. ( )

Disappointing. A comics take on oral biographies that unlike those I've read fails to make the subject or the events in any way distinctive or even of much interest. For all the impact this has, George Sprott the arctic tourist and fading TV presenter might as well have been Peggy Lipton the bird-watching lab technician or the retired accountant Marc Schwob who always takes the cross-town bus to buy bananas.

Writing aside, part of the flatness is I think the result of Seth's drawing style; the. lines are rounded, the details only basic ones, the shading firmly delineated. That's fine but this style doesn't really allow for subtlety., the lack of which llimits the effectiveness of the biography. Nor iis it at all effective in portraying the hallucinatory memories of a dying man which the artist so valued that they are iin gatefold pages which weren't in the event worth unfolding.

Another drawback was the frequent insertion of the narrator into the account: his clanking apologies for not knowing all the details of Sprott's life were just annoying but his jejune speculations about the void before and after a person's life were cringe-making and the earnest observation that one's outer life mightn't be a true reflection of one's inner life was equally embarassing.

I was hoping for better than this. Good idea for a story and something striking could have been made of it by someone who was brighter and a less limited illustrator. ( )

As a person who really responds to narrative and structure, the way that Seth gives us the story of his protagonist, George Sprott, is the big seller here. Told through multiple perspectives, bouncing back and forth in time, and taking advantage of Seth's deceptively simple drawing style and the large format of the book, this narrative comes at its topic at an angle, but ends up capturing the man perfectly. Sprott was an at-loose-ends editor of a boys magazine turned gentleman arctic explorer, who rolled those experiences into a long career as a TV personality and lecturer. We learn about his childhood, the end of his life, those who loved him, those who hated him, and those who merely overlapped with him a bit. He wasn't a particularly good man, but by the end of this detailed graphic portrait, he becomes a very real one. ( )

An exercise in naturalism, this suffers from the usual complaint I have with the genre -- beautiful technique, all expended for normal people and everyday life. This is at it's best when it is silent and meditative; at it's worst when the "honest" narrative captions hang on to every panel. ( )

Unlike the comical (and wonderful) 'Winbledon Green', here author Seth sustains a deeply elegiac tone throughout. The large pages encourage (maybe even enforce) a slower-than-usual pace, which contributes. It never breaks through to overt sorrow, but that may be the point. ( )