Clyde Fans

Seth began serializing Clyde Fans in his comic book series Palookaville starting in 1997, and the completed graphic novel was finally published as a single volume by Drawn & Quarterly in 2019. This roughly two-decade span makes it one of the longest-developed works in modern literary comics.

The book follows Abraham and Simon Matchcard, two brothers who run a failing oscillating fan company in the fictional town of Dominion, Ontario, loosely modeled on Seth's hometown of Strathroy. Spanning from the 1950s to the near-present, it chronicles the slow death of small-town Canadian commerce and the melancholy of missed personal connections.

Clyde Fans exists within the same fictional universe as much of Seth's body of work, including his semi-autobiographical George Sprott and the fictional town of Dominion. Readers familiar with his melancholic mid-century aesthetic will find Clyde Fans to be his most expansive statement on the themes of memory, nostalgia, and decline that run through all his books.

Clyde Fans was published by Drawn & Quarterly, the Montreal-based independent comics publisher with which Seth has had a long relationship. The 2019 complete hardcover edition is the definitive format, collecting all the serialized chapters from Palookaville into a single 496-page volume.