A masterful work by a legendary cartoonist about a failing family business and the ensuing erosion of sibling relations and one's sanity.LANDMARK WORK FROM A RENOWNED CARTOONIST AND NEW YORKER COVER ARTIST: Clyde Fans is the twenty-years-in-the-making standalone work from one of today's greatest cartoonists and a vital contributor to D+Q's canon. Seth's comics have been featured in The New York Times, New Yorker, Walrus, Best American Comics. THE DEFINITIVE CLYDE FANS AND THE DEFINITIVE SETH BOOK WITH EXTENSIVE TOUR: This omnibus features new material, lavishly designed and carefully crafted. Much like 2018's Berlin by Jason Lutes, Clyde Fans is Seth's masterwork and will be received as such. In addition to the press and interview circuit, Seth will be going on tour for the first time in many years. THE DECLINE OF THE 20TH CENTURY CAPITALIST DREAM: Clyde Fans shows the gradual disintegration of the middle-class dream of small-scale capitalism. Through two brothers trying to salvage their family business, Seth tells the story of failing small business and failing small towns, poignantly showing the people capitalism left behind.
THEMES OF SIBLING RIVALRY, ANXIETY, AND MEMORY: Like all of Seth's work, Clyde Fans engages memory and family. His portrayal of the sibling rivalry between the two brothers is also an investigation of how memory and time work, and how we handle anxieties about relationships and our jobs.SETH'S AESTHETIC DISTINCTIVELY MATCHES HIS CONTENT: Seth draws his comic using a traditional method of illustration that is very laborious and results in something that looks and feels like it all happened in the mid-twentieth century.A MASTERFUL WORK BY A LEGENDARY CARTOONIST ABOUT THE DECLINE OF SMALL BUSINESS AND THE SUBSEQUENT EROSION OF FAMILIAL RELATIONS AND ONE'S SANITYTwenty years in the making, Clyde Fans peels back the optimism of mid-twentieth capitalism. Legendary Canadian cartoonist Seth lovingly shows the rituals, hopes, and delusions of a middle-class that has long ceased to exist in North America--garrulous men in wool suits extolling the virtues of the wares to taciturn shopkeepers with an eye on the door. Much like the myth of an ever-growing economy, the CLYDE FANS family unit is a fraud--the 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 air conditioning. At Clyde Fans' center is Simon, who flirts with becoming a salesman as a last-ditch effort to leave the protective walls of the family home, but is ultimately unable to escape Abe's critical voice in his head.
As the business crumbles so does any remaining relationship between the two men, both of whom choose very different life paths but still end up utterly unhappy.Seth's intimate storytelling and gorgeous art allow urban landscapes and detailed period objects to tell their own stories as the brothers struggle to find themselves suffocating in an airless city home. An epic time capsule of a storyline that begs rereading.