Sometimes a story is best left a story. GROTH: [Laughs.] I pretty much saw through that at the time, but retrospect it's really embarrassing just how awful... SETH: It does not hold up at all. He was The Kid Who Could Draw. Strange to any of his didactically repetitious Randian tracts [laughs]. You see them reviewed in major newspapers and exhibited in serious museums. I wouldn’t have predicted it. Obviously we’ve made a lot of social progress. SETH: As young as I can remember. “Well, there’s the intro to your story,” he says. GROTH: What I would call an "artistic conscience," among the first generation of cartoonists, was always being mitigated by all kinds of essentially commercial demands. It has been edited by Dominick Grace, Eric Hoffman, and Seth. But I still wanted to be a cartoonist. Another shelf houses issues of, magazine and old Detroit television schedules that Seth has amassed and bound. The way faith, for example, enters into the strips, occasionally heavy-handed, but so often it's handled so naturally and so well that it just adds a layer to the work without being self-conscious. Not only your interest in comics, but the changes in your life that moved you from what may have been a dilettante-ish interest in comics to a deep and abiding interest in the form. They're certainly more fan to read. I was picking up Heavy Metal, and I would see the occasional underground comic book and I'd buy it. That familiarity with Peanuts—I'm sure that with almost everything I do with comics, Peanuts is in there somewhere. But in the minicomics movement, or in the younger guys, I'm not sure if I can put a finger on it, but I guess I could point a finger to Jeff Levine and his discussions in Destroy All Comics. He's managed to capture, with these really simple characters and very few continuities, some sort of deep feeling for the human condition. GROTH: Yeah. In the parlor alone there’s a light-up ceramic sculpture of Kao-Kuk, an Inuit astronaut from his book The Great Northern Brotherhood of Canadian Cartoonists. That came about during art school. Why does a boulder need a story? Maybe one day he’ll publish it. According to local legend, it had not been there the day before. One of the few no things they did it in the '70s. I think at some point — this is off on a tangent — but I think that artists have some sort of drawing style that they just naturally gravitate towards, and for me it's always been a very cartoony kind of approach. When Seth and his wife, Tania, bought this home, it was a typical 1980s kitchen, so of course the first thing they did was destroy it. I'd read the first few issues when they were initially published and remember thinking, rather crankily, that they were unremittingly tedious; the New Yorker-ish drawing and I the glacial pace practically canceled each other out. As we finish our meal, I tell him about my watch stopping on his front lawn. Take, for instance, the notebooks on the history of Dominion, the fictive city that often appears in his series. Smoking (a former prodigious smoker, he quit about eight years ago). Whatever happened to Nate Simpson’s Nonplayer? It's kind of too earnest, or something. Floor-to-ceiling custom shelves hold everything from a full series of. Entrance to the yard is barred by a towering wrought iron archway, custom-made to read: omnis temporalis. Three illuminated signs hang on the front porch. So he likes to open them up and discover what he was watching on a particular day and ponder, for instance, why he was taking in episodes of I Love Lucy when Citizen Kane was on. The illustration work is always of a lower quality, simply because of the fact that you're dealing with somebody else's concerns. ( Log Out /  I didn't know how to socialize properly. He returns and politely requests the chair I have selected.