Seth’s Dominion and the Realm of an Artist’s Interest

Centre Pompidou’s massive celebratory exhibition Comics, 1964-2024 was as ambitious of an attempt to sum up the modern history of comics as anything I’ve ever seen, and it featured enough original art to leave any comics lover reeling. While it was amazing to pore over the work of so many cartoonists from around the world, the part of the exhibit that stood out to me the most was not a page of original comic art, but a miniature cardboard town titled Dominion.

You only have to take a glance at Dominion to know that the project came from the mind of Seth – it looks like a Seth drawing brought to life - a neat little city that may have existed somewhere once, with three-story bookstores and brick walled factories and cleverly themed business names. Reading more about the piece, I was delighted to find out that the artist handcrafted each of the buildings himself from cardboard boxes. The longer I looked at the buildings, the more I was taken in by each one. The quality of every outlined window, the vintage feel of the tiny hand painted signs, the complicated architectural elements (like corner entrances and a Greek temple façade) all added up to make this pristine and nostalgic quality that we are so familiar with in Seth’s drawn work.

While the richest part of the work can only be observed by getting close to the display, stepping away from Dominion made for interesting viewing too. The effect of the physical nature of the piece and the amount of space it took up in the gallery stood in contrast with the rest of the art on display. Most of the art in Comics, 1964-2024 consisted of comics pages in frames mounted on walls or laying in table cases. Dominion took up a good portion of the center of a room. It had to be maneuvered around. It took up physical space.

Walking around the large display, I began to understand why some comics fans also like to collect figurines. Not only does a miniature divorce style from the storytelling aspects of a comics page, a character model, or in this case a city model, satisfies our hunger for more detail. We can get closer for a better look. We can see the back of each building just as we can see the front (and the sides too!). We can choose to look at the city from above or from a lower angle. It’s a completely different way to interact with the art.

Of course, the Dominion buildings are even more interesting than plastic models because they were made by hand, by the artist, out of ordinary materials. Because they were made by hand, we can see where Seth would cut and fold and roll the cardboard to accomplish each individual effect. That tactile nature of the work makes the artist’s touch seem more present and adds a sense of weight to each creation. An inexact cut of a piece of cardboard would have rendered it unusable for a building that needed a roof or a door or a window of a certain size and shape. We understand (or at least can guess at) the massive amount of physical effort, as well as planning, that would go into each building because we can see (or at least guess at) how they were made.

When it comes to comics, we rarely get to see the physicality of the materials involved. The book in our hands is cleaned up, prepared for publication. Sometimes, in self-published comics we get the grainy noise from a photocopier, but usually we don’t see anything beyond the final art we are meant to see. We don’t see blue pencil lines or the sections that got whited out. We can’t always decipher how (or how much) ink was laid down for a section of black. We usually can’t even tell the scale the artist was originally working at. That’s a big part of the fun of exhibits like Comics, 1964-2024; we get a little more insight into the process. We get to see eraser marks and bits of pasted Bristol board. But the pages of art displayed, with all their physicality and texture, are still not the works as they are meant to be seen. The physical details of those pages are not central to the final work, which almost always loses the physical aspects tied to its creation. In a work like Dominion, the physical aspects and details are present in the work’s form. In fact, they make up a lot of what makes the piece special.

It isn’t only the choice of materials and format that set Dominion strangely at odds with the rest of the work in the exhibit. Beyond the fact that it was created by a well-known cartoonist, it didn’t really have a connection to the rest of the exhibition’s focus on sequential storytelling and comics culture. (Though, to be fair, this section of the exhibit was titled “Villes/Cities”). Dominion is not lifted from a comic. There is no cartooning involved. In fact, the work seemed to stand in direct contrast against the other work being displayed. It told no story. It featured no panels. It simply was.

Cartooning has a primary intention built in – communication. Dominion may communicate something, but it was not made to communicate. It wasn’t even made for an audience. In the 2014 documentary film called Seth’s Dominion (dir. Luc Chamberland), Seth speaks to why he works on projects like Dominion. “As an artist, you should have work that isn’t just to be published, and that’s why I have all these little hobbies, as I call them…That’s why I have the city of Dominion. It’s very different than working on a comic page where you know the minute you start it that you’re planning to publish it. That’s a straightforward artistic goal of trying to communicate with another person. There’s something really valuable about doing art that’s just for yourself.”

That personal aspect, that non-communicative instinct, one that avoids or at least ignores a public audience, colors how we might try to understand the work. Dominion, though its cardboard buildings may be on display in a museum exhibit about comics, exists for a reason outside of an audience. It was made for Seth’s enjoyment. Because we know this, we can assume that the artistic choices Seth makes with Dominion are made solely to follow his own aesthetic and his own interests. It’s as pure of a Seth work as one can imagine, and it’s thankfully presented in a way that the viewer can soak in every miniscule detail and artistic choice. It serves as is a treasure trove of Seth’s interests and skill and style. But that’s not all.

What is possibly most tantalizing about the whole project is that, though the cardboard city we see is so rich with detail, it is not the complete work – the complete work isn’t even finished. Elaborating over email about the ongoing project, Seth writes, “Those little cardboard buildings are the tip of an iceberg of my imaginary city. Most of the planning of Dominion has gone into a series of workbooks that catalog and describe the history, people and urban landscape of the place. It has gotten quite elaborate over the years and lately it is more about the ‘famous’ citizens of the town than anything else. One element builds upon the other and it is a process of endless elaboration. A great pleasure to work on.”

Dominion is also a great pleasure to think about. Who are the famous citizens of Dominion? How do they spend their days? What are their dramas? Dominion’s cardboard buildings, in their neat rows, teem with those questions and possibilities. Getting up close to the buildings, you can easily imagine a schoolteacher popping into the shop for a gallon of milk or a lawyer waiting in line at City Hall for some paperwork. And because we are familiar with Seth’s work, with his characters and his storytelling, we can recognize the echoes of his unseen city – even when we cannot see it.

Even as a partial work, knowing the background of the piece makes the cardboard buildings of Dominion feel like possibly more of a statement for Seth’s distinctive style and personal interests than any of his published work. We know that Dominion is what Seth works on outside of consideration for a reader and publishing schedules and the confines of what can be printed in a book, and that (as well as the time consuming and labor-intensive physical aspects of the work) makes it stand apart from Seth’s published work.

What has delighted me the most about learning about Dominion is that Seth also holds this mostly-unseen work to be of high importance. While it might be easy for fans of Seth’s cartooning to dismiss Dominion as a side project or a curiosity compared to his impressive body of published graphic novel work, Seth disagrees. In his email, he writes, “Probably, in the end, these notebooks will be the real life's work. I only hope I live another 20 years to get to the ‘finishing point’ with them. They can never really be finished but I know that at a certain point I will hit a kind of critical mass of information and it will feel ‘finished enough.’"

Comics, 1964-2024 ran in Centre Pompidou from May 29 – Nov 4 2024