Palookaville 22

This intermittent anthology—the last volume was published in 2013—starts with part four of Seth’s (George Sprott) industrial and family drama “Clyde Fans,” in which the family-run fan factory nears closure, and the two Matchcard brothers hash out past incidents. A shorter piece shows work he created for his wife’s retro barbershop. The center of the book is the second part of “Nothing Lasts” (part one is in Palookaville 21), a memoir that unfolds through memories of the houses and apartments Seth lived in as a kid. In Seth’s meticulous, exquisitely rendered environment, objects and buildings are markers and emotional containers that elicit specific recollections, usually traumatic. At times poetic, at others obsessive, Seth’s fictional and autobiographical worlds unfold in an eerie blue shadow. The stories’ tone and pacing accentuate the alienation and loneliness the characters feel—most significantly Seth himself, as he relates his creative and emotional kinship with comics, both as what saved him and what destroyed any chance of connection with others. (May)