Drawn & Quarterly, unpaginated, $24.95, hardcover.

Canadian cartoonist Seth continues his expedition into the past with the exquisitely designed Bannock, Beans, and Black Tea: Memories of a Prince Edward Island Childhood in the Great Depression.

As Seth and his father, John Gallant (born 1917), make clear in these reminiscences of Gallant's childhood, there wasn't much that was great about the Depression, at least as seen from the perspective of the dirt-poor Acadian refugees of St. Charles, PEI. The winters were cold, the wind was unrelenting, and "raw turnip is no treat--but like I said, when you are starving...!"

Seth travelled the quieter byways of Southwest Ontario in the sketchbook Vernacular Drawings (2002), and Bannock, Beans, and Black Tea (the title is taken from his dad's typical breakfast, when there was breakfast) furthers his belief that the past is best viewed from the ground up, no matter how stony that might be. When Seth was a kid, his father's yarns about his early years were, as he says in a comic-book-style introduction, "just fun stories filled with conflict, adventure, and determination. Only when I was older did I come to see them for what they really were--tales of awful desperation." Transcribed, ordered, edited, and illustrated, they resolve into a picture of a hardscrabble life eked out of ungiving earth and crumbs of neighbourly charity, and despite the incomprehensible indifference of Gallant's own father, toward whom he carries an ongoing baffled rage.

There's more than a hint of suspender-snappin' one-downmanship to Bannock (it were three miles to the school--uphill each way), but after experiencing Gallant's recollections of the struggle, the hand-me-down cruelty, the tragedies made worse by their incidental nature, it's impossible not to sympathize with his weary acceptance: "It is very difficult for me to write any more of this story. It makes me feel as if I am going to cry. I will still remember that sad day forever. I guess we all know who is to blame for her death--but very little can be done about it now."

Gallant asks modern readers to compare the easy lives they have inherited from his generation of pioneers, and so, along with Seth, let us do that very thing.