items from bygone eras. He rants about the modern world and criticizes himself, in particular to his friend and fellow cartoonist Chester "Chet" Brown. While searching for information on cartoonist Whitney Darrow, Jr., Seth comes across a cartoon signed "Kalo" in The New Yorker. Fond of this older style of cartooning which resembles his own, Seth sets off to find more about this obscure cartoonist. Seth begins a relation with a woman named Ruthie, whom he first spots while conducting a search at the Toronto Reference Library. He remains self-absorbed and pays little attention to her interests, though she shows enthusiasm for his and discovers Kalo's real name—Jack Kalloway. Seth learns Kalo had spent his life in Seth's own childhood hometown of Strathroy in Southern Ontario; when he makes a visit there he refuses to allow Ruthie to accompany him, and a month later breaks off the relationship, to his later regret. After two years of no progress Seth finds out that Kalo had run a real estate business in Strathroy that his daughter inherited on his death in 1979. He returns to Strathroy where he interviews Kalo's daughter and 93-year-old mother. He learns that Kalo spent years as a cartoonist in New York and gave up cartooning for real estate after returning to Strathroy and marrying. Kalo's mother had kept a collection of her son's work, but lost it when she moved to a nursing home. In the end, Seth has only the eleven cartoons he had found, which append the book. Publication It's a Good Life, If You Don't Weaken was serialized in issues (December 1993) through (June 1996) of Seth's comic book Palookaville, published by Drawn & Quarterly. It appeared in collected form in September 1996 from the same publisher. Seth said his mother used the title phrase when he was growing up. On the cover, Seth labelled the work "a Picture-Novella"; this allowed him to avoid the term "graphic novel" and instead use "an antiquated-sounding term". He has used the term on all his later book-length works of fiction. The book has been translated into a number of languages. A French edition appeared first in 1998, and then in an edition more faithful in production to the original English one—with blue wash on yellowed pages—and in a different translation in 2009. An Italian version followed in 2001. In 2004, editions appeared in German, Spanish, and Dutch.