It's a Good Life, If You Don't Weaken

It's a Good Life, If You Don't Weaken
First edition cover, Drawn and Quarterly, 1996
Creator	Seth
Date	1996
Page count	176 pages
Publisher	Drawn and Quarterly
Original publication
Published in	Palookaville
Issues	4–9
Date of publication	1993–1996

It's a Good Life, If You Don't Weaken is a graphic novel by Canadian cartoonist Seth. It appeared in a collected volume in 1996 after serialization from 1993 to 1996 in issues #4–9 of Seth's comic book series Palookaville. The mock-autobiographical story tells of its author's obsessive search for the work of a fictional forgotten cartoonist.

Seth presents the fictional book as a work of autobiography and features figures from his life such as his friend and fellow cartoonist Chester Brown. The minimalist artwork draws from the styles of the early New Yorker cartoonists, rendered in thick brushstrokes with heavy blacks against a greyish-blue wash. The story unfolds with a nostalgic and melancholic tone, and several wordless scenes take the reader on a tour of Southern Ontarian city- and landscapes. The book gained Seth a reputation as part of an autobiographical comics trend in the 1990s. It won two Ignatz Awards in 1997 and ranked No. 52 of The Comics Journal's "100 Best Comics of the 20th Century".

Seth, a cartoonist then based in Toronto, first drew attention to his work in 1985 when he took over art duties from the Hernandez brothers for Mister X from Toronto publisher Vortex Comics. In April 1991 he launched his own comic book, Palookaville, with Montreal publisher Drawn and Quarterly. By this time, Seth's artwork had evolved to a style inspired by The New Yorker cartoons of the 1930s and 1940s.

Self-revelatory autobiography was a prominent genre in alternative comics in the early 1990s, drawing influence from the works of Robert Crumb, Harvey Pekar, Art Spiegelman, and others of the earlier underground comix generation. Seth had focused on autobiographical stories since Palookaville débuted. Friends of his appeared in them, most prominently fellow Toronto-based cartoonists Chester Brown and Joe Matt, who also featured each other in their own autobiographical comics. Though a work of fiction, Seth presented It's a Good Life, If You Don't Weaken as another autobiographical story, an approach inspired in part by Lynda Barry, who mixed autobiography with fiction in her comics. Seth, Matt, and Brown shared a melancholy worldview and a self-deprecatory approach, though Seth showed far more restraint in the content of his work than the other two, whose comics revealed personal details such as their authors' masturbation habits.