Dominion: "Jaunty Model Buildings"

Last summer I posted about the artist Seth and his miniature city, Dominion. Recently I saw a post at HiLoBrow about Dominion and a new article about it by Joshua Glenn that is up at ArchitectureBoston.

Although Dominion's miniature buildings are simply made from cardboard, they're highly evocative, and ring true to me about what Ontario looks like even though the models are highly stylized. Well, the models capture a certain period in Ontario that lives on today mainly in remnants. Seth's graphic novel, It's A Good Life If You Don't Weaken, captures the sense of Dominion, or maybe Dominion captures the sense of the story - it's clear they're intertwined even though the novel preceded Dominion's first buildings by many years.

Plot-wise, the book chronicles Seth's attempts to track down a mid-20th century cartoonist named Kalo. While reading it I sometimes wondered if Kalo might have contributed a cartoon or two to any of the era's model railroading magazines. Although Kalo had cartoons published in Esquire and The New Yorker, he did have an early one in Modern Mechanix. Kalo's style is distinctive, so even though a cartoon might be unsigned, or unlisted in a table-of-contents, I think one of his might be identifiable on style alone. Well, if I ever see a model railroad one in his style, I'll let you know.

[Update 1 October 2020: Dumb me. Here I was thinking Kalo was a real person. No, Kalo is fictional as is the story - well, yes I knew the story was fictional, but for some reason I thought it incorporated real elements. Says something about the quality of Seth's writing as well as my gullibility.]