by JULIET WATERS

PEI has always conjured up, for me, visions of blossoming trees, red earth, the "Lake of Shining Waters" and a life filled with difficult but loving and imaginative frugality. While my real childhood was the chaos of living with stressed-out yuppie parents, in my imagination I was a disciplined, healthy farm child, doing chores, frolicking in nature and getting shit-faced drunk on raspberry cordial.

Apparently I'd forgotten the first chapters of Anne of Green Gables, where Anne recounts her bitter childhood memories. This harsher PEI is the one you'll find in Bannock, Beans and Black Tea, graphic novelist Seth's loving transcription of his father John Gallant's memories of a brutal childhood during the Great Depression.

For the son of a man who had to abandon his education in Grade 2 (he didn't have the clothes to go to school) Seth is doing pretty well. A couple of weeks ago he was a large part of a cover story on graphic novels in The New York Times Magazine. His books, and the genre, will benefit immeasurably from a distribution deal his Montreal publisher, Drawn and Quarterly, just struck a couple of weeks ago with Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. This deal with the most respected and highbrow American publisher is tantamount to an official ordination of comix as a high art form. The literary quality of Seth's work undoubtedly has a lot to do with moving the genre into that pinnacle niche.

The attention is good because a book like Bannock, Beans and Black Tea is exactly the kind of book that too many people might make the mistake of reading quickly and only once. There's a resonance and subtlety to these stories that's going to be very difficult to hear for ears more usually attuned to our high-decibel culture. Also, it's not a graphic novel in the traditional sense, since there are actually only about two dozen pages in all of illustrated panels. Stylistically it brings to mind Lynda Barry's Cruddy, an almost unbearably bleak novel scripted in comic book lettering. Cruddy and Bannock together will one day make an interesting academic paper on the role of extreme childhood deprivation in nurturing comic book genius.

These simple, sad little stories about going to school wearing a flour sack as a shirt with kids so desperately hungry they eat up all the crayons, illustrate exactly where the graphic novel aesthetic is fitting into today's literary culture. Seth's work is the craft of a maximum minimalist that works exquisitely against the grain of our punishingly complicated, cluttered culture. The landscape of Gallant's childhood is so absurdly barren he can actually remember, at the age of six, the first person outside his family he ever saw.

The title refers to his usual breakfast, and the peak experience of this entire book is a brief period when young Johnny works on a farm and gets to eat "porridge with cream and sugar, bacon and eggs, lots of toast and cold milk." The death of one of his infant siblings, from freezing in the middle of the night, is mentioned almost as an atmospheric detail. He grows up near Souris, a town which "got its name from a plague of mice during the early 1700s. They destroyed the crops and then went down to the sea and drowned (or so the story goes.)" About the closest we get to any "lake of shining waters" is the afternoon Johnny goes fishing for eels with his grandfather. If there's irony in the sentence, "That evening we had a fine meal: eels, potatoes, turnip and bread" it's very, very quiet.

There's a lot more in this book for anyone who's willing to really listen. But if nothing else, no reader will ever close this book without a deeper appreciation for the value of a healthy breakfast.

Bannock, Beans and Black Tea by John Gallant and Seth, Drawn and Quarterly, hc, 120pp, $24.95