By Jim Woodring (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-60699-594-5
Some creators in the world of comics just defy description and their graphic novels and collections are beyond the reviewer’s skills (mine certainly) to elucidate or encapsulate. Some are just so pedestrian or mind-numbingly bad that one simply can’t face writing about them. Others are so emphatically wonderful that no collection of praise and analysis can do them justice.
At the apex of that tricky funnybook pyramid is Jim Woodring: a position he has maintained for years and clearly appears capable of holding for years to come. Woodring’s work is challenging, spiritual, philosophical, funny, beautiful and extremely scary. And, even after reading that sentence, you will have absolutely no idea of what you will be seeing the first time you read any of it.
Moreover, even if you have scrupulously followed cartoonist, animator, Fine Artist, toy-maker and artistic Renaissance Man James William Woodring through an eccentric career spanning his first mini-comics in 1980, the groundbreaking Fantagraphics magazine series such as Jim (1986), the notional spin-off Frank (of which Weathercraft was the latest incredible instalment), Tantalizing Stories, Seeing Things, Congress of the Animals or his more mainstream features such as Star Wars and Aliens tales for Dark Horse, you’ll still have no idea how you will respond to his newest work.
Woodring delivers surreal, abstract, wild, rational, primal cartooning: his clean-mannered art a blend of woodblock prints, Robert Crumb style, wry humour and eerie conviviality, Dreamscape, religious art and monstrous phantasmagoria. His works form a logical, progressional narrative pockmarked with multiple layers of meaning but generally void of speech or words, magnificently dependent on the intense involvement of the reader as a fully active participant.
So you can imagine what his first formative thoughts, passing observations and moments of wild unfettered graphic whimsy must be like…
This stunning little hardback opens the gates of dream just a crack and offers selected graphic snippets from his sketchbooks covering the superbly productive period following the millennium and offering a few choice views of the other graphic avenues he could have travelled if the world of harnessed hallucinations had not such a strong hold…
In his ‘Introduct’ Woodring describes his abandonment of traditional graphic tomes for diminutive “Moleskine” doodle-pads, using the flimsy palm-sized books to capture ideas roughly, quickly and with intense immediacy …and the gimmick clearly works.
The material collected here – mostly enlarged 140% up from the originals – simply buzzes with life and energy.
Many Frank regulars appear, including the eponymous Krazy Kat-like ingénue himself, and there are absolute torrents of bizarre, god-like household appliances, vulture-things, frog-things, rhino-things, plant-things and unspeakable Thing-things, that inhabit the insanely logical traumic universe of his sensoria.
There are snippets of reportage, plenty of designs and even roughs and layouts from finished stories. Woodring also proves himself a pretty sharp pencil when it comes to capturing the weird moment of reality we all experience, a keen caricaturist and a deliciously funny “straight gag-man”, glamour artist and capturer of friends in idle moments – just like all of us sad art-school escapees who break into a cold sweat whenever we realise we’ve left the sketchbook at home and there’s only beer-mats and napkins to draw on….
Woodring is not to everyone’s taste or sensibilities – for starters, his drawings have a distressing habit of creeping back long after you’ve put the book down and scaring the bejeezus out of you – but he is an undisputed master of the form and an innovator always warping the creative envelope.
As such this welcome peek into his creative process and conceptual/visual syllabary offers encouragement and delight to artists and storytellers of every stripe, as well as being just plain wonderful to see.
All art-forms need such creators and this glorious hardback monochrome tome could well change your working and reading habits for life.
Go on, aren’t you tempted, tantalized or terrified yet? What about curious, then…?
© 2012 Jim Woodring. This edition © 2012 Fantagraphics Books. All rights reserved.