Articles with the Tag Jim Woodring

Jim Woodring and Weathercraft — Friday Funnies

Comix
Published on

I’ve talked about Jim Woodring before in my Friday Funnies series. Weathercraft is the newest book in his Frank series. As always, it’s a nearly wordless comic, no dialogue, no captions, just art. Reading it can be done in five minutes, you’ll be able to follow the story from panel to panel, from page to page, but you’ll have no clue as to what just happened. I’m a text orientated guy, I read comics text first, art second and I did read Weathercraft that way first, fast, just getting the bare bones of the story, following it panel to panel, page to page but without taking in it as a whole.

page from Weathercraft

This naive way of reading any Frank story comes natural, thanks to Woodring’s art. There’s nothing difficult or unclear about his artwork, as you can see from the page above. For the reader, the hard work does not lie in following the story from panel to panel, but in coming to some understanding what the symbolism in the story could mean, whether it is representing some deeper meaning or is meaningful of its own accord. For Woodring, the hard work must lie as much in making things so clear to the reader, to making Manhog’s expressions so easily readable, to keep the flow of the story obvious especially when the symbolism grows heavy.

page from Weathercraft

Such as it starts to do here, as Manhog discovers the plasticity of what seemed until now be a solid reality. As might be obvious by now for readers already familiar with the universe in which the Frank take place, the unifactor, this is a Frank story in which Frank is only a secondary character and Manhog is trust into the lead role. His transformation and edification as to the true nature of the Unifactor, the universe in which he lives, is the story of Weathercraft

page from Weathercraft

But what this story is, what Manhog’s investigations reveal, will remain a secret for now. It’s pointless trying to recap it here. More perhaps than any other comic, the pleasure in this lies not with its plot revelations, but with the flow of the story. You do not even need to attempt to understand What It All Means, just reveling in the worlds Woodring has created here is pleasure enough.

For those who still want to know at the very least what Woodring thinks it all means, there’s his video walkthrough over at Fantagraphics. Personally, I find ignorance is bliss in this instance.

Friday Funnies: The Portable Frank

Art & Criticism, Comix
Published on

The Portable Frank

The Portable Frank
Jim Woodring
Fantagraphics, 2008
200 pages/$16,99
Get if from Fantagraphics.

The Portable Frank is a collection of fourteen of the black and white Frank stories wrote and drew in the twenty-odd years since Frank first appeared on the cover of Jim issue four back in December 1990. Frank looks like a mutated Felix the Cat wearing Mickey Mouse’s shoes and gloves and even so is the most normal looking of the cast of characters Woodring assembled around him. Two words you’ll hear a lot when describing Frank’s adventures: dreamlike and surreal, as reviewers try to grapple with the world and cosmology Woodring has created with these stories. A copout, but it is difficult to explain Frank to people who haven’t seen these stories.

The best comparison I can make is to finding a collection of legends or fairytales from some unknown mythology. The stories make no sense together, sometimes contradicting each other, characters changing from one story to the next, dying in the one and returning with no damage in the next. At the same time you can see how this mythology must’ve developed over time, how each character has their role to fullfil in it. That’s what these Frank stories are like.

Frank himself is the innocent everyman, kindhearted, a bit naive but capable of shocking cruelty at times. His main nemesis is the manhog, half man, half pig, all rage and id. Manhog often attacks and bullies Frank, but as often is the victim of others, used and abused by the closest figure the strip has to a true evil personage, Whim, the moonfaced grinning devil figure, who acts as the tempter to Frank, warpinghim spiritually as well as physically. His servant (?) Lucky is a human looking figure, but with a hugely elongated face, usually seen manhandling Manhog for some menial task or other. As his protector Frank has Pupshaw, a dog kennel shaped creature with a sort of bushy raccoon-like tail, whom Frank takes for a pet in the first story. Pupshaw largely behaves as a sort of dog or cat like creature, but transforms herself into a monsterous form when needed. There are also Faux Pa and Real Pa, older looking, more heavyset and stubbly versions of Frank, who walk on four paws. Faux Pa, in league with Whim, turns up in several stories to try and transform Frank into something more cruel, while Real Pa only shows up in the last story, guiding Frank out of the dungeons he had landed himself in.

All of Frank’s stories are nearly wordless, told in pantomime, with no dialogue and only a few captoins here and there, usually at the end of a tale. What we see and get to know of the various character’s emotions and their inner life has to be deduced from their expressions and postures. Woodring is a master at this, in drawing attention to a character’s mood by showing it on their faces, slightly exaggerated but never forced. He also uses a lot of reaction shots, where in panel one something happens and in the next panel you see Frank’s reaction to it, acting as a counterpoint.

Woodring’s art is stylised and inventive, as can be seen at Fantagraphic’s official flickr stream. You can run through this book in an hour, but come back to it time and time again discovering new details. Woodring is one of those artists that make you sees the world through his eyes, where you can’t help but see his figures and poses everywhere you look.

As a collection, The Portable Frank is an effort to have an affordable introduction to Frank’s world, the title of course harkening back to Viking’s old collections like The Portable Mark Twain. The format is nice, slightly smaller than a regular comic book in dimensions, but some concessions had obviously to be made to keep the price low. So there’s no bibliographical material, no key to the characters (whose names never appear in the stories and I had to get from Wikipedia), there’s just the stories themselves. But that’s enough.