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Jim
Frank is, as everyone knows, Jim Woodring s best-selling cartoon character. Jim, on the other hand, is Woodring s cartoon alter ego, the fictional doppelganger who has for 30 years inhabited Woodring s alternate universe where shifting, phantasmagoric landscapes, abrupt, hallucinatory visual revelations, and unexpected eruptions of uninhibited verbal self-flagellation are commonplace. Jim is a mind-bending collection of all of Woodring s best non-Frank creative work comics stories, prose stories, drawings, and paintings, with a new introduction and afterword by the man himself. Abounding in metaphors if you choose to see them and naked self-disclosure if you don t, this volume of comics, prose, and images collected here for the first time is a bounty of Woodring s inspired artistry."
224 pages, Hardcover
First published August 13, 2014
About the author
Jim Woodring
133 books248 followersJim Woodring was born in Los Angeles in 1952 and enjoyed a childhood made lively by an assortment of mental an psychological quirks including paroniria, paranoia, paracusia, apparitions, hallucinations and other species of psychological and neurological malfunction among the snakes and tarantulas of the San Gabriel mountains.
He eventually grew up to bean inquisitive bearlike man who has enjoyed three exciting careers: garbage collector, merry-go-round-operator and cartoonist. A self-taught artist, his first published works documented the disorienting hell of his salad days in an “illustrated autojournal” called Jim. This work was published by Fantagraphics Books and collected in The Book of Jim in 1992.
He is best known for his wordless comics series depicting the follies of his character Frank, a generic cartoon anthropomorph whose adventures careen wildly from sweet to appalling. A decade’s worth of these stories was collected in The Frank Book in 2004. The 2010 Frank story Weathercraft won The Stranger’s Genius Award and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for that year. The most recent Frank book, Congress of the Animals, was released in 2011.
Woodring is also known for his anecdotal charcoal drawings (a selection which was gathered in Seeing Things in 2005), and the sculptures, vinyl figures, fabrics and gallery installations that have been made from his designs. His multimedia collaborations with the musician Bill Frisell won them a United States Artists Fellowship in 2006. He lives in Seattle with his family and residual phenomena.
-Walter Foxglove
He eventually grew up to bean inquisitive bearlike man who has enjoyed three exciting careers: garbage collector, merry-go-round-operator and cartoonist. A self-taught artist, his first published works documented the disorienting hell of his salad days in an “illustrated autojournal” called Jim. This work was published by Fantagraphics Books and collected in The Book of Jim in 1992.
He is best known for his wordless comics series depicting the follies of his character Frank, a generic cartoon anthropomorph whose adventures careen wildly from sweet to appalling. A decade’s worth of these stories was collected in The Frank Book in 2004. The 2010 Frank story Weathercraft won The Stranger’s Genius Award and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for that year. The most recent Frank book, Congress of the Animals, was released in 2011.
Woodring is also known for his anecdotal charcoal drawings (a selection which was gathered in Seeing Things in 2005), and the sculptures, vinyl figures, fabrics and gallery installations that have been made from his designs. His multimedia collaborations with the musician Bill Frisell won them a United States Artists Fellowship in 2006. He lives in Seattle with his family and residual phenomena.
-Walter Foxglove
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
January 22, 2015
Unlike a lot of Woodring fans, I got into his work through his "auto-journal" comics collected here, most of which feature Jim himself (actually it's his dream alter-ego.) The b&w artwork may not be as refined as his Frank cartoons, but the stories here are every bit as fun and tripped-out. I really enjoy the dream-logic of these tales, where Jim would be walking around while the scenery shifts around him (such as when he's walking through a neighbor's home and somehow ends up at a strange stage performance), and characters appearing out of nowhere, just like real-life dreams. It perfectly captures that helpless feeling one sometimes gets when dreaming, like realizing you've been walking around naked all day, or when you find you are suddenly unable to do the simplest of tasks for some reason. And sometimes the dreams turn into inescapable, surreal nightmares.
There are also numerous prose stories, poems, journal entries, and fake advertisements scattered throughout, making this well-worth the rather hefty price-tag. It's possible to read the entire comic-strip portions in just a few hours, but all the other various accoutrements means you'll be enveloped in Woodrings hallucinatory world for quite a while. And it may take you a long time to get re-adjusted to the real world once you've finished.
Highly recommended for fans of weird comics.
4.5 Stars.
April 22, 2015
Jim Woodring started having hallucinations at a pretty early age. He also kept what he called an auto-journal, which was also his dream journal, out of which he started to self-publish Jim in the mid-eighties. He had a drinking problem for several years. Maybe drugs, too. He followed Hindu philosophy. All this is part of the world that he creates (and partly creates him?).
Woodring's most famous character is Frank, the main character in a wordless comic that has spun out many books. Read The Frank Book and you have the basic collection of Frank stuff. I guess the best way to describe Woodring's work is surrealism, though I am not sure what the right category is. Jim is an alter-ego for Woodring himself, possibly (in part? mostly?), so you wonder the extent to which his auto-journal is really a memoir of dreams/fantasies/nightmares. Auto-journal connotes "automatic writing" for me, too, and the stories are wildly associational, sometimes funny, sometimes bizarre, always unique.
The Frank Book is silent; his Jim stuff has words, featuring a character that looks like him. Some of this includes prose stories, texts from early zines, handwritten psychotic stories that are not even illustrated. There's ads in here. It's nice to get words after I've read so much of the wordless Frank stuff, and actually "see" Jim, but if you begin to read it and assume this is finally Jim Woodring talking, well, you're gonna get in trouble there. Though you do get some insight into his larger hallucinatory world through his use of words here. And/or Woodring's very active and crazy and colorful dream world.
Is Woodring's work "art comics"? Is it "underground" or "alternative" comics? Both? What separates this from the work that Crumb was doing on acid? Or Crumb's Trouble with Women? Or Charles Burns in Black Hole or his Hive trilogy? Or Michael DeForge's Lose work? I tend to separate out "conceptual" work like Ware's Building Stories or Richard McGuire's Here from "alt-comics" or underground comics, one proceeding from what I assume is a conscious focus on a concept or series of related concepts and the other a sort of unconscious stream of ideas. But the categories bleed into each other, are a false dichotomy. Who knows for any of us where ideas proceed from? What's conscious or unconscious art? If we need categories for art, I tend to put Woodring's stuff in the unconscious category, with Crumb, who also claimed he never knew where a lot of his ideas came from.
Here's a few things from his work:
"I don't belive in atoms."
Story titles: "Seafood Platter from Hell," "When the Lobster Whistles on the Hill," "Boyfriend of the Weather".
Ad: "Record Your Dreams: You are Not your Body."
A longish fishing story, with Jim and a buddy.
A recurrent nightmare image of a frog runs throughout.
I can say if you are just looking for fun comics, this is not your stuff to read, because it has a paranoid, anti-capitalist feel to it, it proceeds out of some fear and darkness and not from joy, though this is not to say you will get no joy from appreciating its explosive imaginative force. It's still pretty amazing to me, as art, (think Dali and surrealism and dada for pure invention) if it's not most people's cup of tea.
Personal note: Since I have a son who suffers (and I mean now) from some similar "issues" that has fueled Woodring's art, I have become more interested in this world Woodring creates. Also I revised this review today because I am re-reading Foucault's Madness and Civilization and think this book tells me something about madness and society. I read some of the Jim stuff years ago, but this book I read first in April 2015 and looked through it again the last couple days.
Woodring's most famous character is Frank, the main character in a wordless comic that has spun out many books. Read The Frank Book and you have the basic collection of Frank stuff. I guess the best way to describe Woodring's work is surrealism, though I am not sure what the right category is. Jim is an alter-ego for Woodring himself, possibly (in part? mostly?), so you wonder the extent to which his auto-journal is really a memoir of dreams/fantasies/nightmares. Auto-journal connotes "automatic writing" for me, too, and the stories are wildly associational, sometimes funny, sometimes bizarre, always unique.
The Frank Book is silent; his Jim stuff has words, featuring a character that looks like him. Some of this includes prose stories, texts from early zines, handwritten psychotic stories that are not even illustrated. There's ads in here. It's nice to get words after I've read so much of the wordless Frank stuff, and actually "see" Jim, but if you begin to read it and assume this is finally Jim Woodring talking, well, you're gonna get in trouble there. Though you do get some insight into his larger hallucinatory world through his use of words here. And/or Woodring's very active and crazy and colorful dream world.
Is Woodring's work "art comics"? Is it "underground" or "alternative" comics? Both? What separates this from the work that Crumb was doing on acid? Or Crumb's Trouble with Women? Or Charles Burns in Black Hole or his Hive trilogy? Or Michael DeForge's Lose work? I tend to separate out "conceptual" work like Ware's Building Stories or Richard McGuire's Here from "alt-comics" or underground comics, one proceeding from what I assume is a conscious focus on a concept or series of related concepts and the other a sort of unconscious stream of ideas. But the categories bleed into each other, are a false dichotomy. Who knows for any of us where ideas proceed from? What's conscious or unconscious art? If we need categories for art, I tend to put Woodring's stuff in the unconscious category, with Crumb, who also claimed he never knew where a lot of his ideas came from.
Here's a few things from his work:
"I don't belive in atoms."
Story titles: "Seafood Platter from Hell," "When the Lobster Whistles on the Hill," "Boyfriend of the Weather".
Ad: "Record Your Dreams: You are Not your Body."
A longish fishing story, with Jim and a buddy.
A recurrent nightmare image of a frog runs throughout.
I can say if you are just looking for fun comics, this is not your stuff to read, because it has a paranoid, anti-capitalist feel to it, it proceeds out of some fear and darkness and not from joy, though this is not to say you will get no joy from appreciating its explosive imaginative force. It's still pretty amazing to me, as art, (think Dali and surrealism and dada for pure invention) if it's not most people's cup of tea.
Personal note: Since I have a son who suffers (and I mean now) from some similar "issues" that has fueled Woodring's art, I have become more interested in this world Woodring creates. Also I revised this review today because I am re-reading Foucault's Madness and Civilization and think this book tells me something about madness and society. I read some of the Jim stuff years ago, but this book I read first in April 2015 and looked through it again the last couple days.
September 18, 2015
I feel like this could just be a gush of superlatives, but the crux is that Jim Woodring can capture a wordless, profound strangeness of experience better than almost anyone. Even when, as here unlike his parallel progression in Frank, he's using words, and often drawing himself and ostensible real life. He's not free of a certain heavy-handedness at times when seemingly grappling with large metaphysical and ontological issues that may only be partially accessible even to Wooding himself. And yet, much of this is just totally, disconcertingly natural and direct, even when seemingly equally searching and expressive of the inexpressible. Also great to chat with when Maya and I picked this up at an opening of his new (wonderful) paintings.
March 29, 2017
I freely admit that I'm incapable of viewing Woodring's work objectively. I've spent too many years following his work and reveling in his particular brand of surrealism to the point where it seems about to bleed over into reality. Now there's a sobering thought ...
A long time ago, Fantagraphics began publishing a magazine format comic called Jim. For most comics fans, it was our first glimpse into the mind of Jim Woodring. This book reprints much--possibly all?--of that early material. Some of it previously appeared in Fantagraphics' The Book of Jim, but any Woodring is worth rereading multiple times. Dreams and reality and spiritforms blend in odd and unexpected ways. Too often, "surrealism" becomes a cliche, a sort of standing joke where randomness is substituted for thought in a safe, dismissable way. But Woodring's visions have all the shock and sweat and confrontation and hallucinatory power of an Ernst or Dali or Miro. Reading his work, you get the impression that he would be writing and drawing these stories whether anyone wanted to read them or not.
If you've never read these stories before, now's your chance. If you have, you'll be overjoyed to read them again. Highly, highly recommended!
A long time ago, Fantagraphics began publishing a magazine format comic called Jim. For most comics fans, it was our first glimpse into the mind of Jim Woodring. This book reprints much--possibly all?--of that early material. Some of it previously appeared in Fantagraphics' The Book of Jim, but any Woodring is worth rereading multiple times. Dreams and reality and spiritforms blend in odd and unexpected ways. Too often, "surrealism" becomes a cliche, a sort of standing joke where randomness is substituted for thought in a safe, dismissable way. But Woodring's visions have all the shock and sweat and confrontation and hallucinatory power of an Ernst or Dali or Miro. Reading his work, you get the impression that he would be writing and drawing these stories whether anyone wanted to read them or not.
If you've never read these stories before, now's your chance. If you have, you'll be overjoyed to read them again. Highly, highly recommended!
August 16, 2014
I can't really review or describe this book in very useful detail, I'm too much of a fan... but if you've read any Jim Woodring comics that are not Frank, you probably know whether you would like a large volume of them. I love Frank but I've always had a special weakness for his other stuff, partly because he's one of a very small number of cartoonists who can make emotionally engaging narratives out of dreams, and partly because he writes sharp and hilarious dialogue. I'm partial to the longer stories that originally appeared in the Jim vol. 2 series, especially "Quarry Story" and "The Hindu Marriage Game", so it makes me really happy that those are collected here. The only problem with the completeness(*) of this collection is that if the stream-of-consciousness text pieces from his early zines aren't really your thing, well, there are a fair number of them. Also, I would've liked to see more cover art. Whatever, it's a beautiful book.
(* The only thing that's missing as far as I can tell is one of the "Big Red" stories, where Jim's cat gleefully murders a boastful cat named Tuffy. Except now I can't find that story in any of my old Jims; maybe it was just one of those tiny zines that he sent out through the mail? Or did I dream it??)
(* The only thing that's missing as far as I can tell is one of the "Big Red" stories, where Jim's cat gleefully murders a boastful cat named Tuffy. Except now I can't find that story in any of my old Jims; maybe it was just one of those tiny zines that he sent out through the mail? Or did I dream it??)
February 3, 2020
It was a joy to see more work from this unique artist. Those who are familiar with the mostly wordless FRANK comics might be surprised by all of the text in this work.
I liked the dream sequences a lot...I didn't care as much for the "royal couple" who seemed to be both stupid and cruel just for the hell of it, rather than wrestling with the human condition a la Manhog.
I'm still stunned by Woodring's ability to capture the surreal and otherworldly like no other.
I liked the dream sequences a lot...I didn't care as much for the "royal couple" who seemed to be both stupid and cruel just for the hell of it, rather than wrestling with the human condition a la Manhog.
I'm still stunned by Woodring's ability to capture the surreal and otherworldly like no other.
August 24, 2018
Far out. I've enjoyed Woodring's unique brand of strange for a while now, but it's fun to see some early, pre-Frank work. Almost everything here feels like a dream journal (some of it explicitly is), but packaged into a series of comics, stories, and advertisements. The art is immaculate and the bizarre dream-logic highly enticing.
October 3, 2021
Wow, this was almost a 10/10 read right here. Woodring is quite a force here, a true continuation of the original Surrealist movement. While his artistic abilities in the earlier comics and pieces are still somewhat underdeveloped, it's nice to see him getting up to speed in this collection up until that point when the well-known Frank comics start. I hope some people actually bought and kept the dream diary comics he sold via his magazine so that one day they can also be collected along with his other stuff. I'd read a full collection of Jim's dream diary entries!
April 11, 2020
Do you like dream-like stories and surrealism? Then this is for you! I love the advertisements and the art. So much time went into making this. Read Frank first, then this.
As someone who has abnormal memory when it comes to dreams, this book makes me think I could probably do something with that.
Read it on Hoopla, as they have many graphic novels there.
As someone who has abnormal memory when it comes to dreams, this book makes me think I could probably do something with that.
Read it on Hoopla, as they have many graphic novels there.
April 4, 2021
Unrestrained, sharp, and bold as hell. Proper honest surrealism. Jim makes me grab at my pens and dig in whenever I read it, desperate to express my own raw brain just as it feels Woodring has here.
Watch the documentary on Jim Woodring if you’re into this.
Watch the documentary on Jim Woodring if you’re into this.
June 19, 2022
A little underwhelming. Surprisingly enough Woodring's work seems kind of emptier when it has words. That's not to say I didn't like it, I did! But there were few moments when I felt like it reached the same heights as Frank.
July 23, 2015
i couldn't choose between dying of happiness or soiling my pants when i found this book. i've loved woodring's books for years, and this collection of his earlier work was everything i hoped it would be. no one in comics or literature can inhabit the dream space like woodring, or make it so engaging. master of the surreal and the absurd. two hundred pages of mind bliss.
October 5, 2015
I've been having my mind blown by Woodring's non-textual stories since I picked up The Frank Book years ago. I wasn't sure what to expect from this compilation of his early work chock full of words. Holy fuck it's amazing and my brain has been reshaped yet again.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews