Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Fran by Jim Woodring Fran by Jim Woodring – Photoset Preview. “Over the last few decades, Jim Woodring has been drawing a series of wordless, blissfully cruel slapstick fables, set in a world of grotesque entities and psychedelic minarets: half unshakable nightmare, half Chuck Jones cartoon filtered through the Bhagavad Gita.” – Douglas Wolk, The New York Times Book Review. “When most people try to employ dream logic in their work they fail miserably but Jim Woodring is great at it. The closest thing to a peer he might have is David Lynch but even that’s a stretch. Jim Woodring is the only Jim Woodring and no one has done what he does except for him.” – Nicholas Gazin, Vice. 104-page black & white 7.25" x 9.75" hardcover • $19.99 ISBN: 978-1-60699-661-4. Due to arrive in about 2-4 weeks. Click the thumbnails for larger versions; get more info, see more previews and pre-order your copy here: Fran by Jim Woodring. Continuing my survey of current comics I've read, here are a bunch of comics published by Fantagraphics. As I've written before, I was an editor for Fantagraphics in the early 90s. I started with them when they moved from Los Angeles (the Simi Valley, actually) to Seattle in 1989. This move, weirdly enough, resulted in a huge windfall for them. They sold a house that they owned in Agoura Hills and bought two houses in Seattle! Co-publisher Kim Thompson told me that the company made more profit from that one deal than they had made since they began publishing. But life with a small-press alternative publisher is always a bit precarious. Fantagraphics has gone through several serious, company-threatening crises. Shortly after the move to Seattle, the dire implications of the "black and white bust" of 1987 caught up with them. Great titles that had sold very well just a year or so earlier fell off precipitously. That's when they started Eros Comix (taking a page from Barney Rossett and Grove Press- -publishing smut to finance art) as well as when they ramped up their catalog sales. I realize this company history is probably a bit dull (don't worry, I discuss actual comics below). The only reason I mention it is that the death of co-founder Kim Thompson has created another crisis situation for the company. So they are running a Kickstarter campaign to pay for their spring season (book publishing is organized into two "seasons" for some reason). When I started writing this post on November 6, they were $73,000 into their campaign for $150,000. By November 12, they had raised the entire amount. (That said, they still have some good premiums and can use the extra money if you find yourself with an urge to spend some mad money between now and December 5.) I think Kickstarter is a great tool for publishers, whether self-publishers or small presses like Fantagraphics. The reason is that they essentially act as catalogs for future books--your "donation" is really just an payment for a book that will be published and sent to you later. (For this one, I ordered a boxed set of the complete run of Eightball by Daniel Clowes.) I don't want to belabor this. Instead, let's look at a few more-or-less recent Fantagraphics books. Problematic: Sketchbook Drawings 2004-2012 by Jim Woodring (Fantagraphics Books, 2012). It's impossible for me to be objective about Jim Woodring. For one thing, I've known him ever since he and his family moved to Seattle when I was living there and working for his publisher. Then in 2011, I curated an exhibit at Lawndale of work by Jim Woodring and Marc Bell. Problematic is a collection of work from Woodring's sketchbook. The sketchbook is a key locus of creativity for many cartoonists, most notably Robert Crumb and Chris Ware, who have had pages from the sketchbooks printed in handsome volumes. Unfortunately, their example can be intimidating for other cartoonists. They want to create sketchbooks as fully realized as Crumb's and Ware's. Woodring writes in the introduction: It was the discovery of small Moleskine notebooks that allowed him to embrace sketchbook life. The Moleskine notebooks are small enough that he can hold it in his hand as he draws. The beige paper preempts the desire to use white-out to cover his mistakes. As a consequence, the work is fresh and spontaneous. Some, like this one, are drawings from his mundane existence, pretty much realistic. Of course, he embraces some things that the rest of us might recoil from. (I was pleased to see that one of the "realistic" drawings he did was of a nut on the street in Houston from his time here.) But most of the drawings are along these lines--fantastic, bizarre, highly imaginative. You flip through this small but thick book having your mind repeatedly blown by Woodring's fecund imagination and astonishing drawing prowess. These drawings are blown up to 140% of their original size, which is astonishing. Most illustrators will tell you that shrinking a drawing is preferable because it covers up a lot of little mistakes. Conversely, blowing it up amplifies its imperfections. So for an artist to deliberately blow up his work implies one of two things. First, that the artist has no ego. He doesn't care if you see his mistakes. The other possibility is that the artist knows he is the shit and that his drawings will look excellent even when blown up. Curiously, Woodring may possess both of these seemingly contradictory qualities. Fran by Jim Woodring (Fantagraphics Books, 2013). According to the flap copy, this book can either be read before Congress of the Animals , after Congress of Animals , or as a stand-alone story. In Congress of Animals , Woodring's protagonist, the odd cat-like "funny animal" character Frank leaves his hitherto self-contained world, the Unifactor, and meets Fran. Although the characters Fank and Fran seem sexless, we can call Frank a male and Fran a female based on their names alone. But they are also very similar (as are their names). Fran has a slightly different head than Frank (longer ears) and her body is subtly different. Fran finds them in wedded bliss. One day a hideous creature steals an object of Frank's. Frank chases him, kills him, and discovers that the creature had a hoard of stolen objects. Frank and Fran examine the haul and discover amongst the varied items a projector. The projector works by having the user wear it on one's head. Then it shows what's happened to the wearer in reverse chronological order. Jim Woodring, Fran page 24. Fran however is unwilling to try it (presumably because she'd like to keep her past secret) and in her anger breaks the machine. Frank is extremely angry with her and Fran runs away. I won't say any more about the story--you'll have to read it yourself. Like all Frank stories, this one has a lot of mysterious, fantastic events. They are compelling in the same way Dr. Seuss books are compelling. I want to read this over and over as much as I wanted to read Happy Birthday to You! over and over when I was 8. Woodring's way of drawing the fantastic is so beautiful and precise--his work is a strong argument for high craft in comics. Jim Woodring, Fran page 73. I mean, look at page 73 when Frank's rocket crashes into a moon. Wow . Jim Woodring, Fran page 75. And one other thing I want to mention about Fran and all of the Frank stories. Woodring is a great designer and architect. I would love to see actual furniture (and even actual buildings, like the one on page 75) constructed out of Woodring's imagined furniture and buildings. They're fanciful, sure, but otherwise seem solid and more-or-less plausible. Maybe if I win the lottery, I'll build "Woodringland." Until then, I'll have to be satisfied with his beautiful books. The Children of Palomar by Gilbert Hernandez (Fantagraphics Books, 2013). Gilbert Hernandez has been publishing work with Fantagraphics since the early 80s. He and brothers Jaime and Mario created the magazine Love & Rockets , one of the finest and most artistically significant comics of the past 50 years. Hernandez's best work is based around the inhabitants of a small Central American town called Palomar. The Children of Palomar returns to this setting. It's composed of four related stories. Back in the 80s and 90s, they probably would have been published in four consecutive issues of Love & Rockets . But these were originally published in an Italian co-publication with Coconino Press, which says something about the creative ways independent publishers like Fantagraphics must employ to finance projects. Gilbert Hernandez, The Children of Palomar page 5. The original title of the Coconino Press/Fantagraphics copublication was New Tales of Old Palomar , which is very apt. Hernandez is taking the chronology of Palomar that he has already established in many, many stories from Love & Rockets and shoe-horning new events, some of which fill in gaps that had only been implied in earlier stories. For instance, the two swift-moving thieves on page five are the sisters Tonantzin and Diana. Gilbert Hernandez, The Children of Palomar page17, panel 1. Tonantzin and Diana will become very consequential characters in the Palomar stories, but their introduction to the town had never been depicted until now. Gilbert Hernandez, The Children of Palomar page 72. In the third story of the collection, Tonantzin is older (a young teenager, I'd judge) and an accepted member of the community. She sees a strange baby who speaks to her. This is a device Hernandez has used before--the vision that only certain people can see but that other people accept as real. See for example the classic story "Sopa de Gran Pena" from 1983. It's because of touches like these that Gilbert Hernandez's work has been called magic realism. Obviously this is characteristic of many Latin American writers from "el boom", but the writer Hernandez reminds me of is Nigerian writer Ben Okri, the author of The Famished Road , whose characters live simultaneously in the quotidian world and a supernatural world that is overlaid on ordinary existence. Tonantzin can see the baby, the "Blooter," because the Blooter is trying to communicate to her. But other people know the Blooter exists, even if they can't perceive it. Hernandez was born and raised in the United States and has stated that the Palomar stories originally came from stories told him by older relatives about Mexico. But the supernatural or magical elements don't seem "authentic"--they seem more like things that Hernandez has made up. After all, he didn't grow up in an isolated village in Central America, nor is he an anthropologist who has studied the rituals and beliefs of other cultures. What he has done is to imagine a supernatural existence in Palomar that exists simultaneously over the mundane rational world. This overlayed supernatural world is half folkloric and half science fictional, which reflects Hernandez's own cultural background. Gilbert Hernandez, The Children of Palomar page 72, panel 2. This can be seen in the home of the bruja that Tonantzin visits on page 72. Tonantzin is trying to get the Blooter to leave her alone and is asking for magical help. The bruja 's home has a large circular window. Hernandez grew up reading American comics. That window is a visual quotation from Dr. Strange , the supernatural title created by Steve Ditko and Stan Lee in the 60s. Frank Brunner, commissioned drawing of Dr. Strange and Clea, 2002. Here is an example of the window drawn by artist Frank Brunner, who drew Dr. Strange during a memorable run in the mid-70s. Dr. Strange allowed artists like Ditko and Brunner to go wild visually, but their stories were always fundamentally pulp stories--good versus evil in a magical setting. In Hernandez's Children of Palomar , the magical stuff is simply an aspect of reality, to be dealt with like any other aspect of reality. It's there to be endured and enjoyed. Treasury Of Mini Comics Volume One edited by Michael Dowers (Fantagraphics Books, 2013). Three years ago, Fantagraphics published an 892-page brick of a book called Newave!: The Underground Mini Comix of the 1980s (848 pages) I guess enough people liked this super- obscure corner of comics history that they put out a second book, which by being subtitled "Volume One" implies future volumes as well. The first thing you notice about this book (and its precursor) is the diminutive trim size--4 3/4 by 6 inches. There is a historical reason for this size-- it is very close to the size of many 8-page mini-comics over the past few decades. Here's how it worked. You drew your comic and then pasted it down onto two 8 1/2 x 11 boards, four pages of the comic on each. You photocopied them onto both sides of a piece of 8 1/2 x 11 inches copy paper. You fold this over once, then once more until you have basically a 4 1/4 x 5 1/2 inch booklet. You trim it and staple it, and for the cost of one double sided copy and two stapes (one if you're being thrifty), you have yourself a sweet little comic book. What this book demonstrates is that from the late 60s almost to the present, this has been a popular way for people to do self-published minicomics. Dowers had lots to chose from to fill this volume. In 1992, I started writing a column for The Comics Journal called "Minimalism" that was devoted to minicomics. I wrote it through 1996, after which point it was taken over by Tom Spurgeon and other writers. In my experience looking at hundreds of minicomics, they came in all shapes and sizes. The 4 1/4 x 5 1/2 inch 8-pager was common, but I don't think it made up the majority of published minicomics. I mention this because it shows how much is left out of Treasury of Mini Comics and Newave! , despite the fact that they collectively have 1700-odd pages. The amount of utterly ephemeral self-published material that falls into the general category of "mini comics" is immense, and because of its underground existence, it will never be fully catalogued (even though there are some large collections--for example, the one at Washington State University at Pullman.) Matt Feazell, Cynicalman Meets the Boss pages 4 and 5, 1994. The work in Treasury of Mini Comics is presented more-or-less chronologically, starting with comics by Leonard Rifas and Justin Green from 1969 and 1972 respectively. Then there is a long section of the cartoonists who were active in the 80s, like Matt Feazell. Feazell is particularly important because he created a style that was extremely well-suited to the format he published the work in. By using stick figures, he was able to cram a huge amount of content into each page. And he decisively demonstrates how expressive such seemingly limited drawing can be. This is a model for many of the best minicomics in this volume. Macedonio Manuel Garcia, Tales From the Inside #3 pages 6 and 7, 1982. Another important aspect of minicomics is that they gave voice to people who way outside mainstream culture. Colin Upton has produced hundreds of pages of droll, whimsical, revealing comics while living an extremely modest life on disability payments in Vancouver, Canada. And then there is Macedonio Manuel Garcia (above) who did comics while serving time at the Ramsey Unit prison. Considering that the average alternative comics artist is white middle-class 20-something hipster, minicomics offer a little variety. Marc Bell and Rupert Bottenberg, Arbeitees: Einer Industrium Dokument den Marc Bell ut Rupert Dottenberg pages 4 and 5, 1996. Fiona Smyth, At Monastiraki pages 2 and 3, 2008. Peter Thompson, I'm the Devil pages 4 and 5, 2007. Unless you draw very small and very clean, the 8-pager format doesn't lend itself to ordinary comics narratives. It's not uncommon for minicomics to be just a series of full-page drawings around a theme or idea. A bunch of the work in this volume falls into that category, such as the ones above by Marc Bell, Peter Thompson and Fiona Smyth. I tend to like this kind of work a lot--it seems very appropriate for the tiny format. Otherwise, you have to force yourself to draw in a minimal style. Carrie McNinch, You Don't Get There From Here #11 pages 14 and 15, 2008-09. But as I've stated in regard to Matt Feazell, minimalism works for some artists like Carrie McNinch, who not only manages to put an exceptional amount of personal detail in her diary comics, but also provides a sound-track. Ron Regé, Jr., Yeast Hoist #6 pages 10 and 11, 1997. One of the wonderful things about a book like this it shows you work of artists who later achieved acclaim (at least in the small pond of art comics) before many people knew about their work. Ron Regé, Jr. is one example (he also drew the cover). In addition to the artists already mentioned, this book has work by Esther Pearl Watson, John Porcellino, J. Bradley Johnson, Molly Kiely and others whose work is now well-known and highly respected. Aspiring cartoonists take heed. If no one wants to publish your work, publish it yourself on the cheap. The Surreal Within the Everyday: Jim Woodring’s ‘Frank’ Set in a world called “the Unifactor,” Jim Woodring’s wordless Frank recounts the adventures of the title character—a gormless-looking, anthropomorphic, rabbit-like creature with a nature by turns passive and perverse—and his interactions with the Unifactor’s other inhabitants and the world’s beautiful and frightening flora and fauna, given to unpredictable reactions and behaviors. Dotted with opulent mansions, follies, and temples (their Moorish architecture inspired by the Brand Library in Glendale, California, Woodring’s local library in his childhood), the bucolic Unifactor can be a dangerous place: characters are seized by mysterious illnesses and compulsions, things are altered by contact with one another or with more powerful forms or strange devices, and the outré local wildlife and the supernatural are a constant threat, meaning the situations Frank encounters often shift from amusing to frightening or horrifying in the space of a single frame. Born in Burbank, Los Angeles in 1952, the son of an engineer and a toxicologist whose work at the L.A. County Coroner’s office involved doing “a lot of morbid things,” the young Woodring was prey to what he calls “apparitions”: “large, silent, rotating faces hovering over the foot of my bed… Big, horrible, grimacing, deeply-lined faces with their mouths open, yelling at me silently… a staring eyeball that I would see with my eyes open or shut sometimes.” He describes himself as a death-obsessed child given to impulsive, inappropriate behavior: “not gloomy, but desperate.” His compulsion to draw was galvanized by a trip to a 1968 Surrealism retrospective at the Los Angeles County Art Museum, which he says “took me about three days to get over,” as well as a potent early experience with LSD, which “wiped away the world like wiping away watercolor with a wet sponge.” At 19, Woodring briefly became a garbageman before starting work as a cartoonist for publications including Car-Toons magazine. In 1979, he moved into animation when he took up a position at animation studio Ruby-Spears, working on cartoons including Mr. T. , Rubik the Amazing Cube , and what he calls “one of the masterpieces of shit,” Turbo Teen . In his six years there, he was also tasked with coloring the concept drawings that comic legend Jack Kirby—who worked on the company’s Thundarr the Barbarian —was engaged to produce for the studio. In addition to the Surrealists, whose echoes are so tangible in his work, Woodring cites as influences Erik Satie, Rimbaud, Alfred Jarry, Malcolm Lowry, Rembrandt, Boris Artzybashef, and cartoonist T. S. Sullivant. An interest in the transcendental also informs his art, aligning him somewhat—in intent, perhaps, if not in style—with another visionary artist, Alex Grey. While at Ruby-Spears, Woodring began self-publishing Jim, a fanzine containing art and writing, which was brought to the attention of Fantagraphics comics’ Gary Groth by comic artist Gil Kane, who was also employed at Ruby-Spears. Groth offered to publish it if Woodring would include some comics and, in 1987, Fantagraphics took over the publishing of Jim , on the cover of whose fourth issue Frank would make his first appearance in 1990. He would subsequently appear in several other comics, including Tantalizing Stories , before being given his own comic in 1996. With his simplified rubbery form and bulbous feet, Frank resembles a remnant from the world of pre-war comics and cartoons. But though appearing at first sight perhaps misleadingly similar to other “Pop Surrealism” that traffics in the dreamlike dissonances created by decontextualising and distorting the cuteness of childhood imagery, Woodring’s work never sinks into the decorative dead-ends of many of those who might seem to be his logical peers. His surrealism is not exasperated kitsch but rather feels like an attempt to codify something ineffable about the nature of existence in comic book form. Everything in Frank’s world—biology, design, events—follows its own incomprehensible yet intuitively reasonable logic, giving Frank something of the quality of a folk story, its situations and forms obeying ancient patterns and recurring again and again—rubbed smooth by endless retelling inside Woodring’s brain. Horrible and beguilingly innocent at the same time, Frank ‘s repetitions and lack of conventional narrative resolution never grow boring, successive iterations instead seeming increasingly profound as they unspool in a series of surreal tableaux. The whole thing pulses with metaphor while never losing any of its intense graphic power, the almost ritualistic shading in Woodring’s black and white work and the lysergic glow of his color work creating a memorable sense of both solidity and unreality. Woodring’s Frank offers no answers, only a window onto a personal world that, as inscrutably alien as it is, is on some profound level eminently relatable. Fran by Jim Woodring. Jim Woodring Fantagraphics $19.99, 104 pages BUY IT NOW. I will begin by confessing that I've never found Jim Woodring's comics to be particularly elusive, which is perhaps different than declaring them surreal. The latter appellation, of course, is understandable; since the advent of Jim , those many years ago, Woodring's works have been inescapably associated with the dreamtime state – that unique fusion of waking and sleeping autobiography that was the corpus, in relevant part, of his gift to the American funnybook memoir. And, in approaching that most neurotic, observational, plainspoken method of comic-book storytelling -- the verbatim legacy of Justin Green, of Harvey Pekar -- and polluting its depictions with a full range of subconscious potentials, well: you might call that classically Surreal. But I think less of specialized terminology when I sit down with Woodring than I do of remarks he made to Gary Groth almost twenty years ago: “I believe in a collective unconscious and I believe that we are all connected mentally on some level — psychically or otherwise.” My mother's aunt, when I was a child, was an avid newspaper comic strip reader, going back to the Katzenjammer Kids in the gray days of Depression; it was she who bought me my first Mickey Mouse comics, and while I can't say our tastes aligned very much after that, I can vividly recall a sudden moment of connection between us, on the occasion of the release of The Frank Book in 2003: “I like this,” she said. “This guy is really good.” The truth is, all you really need to understand the Frank comics -- those wordless exploits of a quintessential Funny Animal Character set loose in a “closed system of moral algebra,” per his creator -- is to understand virtually anything of our long, shared cultural history of Silly Symphonies and Looney Tunes. And if Frank is not so cuddly as the rest of the menagerie (though still cuddlier than some), it's because Woodring is less interested in replicating popular cartoon formulae than in distilling the fraught concept of “antics” itself into a sort of linguistics – observing, again, a reality of intuition. Lately, Woodring has been concerned with what the book dealers call graphic novels, and it was to my delight that these latter works did not come across simply as longer Frank stories between hard covers, but rather as works of mythopoeic sweep, in ready dialogue with one another. In 2010's Weathercraft , Woodring revised one of his crueler gag shorts (1996's “Gentlemanhog”) into a study of cyclical mechanisms, in which a corpulent, ignorant humanoid beast becomes an enlightened and empathetic individual, only to find himself reduced again to a bestial state as the story concludes with everything reset for further exploitation later on. Frank is just a supporting character, “adopting the attitude that will bring him the most fun,” and occupying the book's final panel by sitting down to peruse a magazine, as if eager to get the next story started. That subsequent tale was 2011's Congress of the Animals , which differed wildly. Its early scenes remain Woodring's bluntest work of societal allegory, seeing the earth itself foreclose on Frank's house and forcing the fuzzy lil' fuck into getting a job. This leads to a quest of Frank's own -- at one point, he literally draws a sword to slay a dragon -- at the close of which he is rewarded, justly, with the companionship of Fran, a fair maiden who returns with him to his restored home. How do we know they're meant for each other? Why, they sort of look like the same creature, of course, and funny animal cartoons have long resisted the hint of miscegenation by pairing boy mice with girl mice, girl cats with boy cats, and. Frank with Fran. I did not consider, at the time, the implications of such a pairing – the terrifying inevitability. Nor, when Woodring revealed She-Frank's true name, did I notice the metaphor behind arriving at a “woman” (to the extent these characters suggest gender attributes), by subtracting something from a man, like Eve from Adam's rib. I was simply happy , having read of Frank's escapades for so many years, that he seemed to have done well for himself, and moreover that Jim Woodring had answered the fatalism of Weathercraft with a paean to successful evolution. This, you are noticing, is a classic patriarchal narrative. The hero, the MAN, in all his Campbellian splendor, seizes his Boon, the maid, and crosses the threshold improved. Ideally, this would not be the end of the conversation, but the beginning, and so we have Woodring's spanking-new Fran , named for "the girl" herself. Quickly, you realize this is not actually the story of Fran, the character, but a story about her, inseparable from the perspective of Frank, whom we come to realize is a bit more invested in this relationship than is Fran herself. I mean, heck – we're already making gendered assumptions based on the feminine curves of someone's floppy ears (linguistics, remember), so we might as well acknowledge that the concept of monogamy might well be foreign to Fran, who is reluctant to share details of her past with Frank, precipitating a blowout row. She leaves him, immediately, and Frank must once again embark on a journey to try and win her back, though the concept of "winning," now, is burdened with the possibility that Our Hero has made the critical mistake of selecting for his mate an entity that not merely looks like him, but is as fundamentally capricious as well. This realization is the heart of this book. Back in Congress of the Animals -- which only promised “[c]ongress” among animals, remember, not lasting peace -- Frank discovered his love in a house that looked like him. Always, she flattered his self-image, a derivation from Fran[k]. Following such mythic predecessors, it seems silly to compare Fran to a popular romantic comedy like (500) Days of Summer , but much in the way that 2009 blockbuster called into question the narrative certainties of its genre by positioning one of its central pairing as only partially knowable, and the other as unreasonably assured of his place in the story, Woodring disrupts the "conclusion" of his own prior book by forcing us to consider that Frank's point of view might only allow for the possibility that he is the protagonist of every situation in which he finds himself. In other words, if Congress of the Animals sought to set Frank free of the circularity of his narrative space, Fran is arguably more ambitious: it seeks to examine the very presumptions that follow the idea of a "protagonist" in a "narrative," understanding that elevating a hero diminishes the perspectives of those he encounters. Fran, we learn, is something of a shape-shifter; sometimes she has three arms, and sometimes she is standing in two places at once. This may be Woodring's way of communicating movement, of animation, but the very fact that Fran moves in a different way than Frank suggests that even her appearance as a female version of him may be an illusion, built up from Frank's own desire for a partner. By the time Frank pursues her to the other side of the country, Annie Hall -style -- where she's shacked up with some sandals 'n' skirt-wearing hippie who responds to Frank's awesome, frothing-at-the-mouth anger with hugs and grins -- her body has become bulbous and strange, his idealization of her breaking down. He is terrified by her independence, at the notion that she has an existence, a form , outside of him; that she had a life before, and will, presumably, thereafter. It was at that point in the book when I realized that Woodring was implicating his very approach to comics. Collective unconscious, after all, can easily manifest as shared delusion, and few are more pernicious and cartoon-ready than the Happily Ever After. Fortunately, Woodring is so keyed in to the source of all of this, that he is prepared to posit the recurrence of stories again and again throughout funny animal history as less the hell of Weathercraft , now, than as a means of challenging the pat conclusions of these cultural myths. All things must pass, Fran says. In the event you don't see some time in your life where a lover no longer feels for you in the way you'd like, rest assured that you will know their death, or they yours. And in a hundred and fifty years, your family, your children -- everybody who loved and understood you in an immediate manner -- will be gone from this world, and whatever impact you had mustered from your time as a living thing will be most likely forgotten, if not left in some state of depreciation. And life and stories, of course, will continue, the big wheel turning. None of this is to suggest that Woodring is against the possibility of growth, or education. There is a marvelous scene toward the end of this book where Frank finds himself inside a curious museum. It is the first time in a while where he is seen laughing at the many fun exhibits. Then, he approaches a roped-off portal, which seems to function as a mirror. He makes silly faces, and enjoys himself greatly, until he suddenly has a vision of Fran's weird hippie boyfriend grinning alongside him, and he is terrified once again. This neatly summarizes the themes Woodring has been building, of Frank as a subjective perspective, navigating a world according to him. But also, it is allegorical on a wiser and more emotive level, insofar that relationships with people leave parts of them inside us. To see an old lover, an ex-spouse, with someone else, is to witness a crucial aspect of the self become displaced, so that this new lover, this new spouse, is somehow involved with you. It is solipsistic, yes, but I suspect more natural than we'd care to admit, so trapped in here behind our own eyes. And should Frank sit down with another book, as he did at the end of Weathercraft , we will know it is not the end of anything, really, but merely a recurrence. Hardly the end of the world, because even if the world and memories and stories possess some ultimate form, they can only be understood by individual humans with unique and valid and true desires. Will Frank retain this lesson? Maybe not. But will we? Fran by Jim Woodring. On sale date: November 2, 2013. In this all-new, original graphic novel from an acknowledged master, Frank’s found a soulmate. For the past 20 years or so, Jim Woodring’s beloved trilobular chuckbuster Frank has enjoyed one mindbending catastrophe after another in the treacherous embrace of The Unifactor, the land into which he was born and from which escape seemed neither desirable nor likely. And then, abruptly, in 2011’s acclaimed Congress of the Animals (the second Woodring original graphic novel, following Weathercraft) Frank did leave the Unifactor for uncharted lands beyond—where, after a string of trials, he acquired a soulmate named Fran. This development raised far more questions than it answered. Would Frank become placid and domesticated? Would he be jilted? Would he turn out to be a dreadful cad? Would he become a downtrodden and exhausted paterfamilias staring vacantly into the dimming fire of life as obnoxious grandchildren pulled his peglike ears and stole his porridge? The answers to these fruitless speculations and many more are delivered in a devastatingly unpredictable fashion in Fran, which is in effect part two of Congress of the Animals. Fans of Frank, connoisseurs of bizarre romance, and spelunkers in the radiant depths of graphic metaphysical psychodrama will want to add this singular cartoon adventure story to their lifetime reading list. Winner of the 2014 Lynd Ward Graphic Novel Prize. “…Mr. Woodring [has] extraordinary gifts as a draftsman, storyteller and creator of hilarious characters and hallucinatory situations…. Over the nearly 100 pages of Fran, Frank goes on a picaresque, surrealistic journey to try to retrieve his lost love in a world populated by all kinds of monsters, demons, and bizarre objects and architecture. Its black-and-white sequences of frames are drawn in a style that owes something to antique European woodcuts, Walt Disney, Looney Tunes and R. Crumb and other underground, psychedelic comic artists who emerged in the 1960s.” — Ken Johnson - The New York Times. Pages 120 Format Hardback Color Black and white Dimensions 7.4" × 9.8" ISBN-13 9781606996614.