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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.