Jim by Jim Woodring

So I had the thought that perhaps Jim Woodring's comics were opaque to me because I was reading his wordless "Frank" stories, which depend heavily on a personal mythology that I suspect is difficult to explicate through pictures alone. [1] Maybe, I hoped, if I read Woodring comics where he could also use words to explain himself, everything would be clearer and I could finally understand the essential Jim-ness of his work.

Reader, my hopes were dashed.

The comics in the 2014 collection Jim do have words - often a lot of words; there are a number of basically illustrated prose pieces, lettered by Woodring, that run for multiple pages - but I didn't find that those words actually helped me comprehend what was going on. Rather the opposite a lot of the time, in fact.

The Frank stories often operate on dream-logic, full of transformations and sudden reversals, random cruelty and beauty, with recurring images and characters that the reader has to assume have very specific meanings, even if that reader can't figure out what the meanings are. The "Jim" stories have all of that, plus confusing dialogue, and feature the author himself as the main character a lot of the time. (Hence, as they say, the title.)

Now, it doesn't actually say anywhere in this book that these comics are the records of Woodring's dreams, not in so many words. But he does talk about having recurring dreams repeatedly, and the stories featuring Woodring as a character often have him in pajamas, and they very much run on dream logic, so...I think that's a fair assumption.

I hope so, because the alternative is that this is how Woodring's waking mind operates, and these stories were assembled deliberately this way, that Woodring thinks these are the clearest and most precise ways to say the things he wants to say. And, since he seems to have a normal life, with marriage, job and at least one child - or did, in the years he made these stories, mostly the '80s and '90s - I find that hard to imagine.

In the end, I'm left as I usually am with Woodring stories: pointing and gesturing, making strangled mouth noises, unable to come up with anything coherent. But this time there are those long text pieces - prose poems? also dream descriptions? stories meant to be understood? - which are generally overly wordy in a "storyteller" manner, include lots of seeming extraneous detail, and tend to start from odd premises, wander for a while, and then stop without anything that seemed to me like a point.

Oh! And there also is a sequence of stories about a young couple - yuppies, I guess? - who are self-centered and live in a fine house, but also talk like all the other Woodring characters, and who I can't tell if we're supposed to laugh at or sympathize with. Especially when one of them kills the other. (There's a lot of random death in Woodring comics - again, I hope and assume that's because of dream-logic rules.)

That's where I am. I like looking at Woodring's drawings. I enjoy the ways his stories move. I find them compelling. But I don't think I've come close to understanding any of them. And words clearly don't help.

[1] See, most recently, The Frank Book, Woodring's earliest "Frank" comics. And, before that: Poochytown, Fran, and Weathercraft.