The Frank Book by Jim Woodring

Does the beginning explicate the later work? It can, sometimes. Especially if a creator starts out relatively simple and gets more complicated as she goes, the beginning is the best way in.

But if the beginning is as hermetic and self-referential as the end, then it may only look like a slightly simpler version, which could be useful, but will not provide any Aha! moment.

Jim Woodring is the latter. I don't know if I need to say that; it's probably clear to anyone who knows Woodring's work. Woodring, for thirty-plus years, has been making comics set in a world we eventually learned he calls The Unifactor, about a little guy named Frank and the enemies, friends, pets, and monsters that inhabit that world with him. The Frank Book was the first big collection of Frank stories; it came out in 2003 and collected stories that had appeared, mostly in anthologies, in the decade before that.

Since then, Woodring has mostly made new Frank stories at graphic-novel length: Weathercraft, Fran, and Poochytown are a few of them, the ones that I've written about here at the greatest length.

Some other things I should tell you about Woodring's work: it's generally wordless. We know the names of these characters from sources mostly outside the books themselves, though this book does collect a series of trading cards (it was the '90s; I can't explain the why of that any more clearly) with names for all the characters to that point and some psychological/behavioral details for them. His work is about feelings and psychological states and transformation and, probably, in some complex way, teleology - his world is a directed, purposeful one, that forces specific actions and changes to...teach moral lessons? illustrate various parables? demonstrate the futility of all action?

That's the thing. I'm pretty sure Woodring has very specific lessons to teach, that his stories are precise and pointed. But I have never found them clear, at all. I don't think most people do, luckily - there do seem to be a few readers in synch enough with Woodring's worldview to explain some pieces of his work, but most of us experience it rather than understand it.

This is the best introduction to Woodring's work, the clearest and simplest and most obvious of the Frank stories. They are not clear or simple or obvious, by any standard definition. There are over three hundred pages of stories here, and they begin as they continue: with Frank in a detailed, complex world that Woodring will not explain to us, besieged by and gleefully exploiting and tricking (and several more even-less likely verbs) the organic, transforming creatures and/or landscape of this place.

It does include those trading cards, so we know he is Frank, the appetite-driven four-legged thing is Manhog, his pet is Pupshaw and her mate/friend is Pushpaw. The devil-figure is Whim. The spindle-looking flying whatzises are Jivas. And that there is both the Faux Pa and the Real Pa, who are completely identical except for the way they interact with Frank.

Things happen. It would be body horror if we took it seriously, if we didn't know all of these characters would be back to their default state at the beginning of the next story, like a repertory company who all die at the end of Hamlet and then jump up to take a bow and ask the audience to come back tomorrow for Love's Labour Lost.

Woodring's work in this era was only intermittently in color, so this book shows his black-and-white line art better than the later, more colorful books. There are some images, mostly single pages, that look to be done with airbrush, but this is mostly pen-and-ink work, full of precise lines to delineate all of these phantasmagorical things.

Woodring is a careful, precise creator - in both his drawing and his stories. We may not know why something looks as it does, or why Frank does any particular thing, but we always know Woodring knows, and did it that way for a very particular reason.

That's enough for me; I hope it can be enough for you. Woodring is a singular figure in comics: utterly unlike anyone else, with influences that seem to be entirely outside of comics and no followers at all. His world is wide and strange and beautiful and horrible, and every page, every panel is a new wonder or horror.

This is where it started. This is where to start. But don't expect to get it. You may have to be Jim Woodring for that.

Book-A-Day 2018 #376: Poochytown by Jim Woodring

Here I go again, trying to eff the ineffable. I admit up front that it will either not work or be stupid for any one of a dozen reasons. But, if I'm reading books and writing about them, I need to do it even when it's doomed to fail.

Jim Woodring is a unique comics creator who makes wordless comics set in a world apparently called The Unifactor -- we know the names of many of his characters from his descriptions and occasional notes, but that's about it. Those worlds are full of nightmare-like transformations, full of organic forms growing and consuming and splitting and combining. I don't think anyone other than Woodring really understands any of it. I certainly don't.

I've written, badly, about Woodring books before: Fran and Weathercraft. And now I will write badly about his newest book, Poochytown.

From the flap copy -- supposedly a letter written to Woodring by "Walter Foxglove, The Smartest Artist" but I believe actually written by Woodring -- and from the odd subtitle "Discontinuing Congress of the Animals and Fran," I think Poochytown is something of a reboot. Woodring seems to be arguing that those two previous books were him trying to mold the story, and that the godlike Unifactor has since smacked him down in some way and forced him to tell the "real" story.

None of that actually makes much sense to me, but, then, neither does the actual story here, so that's fine.

So, two minor (unnamed?) characters have a squabble on the first few pages, which leads to various luggage being strewn across the landscape. Frank, the central character of the series, finds that luggage, along with his housemates/friends/pets Pupshaw and Pushpaw. Among the stuff is a tuba-like device that, when blown, generates an organic mass. The mass, for the first few blows, is interesting and falls to the ground to dissipate, but then one mighty breath makes it even larger, buoyant, and self-sustaining. That thing is filled with other creatures like Pupshaw and Pushpaw, and those two climb up into the thing to fly away with it. Frank, as happens so often, is left behind, alone.

Frank goes back to his house to find Manhog there, and initially drives him out before the two of them fight a horse-monster (?!) together and start to live in that house together. Manhog is a slob and Frank is randomly histrionically sad. They have some minor explorations together, and then find a steering wheel coming out of the ground (?!) and drive that (?!) into a crash (??!!!) which leads to some phantasmagorical stuff I can't even characterize.

Eventually, Frank finds and saves (?) Pupshaw and Pushpaw from the flying land of things like them, since they were being mutated/transformed by being there (?!). Everything goes back to the way it was in the end, and Manhog is kicked out of the house.

My sense is that Woodring's work is something like a classical allegory, based entirely in Woodring's own dream-logic and imagery: every character and object stands for something in his private schema, and each book presents a fable of how those elements of mind, or society, or life, interact in various ways, and provide positive or negative object lessons.

I've never managed to figure out the key to those allegories, though -- never quite figured out what Manhog or Frank or the tuba represent. So reading a Woodring book is like scanning a poem in an unfamiliar language -- well, more that it's like reading a language that re-uses all of the words from English but means entirely different things by those words.

There is no one else like Jim Woodring; his books are marvelous in their unique, inexplicable power. But I don't understand them, and I've never found anyone else whose understanding of them is explicable to me.

This Is Not the Future I Was Promised

Today, I got an e-mail promoting "backplanes." I was momentarily excited, visualizing some kind of backpack-mounted personal-flight device -- maybe not a jetpack, specifically, but certainly something cool.

Sadly, a backplane turns out to be something dull and technical having to do with computer monitors, and my dreams are shattered.

Have we lived and fought in vain!?

Like a Hurricane

To make this short and sweet: the Wheeler household came through Hurricane Sandy vastly better than we got through Hurricane Irene last year. The basement is still bone-dry (even after we took almost everything out of it Sat/Sun), and we only lost power for a few hours Monday night.

In fact, if I can believe the newspaper, we're now -- for the first time in our lives -- part of the 1%, since JCP&L, our electricity company, says that 99% of their customers are down right now.

I'm actually getting more work done at home this week than I expected -- I don't have access to a lot of my company's systems, so I can only do some things, but I'm trying to power through as many of those as I can.

Much of the rest of New Jersey is a huge mess, though -- even up in my area, where we didn't flood this time, there are plenty of big trees down and other problems. (And I have no idea when Hoboken will be un-flooded enough for me to actually go to the office and get some desperately needed stuff done before my looming vacation.)

But, if there's anyone out there worried about me, don't. Worry about those other people, like the ones in Little Ferry who got walloped when a tidal surge took out levees in the Meadowlands and swamped the first floors of their houses in minutes. Or most of the Shore, too. They've got it tough this time around.

The Things You Find When You're Not Looking For Them

This morning I stumbled across the website for The Outdoor Co-Ed Topless Pulp Appreciation Society, which is exactly what it sounds like: a group of New Yorkers (mostly young and female, from the pictures) who have been getting together for at least the past two summers to read Hard Case Crime and similarly noirish stuff, usually in Central Park, with their tops off. (There also seems to be a connected series of read-ins on the roof deck of some building, where full nudity is allowed.)

Yes, there are pictures, and many of those pictures will not be safe for work. That seems to be the point of it: it's more "look at us having fun reading and tanning with no shirts on" than "and here's what we thought of these books." I've chosen one tame image to put here, to illustrate the concept. (If anyone from OCTPAS comes by and wants me to remove it, my e-mail is in the right sidebar.) I'm also happy to see the focus is clearly entirely on the fact that they think this is a fun thing to do, and not on wanting people to look at them. (There's plenty of the other on the Internet already, of course.)

I was hoping for book criticism, but tits are pretty darn nice, too. I never want to be someone who complains about tits; that would be sad. But it would be swell if those readers wrote a tad more about what they read, particularly the ones that multiple topless readers enjoyed -- because that could make a completely wonderful back-of-book blurb.

Still, this is an activity that should be encouraged. Well, both of them: reading and public toplessness. Not necessarily together, I suppose, but there is a lovely chocolate-and-peanut-butter piquancy to the combination. The world turns out to be a little more interesting and exciting than I thought it was when I got up this morning.

A New Category of Spam

I got an e-mail this morning asking for "a cost to place this ad below in you paper and online in employment dept. i need cost for 9 weeks." From the shaky grammar and capitalization, I suspect it's from a bot and thus spam. It then list an ad that I should run in my paper -- I was momentarily tempted to claim that I'd done so and send an invoice for several thousand dollars.

I'm not entirely sure what the point of this message is, though -- perhaps it's just meant as a test to see if the e-mail address is valid. (If someone replies "I'm not a newspaper, you dummy," it means there's a person there.) If that's true, then this is from the subcategory of spam that only exists to pave the way for more spam.

And, of course, is the spam-meisters could be that inventive about something constructive, we wouldn't be in a massive world-wide recession right now.

I Wish I Could Have Heard the Conversation With His Editor

Terry Goodkind's new not-at-all-fantasy novel, The Law of Nines, will be published in September by Putnam. I just read the Publishers Weekly review (close to the top of this page) and noticed that it's set in the modern world with connections to a fantasy world.

Sounds like a good choice for a writer trying to move from secondary-world fantasy to contemporary thrillers; so far, so good.

But his hero is named Alex Rahl, and he lives in Orden, Nebraska -- which is either an indication that this novel isn't as separate from the "Sword of Truth" books as it seems to be, or that Goodkind likes to nudge his readers very very heavily in the ribs. Very curious....

People Who E-Mail Me For No Reason

Today's entry: the Community Center of St. Bernard in lovely Arabi, Louisiana. Sent to me at work, no less.

I can only sit here and look confused. (And then delete it.)