Jim Woodring

In 1979[1] he was persuaded by his best friend[1][4] John Dorman to take work as an artist with the Ruby-Spears animation studio. He did "[s]toryboards during the production season and presentation work during the off-season." He did work for the cartoon shows Mister T, Rubik the Amazing Cube, and Turbo Teen, and he has often said that these were the worst cartoons ever produced. At that time, he formed friendships with and was somewhat mentored by celebrated comic book artists Gil Kane and Jack Kirby, who were both disgruntled with the comics business and were working in animation at the time.

While working at Ruby-Spears he began self-publishing Jim, an anthology of comics, dream art and free-form writing which he described as an "autojournal". In 1986, Woodring was introduced by Gil Kane to Gary Groth of Fantagraphics Books. Jim was published as a regular series by Fantagraphics starting in 1986, to critical acclaim if less than spectacular sales, and Woodring became a full-time cartoonist. Frank, a wordless surrealist series which began as an occasional feature within Jim, became his best-known work, eventually spinning off into its own series in 1996. Most of the content of the first of the two volumes of Jim were collected as The Book of Jim in 1993, which was subsequently ranked as #71 on The Comics Journal's100 best comics of the century list.

Woodring created a short-lived comics series for children, Tantalizing Stories, with Mark Martin. This was the place in which his character, Frank, first featured prominently, in stories that "have a dreamlike flow and an internal logic to them"[5] written in a "symbolic visual language"[5] that is "defined by thick, unforgiving cartoon lines that marry Walt Kelly with Salvador Dali." [6] Most of the Frank stories have been done in black and white, but a number are notable for being in (usually painted) full color. In particular, Woodring was nominated for "Best Colorist" at the 1993 Eisner Awards for the story Frank in the River. The Comics Journal ranked the Frank stories #55 in its list of the 100 best comics of the century.

He has also worked as a freelance illustrator and comics writer, adapting the film Freaks with F. Solano Lopez for Fantagraphics and writing comics based on Aliens and Star Wars for Dark Horse.

Woodring produced a new Frank book in 2005 (The Lute String) and in 2010 his first graphic novel-length Frank book, Weathercraft, which found itself on a number of "Best of 2010" lists.[7][8][9] This was followed up with another, Congress of the Animals, in May 2011. Woodring says that, while he had been away from comics, he built up a backlog of new stories, and he intends to complete a total of four 100-page books like Weathercraft and Congress of the Animals, and then return to the types of stories he had done in Jim.[10]

In June 2010, Scott Eder Gallery[11] in Brooklyn featured a solo show of Jim's Weathercaft art.[12]

A 48-minute DVD called Visions of Frank: Short Films by Japan's Most Audacious Animators was released by Japan's PressPop Music in 2005. It is a collection of nine animated shorts created between 2000 and 2005, each produced by a different artist or team interpreting a different Frank work. Aside from designing the packaging, Woodring had no input into the production of these films, leaving their interpretation entirely up to the animators.[13]

In 2010, a 93-minute documentary was released entitled The Lobster and the Liver: The Unique World of Jim Woodring,[14] directed by Jonathan Howells.

As of April 2011, Woodring keeps an infrequently updated blog,[15] where he sometimes posts panels from works-in-progress, including Weathercraft and Congress of the Animals, as well as other projects, such as new paintings and the construction and demonstration of a working seven-foot dip pen.

Woodring and his wife, Mary, have a son named Maxfield, who has published a graphic novel of his own titled OAK, printed with a grant from the Xeric Foundation, a page[16] from which was featured on November 18, 2012 as an entry for Woodring's blog.[15]

The stories involving these characters occur in the surreal world Woodring calls the Unifactor.

Frank

A bipedal, bucktoothed animal of uncertain species with a short tail, described by Woodring as a "generic anthropomorph" and "naive but not innocent", "completely naive, capable of sinning by virtue of not knowing what he's really about."[17] The character design is reminiscent of old American animated shorts from the 1920s and 1930s, such as from Fleischer Studios. Usually he appears in black and white, but when he appears in colour his fur is purple.

Jim

The artist himself featured prominently in most of his early dream comics.

Pulque

A perpetually drunken, man-sized, Spanish-speaking frog-creature. Pulque inexplicably hangs around with a group of suburban American children, despite the fact that he and the children cannot understand each other and are drawn in markedly different styles.

Chip and Monk

Boyhood friends...

Big Red

A large street cat who hunts and kills with an appropriately cat-like gusto. This is made chilling by Red's dialogue with his prey: "I'll kill you," shrieks a terrified possum, "I killed the old owl!" Red mutters an amused response, "That's nice," as he moves in for the kill.

In 1991 and 1992, Woodring illustrated the Harvey Pekar stories Snake, Watching the Media Watchers and Sheiboneth Beis Hamikdosh for American Splendor.[22] and for Introducing Dennis Eichhorn which appeared in Real Stuff #1.

Woodring did the artwork for Dennis Eichhorn's The Meaning of Life in Real Stuff #3, and contributed the cover to issue #8.

Woodring wrote the scripts for the comic-book adaptation of Freaks, illustrated by Francisco Solano Lopez and colored by Mary Woodring.

In the 1990s, Woodring wrote a number of stories for Dark Horse Comics that were based on the Aliens franchise. The stories were illustrated by Kilian Plunkett, Jason Green and Francisco Solano Lopez, and have been collected as Aliens: Labyrinth in 1997 and Aliens: Kidnapped in 1999.

Released in November 2013, Woodring created an interpretative story based on artwork from Yo La Tengo's album Fade. The resultant product is a set of three soft vinyl figurines (sculpted by Tomohiro Yasui) representing the band members; they come with a DVD featuring an animated short (5:20 minutes) called The Tree, featuring music by Yo La Tengo (plus a "bonus comic" from Woodring is included with the rest).

Woodring's strange toy creations have been sold in vending machines in Japan and are available in American comics shops. In a 2002 interview with The Comics Journal, Woodring said that he was gradually leaving comics behind because they simply were not lucrative enough, and he was increasingly concentrating on individual paintings. He made his return to comics at the turn of the decade, however, producing two new graphic novels.

Woodring's work often has a nightmarish surreal quality. Woodring told The Comics Journal that under the right circumstances he is capable of "hallucinating like mad."[1] The desire to draw something that "wasn't there" was always of "paramount importance" to Woodring.

Woodring's drawing style in the black-and-white Frank stories has often been mistaken for brushwork due to the greatly varying thickness of the linework typical of brush cartooning, but he has insisted,[note 1] and indeed demonstrated, that it is done with a dip pen. He has said, "pen and ink for me is the ne plus ultra of drawing."[1]

In his Frank stories, Woodring employed a style that combined 1920s–30s Fleischer Studios-like character designs with an Eastern architectural and design flavor. He also makes heavy use of a distinctive controlled wavy line that adds contour and texture to the backgrounds, which has become his trademark.

Woodring also works in charcoal and paint (mostly in watercolor). A selection of these works (mostly charcoal) appeared in the collection Seeing Things in 2005.

Woodring singles out for praise the cartoon work of Mark Martin, Justin Green, Rachel Bell, John Dorman, Mark Newgarden, Roy Thomkins, Peter Bagge, Terry LaBan, Chester Brown, Seth, Joe Matt, Robert Crumb, Charles Burns, Gilbert Hernandez, Jaime Hernandez, Lat,[17] Gil Kane and Jack Kirby (Woodring inked and colored Kirby's designs during his time at Ruby-Spears). He considers Kim Deitch to be "the most under-appreciated comic artist working today."[23]

Harry McNaught,[1][17] Boris Artzybasheff,[1] 17th Century Dutch painting,[1] Ingres,[1] Salvador Dalí

Woodring has read widely in literature. Under the Volcano[5] by Malcolm Lowry and Les Misérables by Victor Hugo are two works that he has mentioned more than once in interviews.

Woodring frequently mentions Captain Beefheart, Bill Frisell as musical favorites, but also "schmaltzy, potent, cheap pop music with strings from the late 50s and early 60s, the Theme from A Summer Place, Holiday for Strings, the theme from Midnight Cowboy...that sort of dreck."[13] He also listens to a lot of classical music—his brother, with whom he's close, is a classical musician and has introduced him to much of what he listens to.[1][13]

In December 2006, he became one of the first group of United States Artists Fellows. His work was featured prominently at the Centre National de la Bande Dessinée et de l’Image in Angoulême, France as part of the international comics festival held there in January 2007. The following year, Woodring received an Inkpot Award at the 2008 San Diego Comic Convention, and he was awarded an Artist Trust/Washington State Arts Commission Fellowship in the fall of 2008. In November 2014 he received the Lynd Ward Prize from the Pennsylvania Center for the Book, for his graphic novel Fran.

• Lambiek: Jim Woodring
• Jim Woodring at the Grand Comics Database
• Jim Woodring at the Comic Book DB (archived from the original)

• Rudick, Nicole. "The Mind of a Worldly Man Is Like a Fly": A Jim Woodring Interview part 1 2 3 4. The Comics Journal. June 27, 2011. Retrieved 2011-06-28
• 2011 Video interview on YouTube. Seattle Channel. 2011-03-25. retrieved 2011-04-12
• 2010 Video Interview on The Dusty Wright Show (22 minutes)
• 2010 "The Words and Worlds of Jim Woodring". October 1, 2010. Archived from the original on October 4, 2010. Retrieved April 12, 2010.
• 2010 Heller, Jason (July 8, 2010). "Interview: Jim Woodring". The A.V. Club. Retrieved April 12, 2011.
• 2007 Heater, Brian (March 27, 2007). Interview: Jim Woodring " Pt. 1 Pt. 2. Retrieved April 5, 2011.
• 2005 Epstein, Daniel Robert (October 22, 2005). "Jim Woodring (interview)". SuicideGirls.
• Groth, Gary (1993). "The Comics Journal #164 interview" (PDF). Fantagraphics. Retrieved April 12, 2011.
• Lambiek Comiclopedia article.