Jim Woodring, The Frank Book
Bizarre, twisted, wordless comics. I read the stories before bed and they gave me CRAZY dreams:
That’s why I was unsurprised to find out that many of the drawings actually come straight from Woodring’s dreams and, sometimes, hallucinations, which started when he was young:
I hallucinated when I was a kid. I saw apparitions when I was a child. I’d be lying in bed and I’d see large, silent, rotating faces hovering over the foot of my bed, faces that were very cartoony, actually. Big, horrible, grimacing, deeply-lined faces with their mouths open, yelling at me silently, moving their mouths rapidly. I could make these things go away very easily. There were also things that I saw when I closed my eyes that I couldn’t make go away. Like a staring eyeball that I would see with my eyes open or shut sometimes. It would scare the shit out of me and I would leave my bed running to the living room…
Eventually, the hallucinations became a regular part of his life:
I came to regard them as not only a part of life but the most interesting part. Consensus reality seemed like a dull, dead-end street compared to the intense, mutable reality of those visions or whatever they were—neurological misfires. I expected life to be full of sudden, inexplicable surprises. When these things didn’t happen for a while, life seemed dull and painful. I loved the strangeness, the mystery they presented, and I searched for more of the same everywhere. If I was going up a staircase in the dark, I would dance with anticipatory excitement, like I did when we went to Disneyland. I called that prevision state a “sticky mood”—that sense that I was approaching knowledge. I loved it.
That “sticky mood” reminds me of a piece I read recently about cultivating serendipity, and a breed of people called “super-encounterers”:
Most interesting were the “super-encounterers,” who reported that happy surprises popped up wherever they looked. The super-encounterers loved to spend an afternoon hunting through, say, a Victorian journal on cattle breeding, in part, because they counted on finding treasures in the oddest places. In fact, they were so addicted to prospecting that they would find information for friends and colleagues.
You become a super-encounterer, according to Dr. Erdelez, in part because you believe that you are one — it helps to assume that you possess special powers of perception, like an invisible set of antennas, that will lead you to clues.
When I was researching Woodring’s work, I came across this trailer where he explains that he has “a vocabulary of shapes” that he uses in his drawings:
Real shapes and real patterns are things you would observe in nature, like the marks on the back of a cobra’s hood or the markings on a fish or a lizard.
Imaginary shapes are just that, symbols that come to a person in dreams or reveries and are charged with meaning. In fact, they can be so compelling, a person can spend a lot of time trying to follow and decipher them. They sort of lure you across the landscape.
The real shapes and the imaginary shapes are just there, but the hybrid shapes are made up to fulfill a specific purpose in the story. If I want to convey that something is loaded with a certain kind of potential, I’ll show a shape that looks something like a bursting seedpod. If I want to show that something is female, I’ll pick an obvious female-representative shape. If I want something that’s warlike or dangerous, I’ll make it spiky like a cocklebur, something with less-than-cuddly connotations. I use those shapes in order to provide an undercurrent or a subtext to what it is I’m trying to say.
The Frank Book can be sort of hard to come by — I’m the biggest fan of his black and white comics, so you might start with The Portable Frank.
Filed under: my reading year 2016
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