Jim Woodring: 'I am extremely interested in wrapping up Frank'

The meticulous, surreal cartoons of Jim Woodring are some of the most highly regarded in comics today. There aren’t really words to describe them, which is appropriate, because the stories of Woodring’s odd little woodland critter Frank are wordless, our hero’s adventures taking place purely through vivid pictures rendered in a style like a woodcut.

That clarity is deceptive: Frank’s world – called the Unifactor – is terrifying and bizarre, filled with strange beings like the Whim (a little figure with a stick-thin body and a pair of devilish horns), the Manhog, and Frank’s pets, Pushpaw and Pupshaw.

Woodring’s new book, Frank in the 3rd Dimension (a catalogue of an exhibition at Seattle’s Frye Museum), takes the character to new heights of strangeness. The volume is in old-fashioned 3D, with cardboard red-blue glasses designed by Woodring himself. Here he discusses seeing his work converted into a new format, why some of the things he dreams up are too terrible to draw, and the coming end of Frank.

Can you tell me a little bit about how you got into cartooning?

At an early age, I decided that what interested me was drawings that had a particular power. I would see Time magazine covers by Boris Artzybasheff or magazine illustrations by him or Pierre Roy, or any number of illustrators who were doing artistic, innovative things and sometimes those illustrations had a kind of metaphysical charge that really got me. They made me want to not only find more of those things but produce them myself.

I would occasionally see a painting by Hieronymus Bosch or Bruegel or some weird image. I didn’t learn about surrealism until I was in high school because I was so socially closed off. When I did learn about it, it was by going to a massive surrealism and dada retrospective at the LA County art museum and I saw all the greatest hits of both those fields and it took me days to recover from all the revelations that came out of that.

What was it like?

It was 1968. You name a surrealist and his 10 best and best-known paintings were there. Or hers. It was a hell of a show and it awakened me for the first time to the idea that there were grown men and women who were actually pursuing these mysteries and I just thought, “That’s my tribe.” Then I had to learn how to draw, because I was not a prodigy at all. I was a very, very weak artist and I didn’t learn how to do what I wanted to do until I was in my mid-20s.

How did you learn?

Well, in the time-honored way of going to used bookstores and getting books of drawing and drilling with a pen and trying to do lettering and studying. Going to the beach and taking drugs, bodysurfing – all those things. Anything I thought would help, I did. I didn’t get any kind of specialized training. I don’t think I would have had the steady quality of mind to go to art school successfully. My mind was too chaotic.

You used to put ‘I hope to spare you all of my worst imaginings’ in Frank as a sort of sign-off. Why?

There’s just a lot of stuff I’ve decided not to do because either I don’t understand it or I can’t handle it. I don’t have much to do with sex in my work because it seems to me that sex takes everything out of the realm of thought and into the realm of passion and that’s not what I’m trying to depict. And I try to avoid things that are seriously disturbing.

I wrote that passage after I did a realistic charcoal drawing of my father standing at a workbench wearing a blood-spattered apron smashing up babies with a single-jack sledgehammer. I just did it to see if I could do it, and when it was done I showed it to my girlfriend at the time who was generally supportive of me, but when she saw that she just said, basically, “You’ve brought something of such unspeakable ugliness into the world, and I don’t know how you can justify it.” And at the time I was interested in transgressive things even though I didn’t like them – Hubert Selby and the Marquis de Sade – but what she said resonated with me and I didn’t want to be the author of something that would make people feel so bad. So I’ve veered away from that kind of horrible, speculative reality and just got into a kind of symbolic language that had always meant the most to me.

Frank is such an amazing tour of someone else’s head. Do you intend the books to be allegorical or is it just more about representing feelings and ideas there aren’t words for?

I want them to have this mysterious charge. Kind of ticking like a Geiger counter indicating something invisible is there; something powerful that you can’t see, and it’s letting you know you’re in the vicinity of it.

How do you, I guess, commune with this notion from which all of the other notions flow? The Unifactor, or the world of Frank?

You know, I can’t really answer that question. I just feel like I’ve been given a job or a position and I kind of vaguely know what I have to do to be fulfilling the terms of my employment here. And I just have to do this job the best I can. I don’t really know what I’m doing with these things. Like a lot of things in life! I have a spiritual life – I don’t know what that means! And it’s the same with this work.

Are you a religious person at all?

Yeah, I am. I guess you would call me a Hindu for lack of a better word. It’s been an important part of my life for 30 years but I don’t know what it means. It’s just something that I feel attached to, and I’m compelled to do it … it nourishes my life and the philosophical aspect of it has done me a ton of good.

Do you have a book of general-interest knowledge about the Unifactor that you keep handy? A notebook that tells you ‘OK, this is allowed and this isn’t allowed,’ or is it just intuitive?

Well, it isn’t intuitive because I’ve had to learn it as I’ve gone, but it’s knowledge that sticks. Unlike most of the stuff involved in my work I don’t forget these things. I’m really immersed in this world.

Is it Frank from here on out for you, or is there other stuff you’d like to pursue?

I am extremely interested in wrapping up Frank. The project that I’m working on now, when it’s done, the two preceding books and another 30-page segment will be added to that for a 400-page single-story graphic novel, and I think at that point I can just lay the thing to rest. And I’ve been doing a lot of sketching and drawing and writing and trying to figure out how to proceed in the direction that I’m going in. One thing about the Frank comics is that it’s definitely a young man’s style. It requires a lot of sharp-eyedness and hand-eye coordination and endurance and I just am losing interest in spending this much time doing these insanely over-rendered things.

It looks astonishingly labor-intensive.

It does take a long time. I’ve never been able to find a shortcut. If the project requires a certain thing … right now I’m working on this implement I’ve already drawn a bunch of pages and I realized I didn’t have the design of it right, so I’m doing different views of this thing, which is entirely imagined, from different angles, and then I have to go back and redraw the pages where it fit, because I’ve already inked them, so I have to do it over.

One reason I feel like I’m on the right track is that I’m able to do this and somehow still get by. I feel like the hand of providence keeps me afloat while I do this stuff, which is not to say that it’s worthy of cosmic support.

You did a strip a few years ago where Pushpaw and Pupshaw get out into the ‘real’ world and it scares the hell out of them. It’s interesting to see you kind of emerging into that world that would frighten your characters. Is there more of that to come?

I can’t really say. I’m giving 90% of my attention to this Frank story I’m working on and I don’t know what else I’m gonna do. I just finished a charcoal drawing that I decided not to post because it’s called “immigrants” and it shows some people being released into a landscape out of the mouth of an enormous frog, and it just seems like the wrong time to put that out there. Even though it’s innocuous, I’m just still so freaked out by the way the world seems determined to drive itself into the bushes.

Frank never strikes me as particularly political but you clearly have a lot of opinions about this stuff. Do you ever think of entering that conversation?

In a way, Frank is about politics, because that character Whim is a politician. That’s his overriding characteristic.

Whim has the horns, right?

Yes. He looks like the other Christian god. I had a terrible experience the other night talking about politics with a friend of mine. I guess I would have to say I am a liberal, you know? If you ask me all the checklist things, I believe in them, but I don’t feel that … there’s just so much brainwashing and kneejerk thinking and it’s so hard for my liberal friends to accept that any conservative point of view is valid for the fear that if you’re honest the other side won’t be and you’ll be at a disadvantage. That concerns me more than the opinions that people are actually spouting; this weird, one-side-or-the-other stampeded quality that is in all the discourse.

When is the new Frank story going to be ready?

It depends on how it goes. I’m thinking about what I’m going to do and it seems pretty ambitious to me. I just have to hope that I make good headway on it. The working title is Poochytown.

And it’s the final one?

I can’t say it’s going to be the final one; I would like for it to be the final one. I’m 63 years old and I can still draw and think and everything but it gets harder to draw all those little lines and have them come out evenly and preserve a steady-state mind. I just want to concoct a way of drawing that is simpler and more expressive and has words in it so I can do these other projects that I want to do. I want to get away from the regimented, wavy lines. I figure if I can have words in it I don’t need to do anywhere near as much drawing.