Frank Book, The - Hardcover

Woodring, Jim

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1560975342 ISBN 13: 9781560975342

Publisher: Fantagraphics Books, 2003

Synopsis

by Jim Woodring
Since 1991, these lusciously rendered, hypnotic fables have dazzled comics readers the world over. All the Frank stories in one massive and deluxe tome. Between its handsome cloth covers are 344 pages of Frank comics, drawings and oddities. A fancy dust jacket, swoon-inducing end papers and ribbon bookmark make this book a decorative object as well as a repository of storytelling genius. Frank is a unique, visionary comic, exquisitely drawn and so fully realized that readers find themselves drawn deeply into Woodring's hallucinatory mindscape. The stories, almost entirely wordless, are told with brilliant, candy colors that people of all ages find alluring. This beautiful collection contains new material and lots of rare and previously-unpublished material (including the very first Frank story, not seen in over 10 years). Plus, this book includes an introduction from prominent Jim Woodring fan and acclaimed film director Francis Ford Coppola! This definitive collection is the very best way to give, receive, and experience one of the great cartoon achievements of the 20th century.

About this title

Review:

Are the Frank stories fables, allegories or dreams? Is Frank a cat, a dog or something in between? Is Jim Woodring an above-average cartoonist with a steady supply of magic mushrooms or a genius? The reader of The Frank Book will be left with these questions and more upon finishing this lavish, wondrous 350-page coffee table book.

But while perusing these wordless tales (which have been collected from publications ranging from Heavy Metal magazine to The Millennium Whole Earth Catalogue) some things do become clear. For instance, Woodring must be an artist with a direct line to his subconscious; how else to explain the dreamlike intensity of these tales, which communicate through symbols and archetypes? And, as filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola observes in his introduction, even at their most oblique the Frank adventures carry with them "a subtle sense of resolution, letting us now that in Woodring's world the equation has been thoroughly worked out and presented, and that the results are worth understanding".

But The Frank Book can be enjoyed purely on visual terms as well. The high-quality paper enhances the Seattle artist's dazzling use of colour, and his black-and-white work is as marvellous to behold in its own way. On a level of pure imagination, it is hard to think of any creatures as fully formed yet bizarre as those populating this work--oddities like the geometrical Jerry Chickens, the mischief-making, moon-faced Whim and Frank's toaster-shaped companion Pupshaw. To open the book is to step into a universe as thoroughly realised and magical as Oz (although The Frank Book, with its occasional scenes of brutality, may not be suitable for children). As Coppola notes, "The Frank Book is one man's puzzling gift to a puzzling world. It brings a hidden world to light and lets us examine it minutely". As with Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan, The Frank Book deserves a place not just on the comic lover's shelf but in the collection of anyone with an appreciation for brilliant visual storytelling. --Shawn Conner, Amazon.ca

Review:

I can't think of much other art that's both so unironically devoted to pleasure and entertainment (in this case, in the form of funny-looking animals doing amusing things in colorful, inventively odd settings) and so deeply, primally unsettling and ambiguous. --Douglas Wolk"

Happily, Woodring never tries to offer up his own explanations for what transpires in his stories. The closest he gets is some vague, oblique hints in this collection's afterword, but -- like those occasions when David Lynch pretends to try to enlighten viewers about his similarly challenging movies -- Woodring's clues only lead to more questions. --Dave Wallace"

Over the last few decades, Jim Woodring has been drawing a series of wordless, blissfully cruel slapstick fables, set in a world of grotesque entities and psychedelic minarets: half unshakable nightmare, half Chuck Jones cartoon filtered through the Bhagavad Gita.

Woodring is fantastic... his stuff will outlast all but one in a thousand of his peers. His stuff is a revelation.--Scott McCloud, author of Understanding Comics

Woodring suggests that each strip is intended to be a mystery but that one concept runs through each one, like a sort of moral. . . this obscurity and strangeness is a large part of what gives the book its charm.

About this edition

• Publisher: Fantagraphics Books
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 1560975342
• ISBN 13: 9781560975342
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 344