Weathercraft: A Frank Comic


By Jim Woodring (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-60699-340-8

Some creators in the world of comics just defy description and their graphic novels and collections are beyond the reviewer’s skills (mine certainly). Some are just so pedestrian or so mind-numbingly bad that one simply can’t face writing about them. Others are so emphatically wonderful that no collection of praise and analysis can do them justice.

And then there is Jim Woodring.

Woodring’s work is challenging, spiritual, philosophical, funny, beautiful and extremely scary. And, even after reading that sentence you will have absolutely no idea of what you will be seeing the first time you read any of it.

Moreover, even if you have scrupulously followed cartoonist, Fine Artist, toy-maker and artistic Renaissance Man Jim Woodring’s eccentric career since his first mini-comics in 1980, or his groundbreaking Fantagraphics magazine series such as Jim (1986), the nominal spin-off Frank (of which Weathercraft is the latest fabulist, fabulous instalment), Tantalizing Stories, or the more mainstream features such as his Star Wars and Aliens tales for Dark Horse, you will still have no idea how you will respond to his newest work.

Woodring delivers surreal, abstract, wild, rational, primal cartooning: his clean-mannered art a blend of woodblock prints, Robert Crumb, Dreamscape, religious art and monstrous phantasmagoria. His stories are a logical, progressional narrative clouded with multiple layers of meaning but totally void of speech or words, magnificently dependent on the intense involvement of the reader as fully active participant.

Weathercraft, for those of you who have seen his previous publications, has all the Frank regulars: the eponymous Krazy Kat-like ingénue, Pupshaw and Pushpaw, the fiercely loyal, god-like household appliances, the mysterious, omnipotent, moon-faced devil Whim and all the rest; vulture-things, frog-things, plant-things and Thing-things, that inhabit the insanely logical traumic universe of the Unifactor.

However, the action here generally follows the gross and venal Manhog (“an unholy hybrid of human ambivalence and porcine appetite”) as he/it undergoes a frantic transformative journey that marries Pilgrim’s Progress to Dr Seuss’ Oh, the Places You’ll Go!, and Hesse & Appelbaum’s Siddhartha with H.P. Lovecraft by way of The Perils of Penelope Pitstop.

And as the journey ends – we stop watching it – has Manhog been truly been transformed? If so, for how long, and what does it matter anyway?

Woodring is not to everyone’s taste or sensibilities – for starters, his drawings have a distressing habit of creeping back long after you’ve put the book down and scaring the bejeezus out of you – but he is an undisputed master of the form and an innovator always distending the creative envelope. All art-forms need such creators and this evocative tome could well change your reading habits for life.

So, are you tempted, tantalized or terrified…?

© 2010 Jim Woodring. All rights reserved.