


And sometimes the dreams turn into inescapable, surreal nightmares. It perfectly captures that helpless feeling one sometimes gets when dreaming, like realizing you've been walking around naked all day, or when you find you are suddenly unable to do the simplest of tasks for some reason. I really enjoy the dream-logic of these tales, where Jim would be walking around while the scenery shifts around him (such as when he's walking through a neighbor's home and somehow ends up at a strange stage performance), and characters appearing out of nowhere, just like real-life dreams. Unlike a lot of Woodring fans, I got into his work through his "auto-journal" comics collected here, most of which feature Jim himself (actually it's his dream alter-ego.) The b&w artwork may not be as refined as his Frank cartoons, but the stories here are every bit as fun and tripped-out. He lives in Seattle with his family and residual phenomena. His multimedia collaborations with the musician Bill Frisell won them a United States Artists Fellowship in 2006. Woodring is also known for his anecdotal charcoal drawings (a selection which was gathered in Seeing Things in 2005), and the sculptures, vinyl figures, fabrics and gallery installations that have been made from his designs. The most recent Frank book, Congress of the Animals, was released in 2011. The 2010 Frank story Weathercraft won The Stranger’s Genius Award and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for that year. A decade’s worth of these stories was collected in The Frank Book in 2004. He is best known for his wordless comics series depicting the follies of his character Frank, a generic cartoon anthropomorph whose adventures careen wildly from sweet to appalling. This work was published by Fantagraphics Books and collected in The Book of Jim in 1992. A self-taught artist, his first published works documented the disorienting hell of his salad days in an “illustrated autojournal” called Jim. He eventually grew up to bean inquisitive bearlike man who has enjoyed three exciting careers: garbage collector, merry-go-round-operator and cartoonist. Jim Woodring was born in Los Angeles in 1952 and enjoyed a childhood made lively by an assortment of mental an psychological quirks including paroniria, paranoia, paracusia, apparitions, hallucinations and other species of psychological and neurological malfunction among the snakes and tarantulas of the San Gabriel mountains.
