Jim Woodring

James William Woodring (born October 11, 1952) is an American cartoonist, fine artist, writer and toy designer.

He is best known for the dream-based comics he published in his magazine Jim, and as the creator of the anthropomorphic cartoon character Frank, who has appeared in a number of short comics and graphic novels.

Since he was a child, Woodring has experienced hallucinatory "apparitions", which have inspired much of his surreal work.

He keeps an "autojournal" of his dreams, some of which have formed the basis of some of his comics.

His most famous creation is fictional—the pantomime comics set in the universe he calls the Unifactor, usually featuring Frank.

These stories incorporate a highly personal symbolism largely inspired by Woodring's belief in Vedanta from Hindu philosophy.

He also does a large amount of surrealist painting, and has been the writer on a number of comics from licensed franchises published by Dark Horse and others.

Woodring identified Bimbo's Initiation as "one of the things that laid the foundation for my life's philosophy."

Woodring has won or been nominated for a number of awards.

He placed twice on The Comics Journal's list of the 100 best comics of the century, with the Frank stories ranked #55, and The Book of Jim ranked #71.

The elder of two children, Woodring was born in Los Angeles.

He suffered from hallucinations (which he called "apparitions") of floating, gibbering faces over his bed (among other visions) when he was a child, and "was obsessed with death at a tender age" and was afraid his parents would come into his bedroom and kill him.

He had behavioral problems, finding himself unable to stop himself from doing things he knew he should not be doing, which he says he did not bring in line until he got married.

Woodring has also been diagnosed with prosopagnosia.

He graduated from high school in 1970 and went to Glendale Junior College for about two months.

While there,"'I had the most significant hallucination of my life in this art history class. I took it as an omen that I should just get the hell out of school and stay out! [Laughs.] This hallucination was so much more interesting than the class — it seemed to have forced its way into the classroom and jumped out of the screen where these slides were being projected in order to tell me that I should be somewhere else. I felt that this image had gone to a lot of work to get into the building and get into that room and wait for the screen to turn blank and then appear at me to honk at me to go. So I did.'"

Woodring dropped out of college and spent the next year and a half as a garbage man.

During this time he developed a serious drinking problem, which lasted about eight years.

He eventually quit drinking because he felt it was interfering with his growth as an artist.

In 1979 he was persuaded by his best friend John Dorman to take work as an artist with the Ruby-Spears animation studio.

He did "[s]toryboards during the production season and presentation work during the off-season."

He did work for the cartoon shows Mister T, Rubik the Amazing Cube, and Turbo Teen, and he has often said that these were the worst cartoons ever produced.

At that time, he formed friendships with and was somewhat mentored by celebrated comic book artists Gil Kane and Jack Kirby, who were both disgruntled with the comics business and were working in animation at the time.

While working at Ruby-Spears he began self-publishing Jim, an anthology of comics, dream art and free-form writing which he described as an "autojournal".

In 1986, Woodring was introduced by Gil Kane to Gary Groth of Fantagraphics Books.

Jim was published as a regular series by Fantagraphics starting in 1986, to critical acclaim if less than spectacular sales, and Woodring became a full-time cartoonist.

Most of the content of the first of the two volumes of Jim were collected as The Book of Jim in 1993, which was subsequently ranked as #71 on The Comics Journal's100 best comics of the century list.

Woodring created a short-lived comics series for children, Tantalizing Stories, with Mark Martin.

This was the place in which his character, Frank, first featured prominently, in stories that "have a dreamlike flow and an internal logic to them" written in a "symbolic visual language" that is "defined by thick, unforgiving cartoon lines that marry Walt Kelly with Salvador Dalí."

Most of the Frank stories have been done in black and white, but a number are notable for being in (usually painted) full color.

In particular, Woodring was nominated for "Best Colorist" at the 1993 Eisner Awards for the story Frank in the River.

The Comics Journal ranked the Frank stories #55 in its list of the 100 best comics of the century.

He has also worked as a freelance illustrator and comics writer, adapting the film Freaks with F. Solano Lopez for Fantagraphics and writing comics based on Aliens and Star Wars for Dark Horse.

Frank, a wordless surrealist series which began as an occasional feature within Jim, became his best-known work, eventually spinning off into its own series in 1996.

It is a collection of nine animated shorts created between 2000 and 2005, each produced by a different artist or team interpreting a different Frank work.

Woodring produced a new Frank book in 2005 (The Lute String) and in 2010 his first graphic novel-length Frank book, Weathercraft, which found itself on a number of "Best of 2010" lists.

A 48-minute DVD called Visions of Frank: Short Films by Japan's Most Audacious Animators was released by Japan's PressPop Music in 2005.

In June 2010, Scott Eder Gallery in Brooklyn featured a solo show of Jim's Weathercaft art.

This was followed up with another, Congress of the Animals, in May 2011.

Woodring says that, while he had been away from comics, he built up a backlog of new stories, and he intends to complete a total of four 100-page books like Weathercraft and Congress of the Animals, and then return to the types of stories he had done in Jim.