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124 Interview —JIM WOODRING Jim Woodring was born in Los Angeles in 1952. His early work found print in various alternative publications such as The Los Angeles Free Press. During his time working in an LA animation studio, he self-published the first issue of Jim in 1980. This “illustrated autojournal” was a collection of images and comics that Woodring professes is based on the hallucinations of his childhood. The comics publisher Fantagraphics later published Jim as a comics magazine, the success of which led to Woodring leaving his job as an animator and becoming a full-time comics writer and artist. His work has since been printed in a variety of Fantagraphics comics, as well as in other publishers’ comics, periodicals, and magazines, such as the Kenyon Review, Heavy Metal, and World Art Magazine. Since 1991, his most notable creations have been the characters in his comic Frank. Frank inhabits a surreal and macabre world where parallel dimensions and physical laws bend and collapse, and a dramatic cast of animals, impossibly disfigured humans, and personifications of abstract concepts murder, eat, enslave, and love one another. The following is a summary of an interview conducted by telephone on November 6, 2007. Jim Woodring: Frank’s world . . . is sort of a playground for simple forces and appetites . . . I like the image to come to me without explanation, sufficiently mysterious to inspire interest. I like the mystery, the struggle of bringing something into the light. The knowing that it means something without knowing what it means; that’s the charge I want. That’s what the best surrealism does. I like an image that harasses you a little bit, that worries you, tugs at you . . . Frank’s a simplified, vastly simplified to say the least, reflection of how I see the world. Even though the stories are easy to describe, what happens in them is open to interpretation. I’m astonished at what people see in Frank. Frequently they understand them, or see obvious messages in them, INTERVIEW: JIM WOODRING 125 better than I do. I love a mystery. If the meaning of a story comes to me while I’m writing it I will usually abandon it as too obvious. If I have to understand, let the understanding come when the thing is finished. There are some stories I still don’t understand, thank God. Paul Williams: I wonder whether Frank attracts interpretations like a Rorschach blot? JW: Oh definitely. There’s a DVD of animations by Japanese animators [Visions of Frank, 2005]. And they have all made changes in the storylines, and one assumes these changes reflect their own interpretations of the stories and their own feelings about them; I like that. PW: You seem very at ease with other creative people coming along and taking these characters and making them play out what they see in them. JW: Completely. It makes me feel good and sort of proud that some people get so much out of Frank. PW: Do you think Frank could be a suitable text to be studied in schools or universities? Is this something you’ve come across before? JW: Frank stories have been used as subjects of study in some college courses, and not only in the context of comics study, or so I’ve been told. There have been some papers written on Frank, and at least one Master’s thesis. I have a copy of it but I’ve never been able to bring myself to read it. Actually I haven’t read most of the articles and reviews of Frank that I’ve collected. It sort of gets to me, seeing evidence that people are taking Frank that seriously. But you know I have to say that these stories do express things that are very meaningful to me. I think there are concepts in those stories worth contemplating and discussing, though personally I would prefer to discuss them outside the context of Frank. Spiritual and personal forces and whatnot. I guess the question of whether or not they should be studied in school is settled by whether or not they are studied in school. PW: In December 2006, you were awarded a United States Artists Fellowship: nearly a year on, has that award changed the way you look at your work? Generally , do you think awards and things like that change one’s status within the comic industry? JW: It hasn’t changed the...

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