An interview on Quacky, Manhog’s freedom, and the rules that govern his world

Transmission 424: Interview with Jim Woodring

Jim Woodring is an acclaimed cartoonist, fine artist, writer, and toy designer whose singular body of work has spent decades blurring the boundaries between comics, painting, mythology, and dream. He navigated a childhood shaped by vivid perceptual phenomena, later channeling those experiences into a deeply unique artistic vocabulary. After working varied early jobs and contributing to the underground comix scene, he gained widespread recognition for his self-published “autojournal” Jim and his signature creation adventures of Frank, a mysterious figure who wanders through the richly imagined Unifactor, He has developed a visual language that can be at once beautiful, playful, grotesque, and profoundly psychedelic. His work resists easy interpretation, inviting readers to inhabit a world where violence and tenderness, comedy and horror, innocence and experience coexist without explanation. Woodring’s work invites reflection on how meaning can be constructed without words, on his symbolic vocabulary and craft, on questions of spirituality, and on the strange relationship between conscious intention and involuntary imagery. His work inhabits a dreamlike space where the surreal and the nightmarish constantly converge.

His images seem to emerge from a place beyond the visible world, shaped by a fascination with the act of imagining what is not there. During the 1990s, Woodring brought his singular visual language to the Aliens universe, creating a series of stories for Dark Horse Comics. In 2013, he turned his attention to Yo La Tengo’s Fade, translating the album’s artwork into an imaginative narrative of his own. The collaboration evolved into a distinctive multimedia work: three soft vinyl figures of the band, sculpted by Tomohiro Yasui, accompanied by The Tree, a five-minute animated film set to Yo La Tengo’s music, and a bonus comic by Woodring. His work has received significant recognition from leading institutions in the fields of contemporary art and comics. In 2006, he was selected as one of the inaugural United States Artists Fellows. The following year, his work was prominently presented at the Centre National de la Bande Dessinée et de l’Image in Angoulême, France, as part of the internationally renowned Angoulême International Comics Festival. In 2008, he received an Inkpot Award at San Diego Comic-Con, as well as an Artist Trust/Washington State Arts Commission Fellowship. In 2014, his graphic novel Fran was awarded the Lynd Ward Prize by the Pennsylvania Center for the Book, further establishing his work within the broader field of graphic narrative and contemporary visual culture.

His latest book, Quacky, published by Fantagraphics, takes Frank in a new direction. Drawing on the format of the vintage Big Little Book, Jim Woodring combines illustrations with prose to give readers an unprecedented glimpse into Frank’s inner life. The result is a story about friendship, generosity, change, and the difficulty, and necessity, of accepting what cannot be controlled. A nostalgic aesthetic smuggles deeply unsettling, existential psychological experiences into the reader’s mind. In Quacky, Frank who has spent much of his existence in silence is finally given a voice. But what does he discover when he begins to look inward? And what does Jim Woodring discover by allowing us, at last, to listen?

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You’ve mentioned that your main impulse as an artist was to draw something ‘that wasn’t there.’ What does it actually mean to successfully depict what doesn’t exist? When you translate these unseen phenomena onto paper, do you feel like you’re inventing a strange universe from scratch, or acting as a translator for something that already exists?

It’s difficult to describe how it feels to me to get what I’m looking for in a picture. It’s good, of course, a very peaceful state. But the inspiration, the idea is in control and my job is to do as it tells me and not get in the way, so I don’t feel much of a sense of personal achievement or pride in my work. It’s my belief that things get themselves made. The idea comes unbidden, and the practitioner feels an urgency to capture it in a work of art. The thing gets itself made by appearing as an idea the practitioner feels compelled to act on. In the early days this phenomenon made me ecstatic, and I still derive a lot of happiness from it.

Given your history with childhood apparitions, prosopagnosia, and dream journals—has this decades-long process of mapping out your inner visions been a way to make them hurt less, or has it simply dissolved the boundaries between imagination, dream, and reality for you?

I always enjoyed being spooked by my neural misfires, or mental illness, or whatever those apparitions and hallucinations were/are. The Frank stories have a lot of that charge, a sense that a profound shock can appear at any moment. It may be that I have offloaded into the stories versions of the things that made my mind so turbulent and wound-up in my earlier years, because it is much more calm and strong than it used to be. I’ve always denied that doing the Frank stories was therapeutic for me but maybe I was wrong about that. I do feel better.

You’ve spoken about art before not just as a career or an outlet, but as a meditative discipline and a moral imperative essential for spiritual growth. In a modern culture that treats content as hyper-disposable entertainment, what do you think are the true, unyielding demands that cartooning makes on the artist’s soul?

If I did indeed say that, it is another case of me forgetting what I actually believe. I emphatically do not believe that art is a moral imperative for spiritual growth. In fact I believe that art, like drugs, can show you places but cannot get you there. People for whom art is a religion have a tough row to hoe. The “true, unyielding demands that cartooning makes on the artist’s soul” would be the same as those made upon anyone who feels they are doing meaningful work, I guess. You want to make something good and you hope to be paid for it.

He is renowned for his surreal, visionary comics that explore hallucinatory, anthropomorphic worlds.

At different points in your career, you’ve moved between painting and comics. What does painting give you that comics cannot, and what do comics force you to confront that painting lets you avoid?

The simple answer is that painting gives me the opportunity to do something trickier and more difficult than the work I usually do. I’m a self-taught artist, and every time I shift gears I have to re-learn many things that would be second nature to me if I’d learned them the proper way, at the hands of a brutal instructor. A painting unfolds as it will, and the experience of making that happen is fun and interesting. Comics are more like a job. I know in advance what the story will be, how long it will be and what I am going for, and I sign on for the duration.

You are famously devoted to traditional, meticulous analog craftsmanship. In an era where digital tools offer infinite undo buttons and shortcuts, how does the physical friction and permanence of traditional media shape the psychological weight of your storytelling?

I really like drawing in pen and ink. It took me a long time to use the pen, and I enjoy the fact that I am experiencing the same ancient technology as every steel nib artist ever. The idea of working digitally has no attraction for me. I like the analog materials, the ink bottle, the studio atmosphere drawing and inking on paper generates. I have no desire to give that up. Plus with a drawing on paper you can appreciate what went into it, the actual skill level, the correction of errors, how certain things are handled. And not incidentally, with digital you have no original art for people to frame and hang in their apartment.

Quacky heavily mimics the physical format of 1930s ‘Big Little Books‘ and early newspaper strips. How did constraining your narrative to this chunky, retro artifact change the rhythm of your storytelling compared to traditional comic panels, and why did this specific vintage format feel like the right container for Frank at this point in his life?

Quacky was intended to BE a Big Little Book, not just mimic one. The idea was that it would look at home on a shelf of BLBs. The instant the idea occurred to me to do a Frank comic in that format I was committed to the project and I started working on it right away. I was amazed that nobody else had ever made a modern BLB; as far as I knew, anyway. I was actually a bit worried that someone would put one out before QUACKY was published, stealing my thunder, it seemed like such a great and obvious idea.

The BLBs were based on famous properties like Mickey Mouse and Dick Tracy. The covers were beautiful and they were so thick that when you hefted one you felt you had a great big dollop of fun in your hands. But they weren’t much fun; at least the ones I read weren’t. They were turgid and dull, thanks not only to the fact that most of them were not written or drawn by the originators of the properties but also to the format itself. It isn’t comics, it isn’t a normal illustrated book. You don’t want to read a novella about Little Lulu, and you don’t want to look at pictures that illustrate just one event in a page of text. So they are intrinsically unsatisfying compared to comics. My goal was to use that format in a way that worked.

Spanning decades of acclaimed graphic novels Woodring’s meticulous analog craftsmanship marries the classic aesthetic of 1930s animation with profound, unsettling existential allegory.

The book juxtaposes Frank’s tender, melancholic journey with a completely insane supporting story, Hoggy Goes Hogwild. What inspired you to contrast Frank’s path with a violent, anarchic breakdown in the same volume, and why do you think whimsy and brutality sit so comfortably beside each other in this book?

HOGGY GOES HOGWILD was intended to come off as filler. I deliberately drew it in a stiff, uncomfortable style to make it look like the work of some poor old working cartoonist who could never achieve syndication, and did work-for-hire jobs like this to survive. It isn’t even named on the cover, but listed as SECOND BIG FEATURE, as if they didn’t know what the story would be when they designed the book.

The violence was intended to come off as funny. These pigs are so non-dimensional that these terrible events don’t seem to have any place to land. Also, I felt that there was probably an editorial requirement that the stories end on an upbeat note, and this one certainly does, though it takes the scenic route to get there.

There was no attempt to make the story be compatible with QUACKY, but as it turned out the two stories have many elements in common.

After 35 years as a silent, nonplussed cipher, Frank finally gets an explicit internal voice in Quacky—complete with anxieties about aging and emotional processing. Was giving him a voice liberating, and what did that shift mean to you after all these decades?

Well, having decided to do the book, the text was a given, so the only question was what voice it would have. And that wasn’t really a question because I knew I wanted it to be written in the voice of all the old children’s books I had read. The OZ books, for example… that propulsive, breathless, slightly schoolmarmish narration. Also, since it was a Big Little Book, the writing had to have characteristic defects: clunky syntax, archaic words, a sense of the author not having felt the need to try very hard to be consistent and accurate. There are mistakes deliberately built in.

The narrative of Quacky emphasizes Frank being deeply affected by generosity and by seeing how his friends perceive him. Why was it important for you to make Frank confront the fact that other creatures have an emotional life centered on him?

Well, that was built into the storyline. I didn’t decide to put that in, it’s how the story got itself written. There is a meta quality to the comic strip in the underwater mansion that I don’t like so much. I didn’t realize it while I was drawing it, but I am implicated. That makes me uneasy.

In Quacky, Frank is remarkably self-reflective when he encounters the last image of the comic strip based on his own life and begins to question his free will. As his creator, how do you view your relationship with him at this point? Do you see yourself as a benevolent guardian, or are you trapping him in an inescapable loop of karmic absurdity?

I have learned not to impose my will on these stories if I can possibly help it (sometimes I can’t), but I have long had it in mind to do a capstone story in which Manhog is liberated from the Unifactor. This is the first story in which Manhog’s circumstances have improved and not then been reversed by story’s end. As of now he is living in that apartment and enjoying a life of comfort and aspiration. So I may have been co-opted in my desire to liberate him myself. He may be free already.

Jim Woodring is an artist whose work bridges visionary surrealism, classic animation sensibilities, and deep metaphysical allegory.

Beyond your personal framework, you’ve described the Unifactor as a rigid, autonomous ecology with its own rules. When a narrative takes an unexpected or cruel turn for Frank, are you ever surprised by where it goes, or do you feel like you are simply recording the harsh operational logic of that world?

To my mind, one of the defining features of the Unifactor is the danger lurking around almost every corner. As terrible as things get there, the hammer never really falls. The dead come back to life, limbs grow back, suffering is quickly forgotten, the imperiled are always rescued eventually. I am sometimes surprised when I look over the stories and I see the wealth of imaginative ideas in them. Not feeling responsible for most of them, I can openly admire them.

The Unifactor seems to operate under a moral logic that is neither conventionally moralistic nor purely amoral. What, if anything, do you feel the Unifactor is trying to teach?

I think the Unifactor is playing with its mind. Frank and everything else are part of that mind. But that’s just a guess.

If you were forced to spend a day inside the Unifactor, what encounter would terrify you most, and on the flip side, if you could build one room or space from that universe as a physical installation, which location would you want readers to physically step into?

I would hate to encounter Frank in person. I don’t think I’d survive that. Many years ago, I got a phone call at night. I said, “Hello?” and a cheerful voice said, “This is Pushpaw!” I almost keeled over and died right there, I was so shocked. It turns out “Pushpaw” sounds like the Sanskrit word for flower, and it is a common woman’s name in India. That wrong number made me aware of how much I don’t want to encounter those characters in this world.

Images courtesy of Jim Woodring

Dominique Musorrafiti

Ciao! My name is Dominique. I’m Italian and I’m proud to be a mix. My father was an Italian chemical engineer and high school teacher, with Greek and Polish heritage. My mother is Haitian, she was high school language teacher, with Dominican, Spanish, French, Portuguese, African and Native American heritage. Being a mix makes me appreciate to want to understand different cultures and lifestyles. I grew up in Italy, lived few years in Haiti, travel around main European capitals, lived many years in China, in Spain and UK. Traveling makes me feel that we can learn something from every situation in every part of the world.