The Frank Book

by Jim Woodring, Francis Ford Coppola (Introduction)

Overview

The definitive collection of Jim Woodring’s mysterious anthropomorph!

Since 1991, Jim Woodring’s lusciously rendered, hypnotic fables have dazzled readers the world over, and the runaway success of the Frank-co-starring graphic novel Weathercraft and the first true Frank graphic novel Congress of the Animals have only whetted readers’ appetites for more.

In honor of Frank’s 20th anniversary Fantagraphics is re-releasing the massive, long out of print Frank Book omnibus, which collected all the Frank material up to the mid-aughts, including several jaw-droppingly beautiful full-color stories, literally dozens of lushly-delineated black-and-white stories, and a treasure trove of covers and illustrations. The Frank Book also features an introduction by one of Frank’s biggest fans (himself a Frank, or almost): Francis Ford Coppola.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781606995006
Publisher:	Fantagraphics Books
Publication date:	10/17/2011
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	8.50(w) x 11.00(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Jim Woodring lives on Vashon Island in Washington State’s Puget Sound with his wife, Mary. The recipient of numerous award — including The Stranger's Genius Award for Literature — he is an animator and a fine artist as well as a cartoonist.

Editorial Reviews

"Over the last few decades, Jim Woodring has been drawing a series of wordless, blissfully cruel slapstick fables, set in a world of grotesque entities and psychedelic minarets: half unshakable nightmare, half Chuck Jones cartoon filtered through the Bhagavad Gita."

The New York Times Book Review

"I can't think of much other art that's both so unironically devoted to pleasure and entertainment (in this case, in the form of funny-looking animals doing amusing things in colorful, inventively odd settings) and so deeply, primally unsettling and ambiguous."

Comics Alliance - Douglas Wolk

"Woodring is fantastic... his stuff will outlast all but one in a thousand of his peers. His stuff is a revelation."

Scott McCloud

"Happily, Woodring never tries to offer up his own explanations for what transpires in his stories. The closest he gets is some vague, oblique hints in this collection's afterword, but — like those occasions when David Lynch pretends to try to enlighten viewers about his similarly challenging movies — Woodring's clues only lead to more questions."

Comics Bulletin - Dave Wallace

"Woodring suggests that each strip is intended to be a mystery but that one concept runs through each one, like a sort of moral. . . this obscurity and strangeness is a large part of what gives the book its charm."

Grovel