Seeing Things - Softcover

Woodring, Jim

4.13

185 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1560978082 ISBN 13: 9781560978084

Publisher: Fantagraphics, 2007

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"A lovely, thought-provoking book that fans simply won't be able to live without."―Juxtapoz.

Jim Woodring's charcoal drawings take the otherworldly qualities of his comics (The Frank Book) to a higher level of clarity and nuance. These crisply rendered images reflect his life-long obsession with hidden worlds, alternate realities and the inexplicable resonance of the unprecedented and irrational in lucid art.

Seeing Things collects the most toothsome of these drawings and arranges them in four sections. "Lazy Robinson" is a series of portraits of forms taken by a cognizant object during the course of a specific and identifiable stream of thought. "Frogs" celebrates the tender proclivities of the most noble of all animals, by placing them in situations that would dismay a horde of saints. "The Visible World" is a roundup of appalling scenes of sub-rational political activity involving catalytic entities with a high ratio of motivation to altruism. And "The Portfolio in Color" appears like a rainbow at the end of all this exalted storminess to send readers out into the world whistling with delight. Many of these images were created for "Mysterio Sympatico," Woodring's multimedia stage collaboration with guitarist Bill Frisell. There is plenty of echoless, glowing furniture to add to that already crowded storeroom which is briefly, but brilliantly, illuminated in the pages of this stately book. Color and black-and-white illustrations throughout

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About the Author:

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

From Booklist:

Woodring's wordless Frank comics are utterly distinctive, not least in each successive publication of them. Woodring has often taken the same images from black and white to flat, comic-book color to three-dimensional full-color in the transition from one kind of publication to another. This album of four thematic portfolios (rather than stories) in Woodring's most highly developed, volumetric style, however, confirms that what he does in color he can do in black and white. Three of its parts contain charcoal work as full of depth and lighting effects as any of Woodring's color stuff. Those three showcase "scenes of sub-rational political activity," "portraits of forms taken by a cognizant object," and frogs, respectively. The final, color section is a potpourri. Frank and Manhog drop in from Frank occasionally, but most of the figures here are, besides frogs, combinations of organic, inorganic, and artificial parts. Wood-ring introduces, sort of, each part with a "memoir" of his hallucinatory childhood that demonstrates that he is as cheerily, eerily masterful a wordsmith as an artist. Ray Olson
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