Frank

GROTH: The created world of Frank seems less involved with nature than it does with organic material objects, a kind of oxymoron. There's an organicism to your inanimate objects. I'm going to do something most people probably hate, which is to quote something they said back at them. In an earlier interview, you said, "Going to a redwood forest doesn't mean anywhere near as much to me as going down an alley that has the right configuration of things." So nature isn't as important to you as abstracted shapes or objects?

WOODRING: I guess that's true. I much prefer a landscape with something man-made in it. It adds the dimension of art or artifice and I like that. A tree is an incomprehensible mystery.

GROTH: But that's what your art is all about ... incomprehensible mysteries.

WOODRING: Yeah, but not as incomprehensible as a tree.

GROTH: Tell me how you go about constructing a Frank story. These are wordless, of course, and they have a dreamlike flow and an internal logic to them. How carefully blueprinted are the scenarios before you draw them?

WOODRING: Well, I write them out as stories, in words, very diagramatically. Frank does this. He does that. He sees this. Every time I write something down I check it to see if it has that telltale glow, the glow that tells me there's something there. If it glows, it stays. It's a very binary process. Everything is either on or off. I get rid of the stuff that's off and keep the stuff that's on. At the end, I have a story.

GROTH: Do you do this in a single burst or over a course of time?

WOODRING: Ideally in a single burst. Some stories have taken longer to get, and I've had to work at them much harder than I wanted to, and I don't think those are the strongest ones.

GROTH: Does the story shift or change as you start to draw it, during the process of drawing?

WOODRING: No. No. No. The process of drawing Frank is very, very boring because by the time I'm ready to draw, it's all worked out. I've worked out the page breaks and I've sketched it all out, and all that remains is the process of drawing it in my deadpan style. So drawing Frank is no fun at all. It's just a purely mechanical exercise.

GROTH: I divide your work between Frank and everything else. Your other work is mostly, roughly autobiographical, although not strictly so. But you use language extensively; there's often a lot of dialogue. Does that serve or satisfy a different creative need than the wordless Frank stories, which are more saturated with symbolism and surrealism?

WOODRING: I guess you could say so. There's a kind of writing that I do that I've always liked. I write really fast and let the words come out the way they want to and it satisfies me. When I first started putting out Jim, both the self-published versions and the magazine-sized ones that you started printing, I put those prose things in just because I felt that that was part of what I did. And I like it. I like that kind of writing. I've got notebooks full of it, so people who think that I put too much of it in my comics can be grateful for the fact that I didn't put more in because I've got tons of it.

GROTH: [Laughs.] Hmm.

WOODRING: Does it satisfy a different creative need, do you mean?

GROTH: Yeah.

WOODRING: It's a different process, more spontaneous. I get up early and write that stuff down and enjoy doing it and enjoy reading it afterwards. So yeah, I guess you could say it's a different kind of creation. It's less constructed. It's a damn sight easier than drawing comics, and to me, much more valuable. It's so very pure.

GROTH: I was referring not so much to the prose stories than about the comics with the words, so you're still drawing the comics.

WOODRING: Oh, well. Those are completely different from Frank. Those are either autobiographical things, things that either happened to me when I was awake or when I was dreaming or a combination of the two. There's a challenge of trying to take my peculiar and not very attractive personal peccadilloes and turning them into something universal. You know? I always liked work that does that. A book like Under the Volcano, which takes something that's just about as restricted and subjective as subject matter could be and somehow makes it into something epic and universal. I think that kind of thing is wonderful.

GROTH: Is that what you try to do?

WOODRING: I guess so. Those Jim stories are fun to draw, 'cause they're loose, but I got sick of drawing myself. I don't ever want to draw myself again.

GROTH: Why is that? You draw yourself so expressively and definitively.

WOODRING: I just don't like to do it. I never really have liked to do it. On the other hand, it's hard for me to draw stories about anybody else, because I don't know what anybody else's experiences are like. If I draw Joe Blow doing this and that, it just doesn't mean anything to me. I guess that sounds kind of lame, but there you have it.

GROTH: What about the idea of making up fictional characters and imbuing them with attributes that you've seen or observed and the kind of life's conundrums you've experienced?

WOODRING: I find that hard to do with human beings. I can do that with Frank and with characters that don't ... they're not supposed to be individuals. But drawing stories about people ... R. Crumb can draw a comic about Charlie Patton or whoever he wants and he can get it just right and make it real. I can't.

GROTH: Or what cartoonists like Gilbert and Jaime [Hernandez] do, which is to create wholly fictional characters.

WOODRING: Yeah. I just can't do that kind of thing. I don't have enough common ground with humanity. Anyway, Gilbert and Jaime are the very best. I can't compare myself with them.

GROTH: But you have done strips with children in them.

WOODRING: The kids in the Pulque stories?

GROTH: Yes.

WOODRING: Those are just ciphers, generic little kids. None of them have any personality, really. They're just a bunch of kids.

GROTH: I don't know. When I was reading them, in an odd way I thought you nailed childhood a lot better than Bill Watterson did. I wouldn't say they were ciphers so much as they were Everykids.

WOODRING: Yeah. But they could have been any kids, any kids at all. It's more of a substance than a set of individuals.

GROTH: Do you find any kind of conflict between the kind of hyper-subjectivity that you imbue in a story and the universality that you're trying to get to?

WOODRING: It's a dichotomy, not a conflict, and I think it's the kind of thing that makes life interesting. If you believe in universality you have to find it everywhere. I'm always amazed when people have a hard time feeling sympathetic towards a loathsome character in a story, as if they were a different species. It's ridiculous.

GROTH: That's a shallow way of looking at art, and makes for shallow art, too, doesn't it?

WOODRING: It's a natural ego function, but that doesn't mean it should carry the day. The first thing everyone is inclined to do is find a reason why their enemies are fuckheads or why the people they don't like deserve their contempt.

GROTH: Whereas good art actually finds the humanity in fuckheads?

WOODRING: Well, no ... that's not what makes good art necessarily, but ...

GROTH: It almost forces you to empathize with certain dimensions that you wouldn't ordinarily want to.

WOODRING: I wouldn't say that good art necessarily does that, because there has been plenty of good subjective, propagandistic art. But I think that if you have an interest in being aware, if your philosophy points you towards the universal and you spend a lot of time investigating that, then you are your own laboratory. That's where you find your answers. And if you find answers that go against self-interest you cant really turn your back on them and retain your intellectual honesty. It can be horribly uncomfortable to face unpleasant truths about yourself, about your situation...it runs counter to the whole issue of survival. People aren't interested, for valid reasons, in seeing themselves as they really are.

GROTH: Does art then, in a way, run counter to a biological imperative? Is that one of its functions?

WOODRING: It can be. It can be. Think of how vigorously some people resist change in art. They're protecting the stronghold. Art can be a real destructive force, you know? It can rob people of their cherished delusions. But an honest person has nothing to fear from it. It can be a pleasure to suffer from unwelcome truths.

GROTH: Do you think that you force yourself to see unpleasant truths about yourself and your world through your work?

WOODRING: Not through my work, but in my life. I like to bust the shrubs. I mean, I know that I have illusions about myself, but those are just the ones that I haven't been able to crack.

GROTH: Are you trying to crack them?

WOODRING: Yeah. I'm trying to crack them. I'm trying to get more of an idea of who I am and what I am. It's an activity you can take right to the deathbed.

GROTH: Let me get back for a second to the differences between the silent Frank strips and the other strips that contain a verbal element. Are there advantages and disadvantages to both kinds of storytelling that you could talk about?

WOODRING: The advantages ... the Frank stories are harder and less fun to do. You have to ...

GROTH: Why is that?

WOODRING: For one thing, it takes more drawing to tell a story in pantomime. You can't ... it's harder to find shortcuts. You can't have any signs that say, "Meanwhile ..." and you can't have someone say, "Let's go to the store," and then in the next panel they're at the store. You have to show them going to the goddamn store. It takes a lot more work. Those Frank stories, like I said, are not a lot of fun to draw because I plot them so carefully, you know? I've heard that Alfred Hitchcock said that by the time he was ready to shoot a film, he didn't even want to do it any more because he'd already had all of the fun of working it out. It's the same thing with these Frank comics.

GROTH: It's just labor?

WOODRING: Yeah. It's just labor. With Frank, I'm trying to capture and present something very ethereal, so I have to make the substructure very solid. You know, Frank is my idea of a pure cartoon. A cartoon character who isn't an anthropomorphic man or an animal. Just a cartoon character who lives in a cartoon landscape with other cartoon characters in a situation where forces could be explored outside of any sultural ... sultural? Cultural or ...

GROTH: [Laughs.] Sultural?

WOODRING: Social context. [Aside.] I'm glad that one got on tape. That's why there's no language in Frank. I wanted to be beyond any kind of place or time or culture. I do put in occasional cultural artifacts like hammers or party horns and things like that just for a little shock now and then. Besides, I'm sure every civilization has had something to pound with and something to make noise with at celebration times. But there would never be anything in there as modern as a television, or anything having to do with electricity. Everything is very primitive.

GROTH: You implied that most of the drawing in Frank is labor, but there's also this rich, dense and magic content that you have to work out and you have to draw and there's a playfulness to it all. So that can't be purely labor. It has to be ... You have to infuse that with ...

WOODRING: Sheer craft, Gary. Nothing but craft.

GROTH: Hmm ...

WOODRING: That's all it is. If the story dictates that I have to have a big palace here, he has to walk into an imposing palace, the palace has to have certain attributes in order to communicate what I want it to. It has to have a certain anthropological quality, but in terms of making it, I have a library of motifs and things in my head and I just draw on it.

GROTH: Surely there's an imaginative element involved to making up Frank's landscape, of inventing those fantastic, organic shapes that evolve and mutate and are such an important part of that world you're creating. After all, you're not interpreting the world so much as extrapolating from it, which must take a creative leap.

WOODRING: Well, it's symbolic visual language. If you could read the original written stories, and I guess there's no reason why you couldn't, if you wanted to...

GROTH: I see a little sidebar here.

WOODRING: But they aren't interesting, except perhaps for the names of characters, and objects and processes that never get mentioned in the wordless strips. There's a lot of shorthand in there. There are a lot of elements in the stories that mean something to me that shouldn't mean anything to anybody else, though of course I hope they do. I use these radially symmetrical shapes and bilateral symmetrical shapes and those have both got a different import to me. They stand for different specific qualities. So if Frank cracks open a jar and a bilat comes out, that means one thing. If he cracks it open and a jiva comes out, that means something else. It's like saying a stench came out or a mouse came out. I have this symbolic language worked out. Actually, if I had my druthers, I would be working entirely with that symbolic language. Just with the language and shapes and forms. That would be fun.

GROTH: Do you think that would lack the communicative necessity of art?

WOODRING: I think it would connect with some people. I think if some of these shapes could be hung in a wall somewhere and they would simultaneously retain and release their talismanic emanations over time they'd be significant. But they wouldn't be significant to that many people. It would be too easy to mistake it for cheap modern art.

[To read the rest of this interview, please see The Comics Journal Special Edition Summer 2002.]

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