Jim Woodring also makes use of wordless pantomimed action in his Frank pieces, but while Ware appears to be attempting to evoke silent films and animated cartoons, Woodring will sometimes use brilliantly vibrant color to create a supersaturated world where anything could (and does) spring to life at any time. The character of Frank itself is an homage to Disney and Warner Brothers type cartoon characters – he appears to be an anthropomorphized rodent. He walks upright and wears white shoes and gloves with four fingers, his body is purplish, his eyes simple circles-and-dots, and he has bucked teeth and a tail. Other mute creatures live in his peculiar world, such as Manhog ( a naked, venal, pitiful presence), Whim (a devilish creature with a head shaped like a crescent moon), the Jerry Chickens (a trio of birds shaped respectively like a cone, sphere and cube,) Pupshaw (Frank’s pet and protector) and Pushpaw (Pupshaw’s feral mate), and Frank’s Real Paw (a version of Frank who walks on all fours and gives him good advice) and his counterpart Frank’s Faux Paw (who looks identical to Frank’s Real Paw but is sent by Whim to lead Frank astray.) This cast of creatures enacts silent dramas that have mysterious resonances for the reader, where the recurrent theme is apparently the struggle for Frank’s soul. Strange places spontaneously change appearance and weather, unidentifiable devices are used to perform achieve incomprehensible accomplishments, characters transform in unpredictable ways and trade roles without explanation. While
generally Frank seems to be a foolish innocent in danger of temptation by weakness or evil, he is capable of acts of terrible cruelty and retribution. Everything in Frank’s world is drawn or painted (the stories are sometimes created in pen and ink and
sometimes in watercolor) with equal liveliness – plants, buildings, furniture, landscape, sky and so on seem as if they could come to life any moment and act as friend or foe. In fact, often they do. Jim Woodring has said in interviews and his own writings
that he doesn’t consider himself to create the Frank Stories, but rather that they are ‘received transmissions’ which he relates to the reader. What this apparently means is that he transcribes them from his dreams and spontaneous fantasies, but that he
never ‘works’ on them or subjects them to an editing process. As a side effect of such an uncontrolled process, he claims that he often doesn’t understand them himself as he endeavors to put them on paper, and that frequently he will recognize embarrassing personal revelations have been made in his stories
after they have been published or gone to press and it is too late to regretfully withdraw them from circulation. Whether this is true or PR-style self-mythologizing I cannot say, but I do know that Woodring’s work gets under my skin like no-one else’s,
and I find myself hypnotized by his forms and colors while I squirm uncomfortably at the stories that transfix my attention.
To summarize, while Guston, Bacon, and Saul and their cohort were reviving figuration and representation and subjecting them to expressionist distortions in the 1960s and 1970s, Robert Crumb, Jack Jackson, Gilbert Shelton and their cohort were doing the same to comedic rather than dramatic effect in the medium of comics. In the 1980s and 1990s, both groups influenced a second generation of cartoonists who used the mass-medium possibilities of mechanical reproduction and the counter-cultural market pioneered by the first wave of underground comix to explore their themes of alienation and inner conflict in a more somber and literary fashion.