STRANGEco visits Jim's house to discuss Newts, Dorbels
and the foul stink of a hodag
words: Patricia Crawford, art: courtesy of Jim Woodring
toy pics: Gregory Blum, layout: Antoinette Celes
Jim Woodring is the very articulate, very funny and very bent cartoonist whose comics are the stuff of legend. A featured artist with Seattle-based publisher Fantagraphics Books, Woodring’s comics are surreal, sweet, nightmarish, and truly unforgettable. Having once looked into Jim’s world, it is virtually impossible not to keep looking at the creatures of his imagination as they dispense -- to quote Francis Ford Coppola -- "candies from another planet." In the past two years, Woodring’s visions have found an even wider range of gazers. The Frank Book, a complete hardcover collection of Woodring’s Frank stories (and for which Coppola provides the introduction), quickly sold out of its first printing. In the world of toys, his Crazy Newts and Imperial Newts capsule toys hatch in vending machines all over Japan and have multiplied in stores across Europe and the U.S. He has also been producing a series of toys with Japan’s Presspop Gallery, including Jiva, Mantra, and the new life-sized Pushpaw vinyl due out this winter. STRANGEco has also been fortunate to produce a Jim-designed figure-- the Dorbel, which has slunk onto the bookshelves of collectors everywhere.
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Jim lives and works in an "unadorned Victorian" in the University District of Seattle with his wife Mary, son Max and three large cats. Their house is not immediately distinguishable from others in the neighborhood except that, the day we visited at least, it seemed surrounded by a purple haze. Maybe it was chromatic blow-back from the unusually energetic and profuse crocuses bursting up in the front yard. Maybe it was wishful tinting. Maybe the house is purple. We talked in his dining room -- a warm, kick-off-the-shoes kind of place, wallpapered in old Sears and Roebucks' catalogs. Boxes of Newts and Jivas are piled beneath a pinball machine. A big black cat wearing a red ribbon ("homage to Krazy Kat") is curled up on a couch. Floor-to-ceiling bookcases are stuffed with the classics of cartooning. On one shelf is a flock of Crazy Newts on display. Behind them, a chorus line of six Dorbels oversee, smirk, snicker, assess, whisper about and eavesdrop on the action, which is, at the moment, wondering about the Dorbel. In 1999, Jim was commissioned to draw a picture of a hodag, a character from American folklore whose pseudo-scientific description is Bovinus spiritualis— a clawed, grinning ox-like creature of fearsome appearance that frequented Wisconsin and eastern parts of the United States. According to Eugene Shephard, the forester who in 1893 got the first prolonged look and whiff of the creature, the hodag had the "head of a bull, the grinning face of a giant man, thick short legs set off by huge claws, the back of a dinosaur, and a long tail with a spear at the end." The beast subsisted on a diet of swamp things, but was known to occasionally snack on wayward lumberjacks and other unfortunates. It was also said to possess "the transmigrated soul of one of Paul Bunyan's oxen," and more obviously, a very obnoxious odor. So obnoxious that it took residents of Oneida County seven years of forest burning to purge the stink. As the drawing began to take shape, the creature underwent its own transmigration. Jim calls Dorbel "the politician of the planet," which suggests that while he is odorless, like a hodag the Dorbel has sinister emanations.
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There have been at least two Dorbel sightings in Woodring's work before he went three-dimensional. He shows up early in Mysterio Simpatico, Woodring's multimedia collaboration with jazz guitarist Bill Frisell. He is also partially glimpsed in "Frank Amok” (2001), which is reproduced in the final pages of The Frank Book. In vinyl form, Dorbel’s six points of articulation enable him to assume a number of poses, thereby amplifying his insider's squint, not to mention the inscrutable significances of those fabulous teeth. Asked for his favorite Dorbel action pose, Jim demonstrates on Jim: one hand/claw held over his mouth, one hand/claw held up at the side of his head --Dorbel/Jim assumes the "hunter-gatherer": posture. Obviously pleased with the plastic toy he's imitating, Jim admires "the way it all came together," from concept to sculpt to manufacturing across an ocean, in this case the Pacific.
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But there are watery expanses and then there are real oceans. The gulf between Jim and the rest of the world was once practically unbridgeable. A "real weirdo" as a kid, his friends' parents generally hated him while his own were singularly unequipped to understand their strange son. "My life was just one sticky mood after another,"Woodring reflects. "I would take walks that lasted five hours and covered seven feet of sidewalk." To have an impulse was to act on it, and like any self-respecting Symbolist poet, he expected to live hard and come to a bad end. Woodring had no formal art training, but started drawing when he was very young. At 13, he made two discoveries that sealed the artistic deal. One was the utterly astonishing book As I See by the graphic designer Boris Artzybasheff. The other was Surrealism, which he encountered at a Los Angeles Museum of Art retrospective. Of his own drawing, Jim has said that he wasn't any good until he was in his mid-twenties. Before then, he felt like "an old man who'd had a stroke, wondering why can't he draw anymore." But from the beginning, he knew he could draw -- even when he couldn't. After several years of creating underground comics on his own, he landed work in an animation studio where he worked on cartoons with such dubious titles as "Mr. T." and "Rubic and the Amazing Cube." On his website, Jim sums them up as being "some of the worst cartoons this degraded planet has ever seen." In 1980 Woodring self-published the mini comic Jim: a surreal "auto-journal" in which his visions and nightmares share the stage with tongue-laving frogs and full-page journal writing. Jim attracted the attention of Fantagraphics Books, which published the title as a successful multi-issue series. Fantagraphics subsequently released Frank, the wordless adventures of the title character, a bipedal feline creature, in a hallucinatory landscape populated by triangular dog-like guardians, pathetic manhogs, hindu jivas and startling transformations. Frank has been an underground phenomenon for over a decade now, and is required reading for one and all.
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In recent years Woodring has stepped sideways into toy design. As artist-based toys gained popularity, he found himself in demand— first in Japan via both Presspop Gallery and Sony Creative’s Time Capsule series. Including the dozen Newts for Sony, Woodring has created a total of 16 figures. But he never set out to make toys, and while he greatly appreciates the craftsmanship and finds turning a concept into plastic appealing, apart from his own designs he is not a huge collector. Cartooning is his vocation, and drawing is his job: one he continues to work at from 7 in the morning until 7 at night, with the humility and fervor of a medieval monk. Looking for more about Jim? Visit him online at jimwoodring.com.
STRANGEco links:
» STRANGEco catalog, featuring Jim Woodring
» Dorbel vinyl figure page
» Life-sized Pupshaw vinyl figure offer
Additional links:
» Fantagraphics Books
» Presspop Gallery
» Frank animated short (requires RealPlayer)
» More about the Hodag