Frank
May 30th 2007 -
Went to see Jim Woodring, the creator of the comic/cartoon character “Frank” at the opera house on Friday night, with Jade & Jon & Kate. Good stuff! Peter Hollo of Fourplay did some funky loops with his electric cello along to one of the cartoons, a hypnotic series of morphing semi-faces, and there were several more musical live performances along with cartoons. Jim Woodring gave a bizarre monologue over a series of artworks on the screen, and then appeared for audience questions.
I really wasn’t expecting what he would look like. I figured he’d be something like Crumb, or comic book guy, or someone much younger, but he looked rather like Colonel Sanders – white hair, neat white beard, immaculately dressed, and he had the unblinking stare and unusual outlook on life that reminded me of Chris F. Apparently, each of the Frank comics is very carefully written out in advance, but if Woodring at any point realises what the comic is “about”, he will immediately abandon it as being insufficiently interesting. I’d be more sceptical of this, but that is exactly how the comics appear, so fair enough. He really is after the goal of apparent lurking sense, just out of reach (and later on, he will most often realise that there was sense behind it, just that he didn’t realise it at the time.)
It has made the Frank comics both more accessable and more obscure for me. The fact that he has acknowledged the semi-sensical nature of his work does make me rather more relaxed about trying to understand it, and I think makes it slightly more enjoyable to just enjoy the dream logic. Jade thought that his monologue was utter wank, but was entranced by the comics/cartoons themselves, which she hadn’t seen before. I could see her point – it *was* wank – but it was provocative, and I’d be interested to read the transcript, because it contained some beautiful turns of phrase.