Publisher Description

Since 1991, Jim Woodring's lusciously rendered, hypnotic fables have dazzled readers the world over, and the recent runaway success of the Frank-co-starring graphic novel Weathercraft and the first true Frank graphic novel Congress of the Animals have only whetted readers' appetites for more. In honor of the characters' 20th anniversary and first graphic-novel length story, The Congress of the Animals, Fantagraphics is re-releasing the massive The Frank Book, which collects all the Frank material up to the mid-aughts, including several jaw-droppingly beautiful full-color stories, literally dozens of lushly-delineated black-and-white stories, and a treasure trove of covers and illustrations - both in a new printing of the hardcover for bibliophiles, and the first edition of a new softcover for those on a budget.

Notes

Featuring an introduction from film director Francis Ford Coppola, this is the definitive paperback collection of Jim Woodring's mysterious Frank.

Author Biography

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

Review

Over the last few decades, Jim Woodring has been drawing a series of wordless, blissfully cruel slapstick fables, set in a world of grotesque entities and psychedelic minarets: half unshakable nightmare, half Chuck Jones cartoon filtered through the Bhagavad Gita.-- "The New York Times Book Review"
Woodring suggests that each strip is intended to be a mystery but that one concept runs through each one, like a sort of moral. . . this obscurity and strangeness is a large part of what gives the book its charm.-- "Grovel"
Woodring is fantastic... his stuff will outlast all but one in a thousand of his peers. His stuff is a revelation.--Scott McCloud, author of Understanding Comics

Review Text

"I can't think of much other art that's both so unironically devoted to pleasure and entertainment (in this case, in the form of funny-looking animals doing amusing things in colorful, inventively odd settings) and so deeply, primally unsettling and ambiguous."

Review Quote

"Woodring suggests that each strip is intended to be a mystery but that one concept runs through each one, like a sort of moral. . . this obscurity and strangeness is a large part of what gives the book its charm."

Description for Sales People

Features an introduction by film director Francis Ford Coppola. First paperback edition of the definitive Frank collection. Published alongside a new hardback edition in honour of the character's 20th anniversary. Follows the hugely successful Weathercraft and Congress of the Animals graphic novels, both available from Turnaround.

Details