The elder of two children, Woodring was born in Los Angeles.
He suffered from hallucinations (which he called "apparitions") of floating, gibbering faces over his bed (among other visions) when he was a child, and "was obsessed with death at a tender age" and was afraid his parents would come into his bedroom and kill him.
He had behavioral problems, finding himself unable to stop himself from doing things he knew he should not be doing, which he says he did not bring in line until he got married.
Woodring has also been diagnosed with prosopagnosia.
He graduated from high school in 1970 and went to Glendale Junior College for about two months.
While there, "I had the most significant hallucination of my life in this art history class.
I took it as an omen that I should just get the hell out of school and stay out! [Laughs.]
This hallucination was so much more interesting than the class — it seemed to have forced its way into the classroom and jumped out of the screen where these slides were being projected in order to tell me that I should be somewhere else.
I felt that this image had gone to a lot of work to get into the building and get into that room and wait for the screen to turn blank and then appear at me to honk at me to go. So I did."
— Jim Woodring
Woodring dropped out of college and spent the next year and a half as a garbage man.
During this time he developed a serious drinking problem, which lasted about eight years.
He eventually quit drinking because he felt it was interfering with his growth as an artist.
In 1979he was persuaded by his best friend ohn Dorman to take work as an artist with the Ruby-Spears animation studio.
He did "storyboards during the production season and presentation work during the off-season."
He did work for the cartoon shows Mister T, Rubik the Amazing Cube, and Turbo Teen, and he has often said that these were the worst cartoons ever produced.
At that time, he formed friendships with and was somewhat mentored by celebrated comic book artists Gil Kane and Jack Kirby, who were both disgruntled with the comics business and were working in animation at the time.
Woodring and his wife, Mary, have a son named Maxfield, who has published a graphic novel of his own titled OAK, printed with a grant from the Xeric Foundation, a page from which was featured on November 18, 2012 as an entry for Woodring's blog.
In October, 2022 woodring released his 400 page comics odyssey entitled One Beautiful Spring Day, featuring eccentric woodcut-style panels with clean black outlines and hatched shadows.