Jim Woodring is a self-taught artist and his first published works documented the disorienting hell of his salad days in an “illustrated autojournal” called JIM. This work was published by Fantagraphics Books and collected in The Book of Jim in 1992.
He is best known for his wordless comics series depicting the follies of his character Frank, a generic cartoon anthropomorph whose adventures careen wildly from sweet to appalling. A decade’s worth of these stories was collected in The Frank Book in 2004. The 2010 Frank story Weathercraft won The Stranger’s Genius Award and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for that year. He followed up Weathercraft with the two part graphic novel Congress of the Animals, released in 2011 and Fran, released in 2013. His most recent Frank book, Frank in the 3rd Dimension, was published last year.
Jim’s work has taken him around the world, from Australia to Alaska to Oslo, and has garnered him numerous awards, including an Artist Trust Gap Award in 2003; a United States Artist Fellowship (with Bill Frisell) in 2006; a 2008 Artist Trust Fellowship; an Inkpot Award at the 2008 Comic-Con International in San Diego; a Rasmuson Foundation and Artist Trust one month residency in Homer, Alaska in 2010; and The Stranger named Jim their 2010 Literature Genius.