The Book of Jim by Jim Woodring (No. 71)

The Book of Jim (1993)

by Jim Woodring

REVIEW BY GIL ROTH:

(from The 100 Best Comics of the Century! in The Comics Journal #210, 1999)

A distillation of Woodring's quixotic magazine series Jim (a self-described "autojournal" neglected at the time of its original four-issue run), The Book of Jim melds dream comics, automatic writing, and surreal illustrations into one unsettling package. The book is fascinating, both for its constituent parts and for the suggestiveness of their interrelationships. Indeed, The Book of Jim is one of those volumes which can be reread from a hundred different points of entry, in dizzying recursions - a real tail-swallowing experience. The comics, such as the harrowing What the Left Hand Did (with its unforgettable scene of torture as spiritual epiphany) and the cryptic Invisible Hinge (which hints at, yet defers, some profound revelation), join to form one hallucinatory dream-diary, punctuated by intervals of uncanny, lucid-dreamy prose, such as When the Lobster Whistles on the Hill. It all fits together like one of those blurred, unreconstructed dreams you try to grasp just after waking.

The Book of Jim lives up to its author's contention that true horror is "not only fun, but sacred". Woodring fearlessly plumbs his own unpredictable dream-life for material, without manicuring what he finds; the result weds beauty to terror. His drawings boast a hypnotically wavy-line and an unfailing graphic brilliance; dig those garden plots, those critters, those alarming, kaleidoscopic transformations. His line is matched by the fearlessness of his prose, eccentric, and precisely descriptive, which can transform an insect's dead shell into a "fuselage" or wring sheer terror out of an empty playground swing. Art and writing run together to give The Book of Jim the matter-of-factness and disarming spiritual heft of a really good nightmare. With this work, Woodring opened up new horizons in first-person cartooning, creating work at once frightening and profoundly affirmative.

ALAN MOORE:
Jim Woodring's stories manage, by some occult means, to be at once unsettlingly alien and intimately familiar. The effect is not unlike opening a new book to find the illustrated account of a dream you had when you were five and told no one about. Cryptic and haunting, Woodring's work evokes a sense of something important and forgotten. Easily the most hypnotic talent to enter the field in years.

FURTHER READING:

Jim Woodring Official Site

Jim Woodring at Fantagraphics Books