Jim Woodring
It takes more drawing to tell a story in pantomime.
It seems impossible that the sands of time could swallow up the E.C. guys... and the great newspaper guys... and render them unknown to all but a few cartoon scholars.
It can be a pleasure to suffer from unwelcome truths.
If you find answers that go against self-interest you can't really turn your back on them and retain your intellectual honesty. It can be horribly uncomfortable to face unpleasant truths about yourself... it runs counter to the whole issue of survival.
If some of these shapes could be hung in a wall somewhere and they would simultaneously retain and release their talismanic emanations over time, they'd be significant.
If I can sell a page of comics... the original, I mean... I can get a few hundred bucks for it... maybe. But if I do a single page comic and draw all the frames individually and put it out as a mini-comic first, then I can sell the individual panels and make a lot more dough.
I've heard that Alfred Hitchcock said that by the time he was ready to shoot a film, he didn't even want to do it any more because he'd already had all of the fun of working it out. It's the same thing with these Frank comics.
I've had some offers that I couldn't take because I WAS BUSY. I have a lot of freedom to control my time as I like.
I'm trying to get more of an idea of who I am and what I am. It's an activity you can take right to the deathbed.
I'm sure every civilization has had something to pound with and something to make noise with at celebration times.
I'm always amazed when people have a hard time feeling sympathetic towards a loathsome character in a story, as if they were a different species. It's ridiculous.
I'm always amazed at how young cartoonists don't seem to give a hoot about so many of the great old practitioners. Nowadays we got these kids who think the profession began with Frank Miller. They don't know who Jack Davis is or Wally Wood or Herriman or any of 'em.
I wanted to be beyond any kind of place or time or culture. I do put in occasional cultural artifacts like hammers or party horns and things like that just for a little shock now and then.
I use these radially symmetrical shapes and bilateral symmetrical shapes and those have both got a different import to me. I have this symbolic language worked out.
I saw the saddest thing today. So sad. I just got to thinking about how all the houses around mine are filled with drunks and people hurting their kids, and everyone has a gun... and the movies these days, God.
I much prefer a landscape with something man-made in it. It adds the dimension of art or artifice, and I like that.
I like to bust the shrubs. I know I have illusions about myself, but those are just the ones that I haven't been able to crack.
I have a library of motifs and things in my head and I just draw on it.
I get up early and write that stuff down and enjoy doing it and enjoy reading it afterwards. It's a damn sight easier than drawing comics, and to me, much more valuable. It's so very pure.
I can't make a living on comics, but I do make a living cartooning, doing freelance work of all sorts. That's great. And recently I've been doing stuff for Microsoft.