"Jim Woodring is definitely one of the most important figures of present day alternative comics scene. I have read again and again his stories based on dreams, published in a comic series called "Jim". Despite the somnambular story lines, these comics repeatedly grabbed my attention, and their mystery hasn't vanished even after so many re-reads. Woodring's "Frank" comics, on the other hand, introduced a line of cartoony but bizarre little characters in a lonely, surreal environment, a strange and eerie combination of George Herriman and Walt Disney. I was lucky enough to meet Jim Woodring at his house in Seattle, in October 1999, and to see some of his moving sculptures and furniture designed in rather Woodringesque style. I wish that some day some crazy millionaire would invest in a Woodring theme-park, a sort of alternative, dreamtime Disneyland."
Sasa Rakezic aka Aleksandar Zograf
Jim Woodring
Fantagraphic Books
Interviews
S.R.: But how did you end up creating those strange but refined mystical environments that we can see in your drawings?
J.W.: Well, that was the world I always lived in. I always had an inclination towards the hidden world. There was no outlet for this when I grew up, I grew up in a very conservative, white-bread town in California. There were not any adults interested in anything artistic there, except for one neighbor who was an architect. So as far as I was concerned, the whole world was one way, and I was another, and I spent all my time trying to uncover the mysteries; Even as a little kid, I was always looking behind things. When I went to a house, the first thing that I did was to look behind the couches, behind the curtains; I was expecting to find a little river there, some sort of a strange toy, something hidden behind the scene. When I was really young, I had a lot of strange psychological or neurological problems, hallucinated, I experienced paranoia, which was absolutely terrible. Completely horrifying. I heard voices, and had bad visions at night, sight apparitions, and I guess I was never much in touch with reality, always looking for the hidden and the marvelous. This was great when I could do it, but it made me a difficult person. I was so out of touch with the rest of the world, I was an oddball, you know? Hardcore oddball. This caused my parents a lot of grief. They didn't know what to make of me. They just gave up on me at a very early age. It was pretty grim, actually. But on the other hand even though I suffered terribly because of the shame and alienation; because how I felt it didn't fit in; I had these ecstatic moods and I was just left on my own devices, so that I could wander around and just look at the walls, and snails... Which is what I most liked to do in my free time, I was in ecstasy; I thought it was all glorious, fantastic, I loved it. I still love it. And I spent past 20 years of my life trying to be as normal as I could and to atone for all the stupid things that I did when I was an adolescent or a young adult. And I really tried so hard to be a normal guy. I started organizing volleyball games in a park here, because it was an attempt to be normal; I started to have dinner parties, get together with people in a normal way. This was never easy for me, but I succeeded at it pretty well, I have a pretty normal life now.
S.R.: I can see that we have some similarities. You said that you had strange hallucinations when you were kid. Does that mean that some of the imagery that we can now recognize from your comics were originally seen as visions of a sort?
J.W.: Yes, some of them; (At that moment I saw a peculiar little insect crossing Jim's table). Oh, that's a strange insect! Yes, some of the things that I used to see survive in my present-day comics. When I was doing the first issues of my magazine Jim, I put a lot of that stuff in there. I transcribed a lot of bad, delusionary experiences that I had. I drew pictures of a lot of things that I used to see; I don't do that so much any more. The one thing that survives is these radially symmetrical shapes I call Jivas that I used to see hovering over the foot of my bed when I was a very young child... I don't know what they were, but I've put them as the ghosts in my comic strips. And the mood of unreality; of something being wrong, of an inanimate object being alive, in a sense that everything is keeping up a pretense of normality which is just about to collapse under the strain of maintaining it, reveal some horrifying underlined situation. It's something that still drives me in my artwork; I could never paint barns or houses or trees just as they are. I would always want to draw them in such a way that some hidden aspect of their nature is communicated. Whether or not I succeed is another thing, but that's my goal. The way you're looking at it is just the cosmic pretense, and then you're not seeing a reality. This is what I believe is the case.
S.R.: What is your explanation of the fact that many cartoonists in the 90's have been trying to produce comics inspired by dreams?
J.W.: So many people are fascinated by dreams, and people have been drawing or recording their dreams in one form or another for god knows how long; centuries. And comics are the perfect medium for doing this because the materials are inexpensive and you have full artistic control. Comics are intimate, and they are perfect media for catching absurdities, transformations and changes of scene that occur in dreams; But on the other hand it's a little bit risky because everybody knows that it's boring to listen to somebody else's dreams if they are not told right.
S.R.: So it can fall into "art for art's sake" trap?
J.W.: Well, it all IS art for art sake. It is just a matter of putting in sufficient effort to make it as interesting as you can, and having a good editorial eye so that you can realize what will not be interesting to other people. Dreams are so precise, and they are so full of information, and the symbols are so full of meaning, that you need to select dreams and show the symbols that are most likely to have universal significance; A re-occurring dream that I used to have as a child was that I would be going through a closet, and in the back of the closet I would find a stop sign. Whenever that happened, it was a surprise to me, and it always scared me so much that I woke up. I've put that into a Frank comic, and many people commented to me that they found that image to be very, very strong. It surprised me that other people have been able to relate to that kind of absurd image. And by the same token, I've done things that I thought were tremendously potent, but to which other people haven't responded at all.
S.R.: Do you ever try to analyze your dreams, or you just let them be what they are?
J.W.: No, I always fail at analyzing them because I think that they are specific messages for a specific purpose. It's something that you and I've talked about; do dreams represent a place where everybody can come together, a collective unconsciousness? At various times I've felt that they are really the place where everybody comes together. And also I felt that it's the only place where you are completely alone. It's easy for me to feel that I know something about dreams, like I can pontificate about them all day. But when I really look at them, I don't know what they are, I don't know what they mean. By the way, I had an unusual experience a couple of years ago when somebody handled me a pair of goggles that were hooked on some sort of electronic machine... These goggles blasted pulses of light into your eyes. People wear them at raves; they take Ecstasy and put on goggles; I was told that it is sort of relaxing and interesting, and when it started going on, I was looking at a piece of glass on which fragments of images are being stuck, at the rate of about 2000 per minute! They were just splattering out of the backs of my eyes - crazy, irrational, seemingly meaningless things! You worked a lot on your hypnagogic visions, and I guess I have experienced some form of that, but it was unpleasant. It is a crack-brain horrible gibberish that just floods into my head while I'm falling asleep. It's not interesting or exotic; it feels more like psychosis. That's what these goggles were calling up... And yet everything that I saw was very precise, very specific. I have concluded that it is a neurological phenomena, that it had no psychological significance, it was just neurons being hit by light, discarding the junk of information.
