Jim Woodring

No, it’s not limited edition. Although I don’t know what they’re going to cost. It might turn out to be a limited edition simply by virtue of being overpriced. They’re just toys; little articulated figures that come in a box and I’m trying to package them as enticingly as possible. The tops of the boxes are going to be watercolor vignettes showing the characters and then there will be a label on the sides. I hope it works out. I’m in the early planning stages so I’m not entirely sure I’m on the right track, but I hope so.

In some ways it is how I see the world. At least some aspects of it. I guess it’s more a reflection of how I would see the world if I could see the things I’m thinking about.

I don’t really have a choice. I could jettison my perspective and try to be a more normal person, but I don’t think I’d succeed at that. I think I’d just be empty. I don’t think I could replace it with something more conventional. That’s not an option for me.

Well, if you notice there are no human beings in that book. I tend to use frogs as stand-ins for human beings, because when it comes drawing people for symbolic pictures, I never quite know how to go about doing it. If you draw them so that they’re like portraits, then the picture becomes about that personality. But if you just draw placeholders the figures tend to be very minimalist. They don’t have a lot of personality. It’s hard for me to know how to draw people, so I draw frogs because to me they’re kind of stripped-down versions of human beings.

I’ve always been fascinated by frogs and I’ve always loved to look at them. They’re good food for thought. I guess in France they’re just good food. They have a lot of interesting attributes. If you have a spiritual event; they’re amazing because they’ll just sit still as if they’re meditating for a long period of time, but they’re never out of it. They always notice when a shadow approaches and then they move like greased lightning. They live on the land and in the water. That amphibious quality is something you can compare to the way people live in both the animal and the spiritual world. They’re strangely anthropomorphic. They almost seem to have hands. They have faces you can read expressions in more readily than you can read them on the faces of other animals. I don’t know what it is but they’re easier to figure out than people. I guess the reason why I don’t draw people very much is because I don’t understand them. I don’t understand us so I never quite know what to show. It’s easy for me to draw people in deplorable circumstances doing terrible things subject to abominable forces. But I don’t want to just do that all the time; I don’t want to heap another log onto the fire of “Here’s what’s wrong with the human race.” So I sidestep it by doing it with frogs.

Oh I’ve eaten them. I’ll eat anything. I’ve even eaten whale meat.

Terrible, it tastes like liver.

Japan.

Yeah they do. They have such a refined sense of barbarism. At the same dinner I had the whale, I had living fish, pregnant fish stuffed with eggs and liver torn pulsating from the bodies of crabs. I guess pain connected with the food makes it taste better.

They love it. It’s part of their exquisite sensibilities. I think it’s a good thing.

I think that could be true.

I don’t have anything that I can determine in common with the Japanese. One of the reasons I like going there is because it’s such an alien experience for me. I never know what they’re thinking or what they want or why they do what they do. I enjoy being in Japan because there’s a reason for me not to understand everything. I’ve been to Europe a few times and I may identify with European sensibilities more than mainstream American ones. But I feel pretty at home here in Seattle. I feel like I’m among people who are like me here.

Yeah, we do. It can be difficult to find someone far away with whom you have a common chemistry. I have a better chance of doing it here than I would in Idaho or somewhere.

For that project Bill composed music and I did drawings. We discussed some ideas about where the stuff would go and I would go over to his house and listen to him compose some things on his guitar while I drew pictures accordingly. Then he would refine the music and I would refine the drawings. And I turned the music into some kind of filmstrip using that Ken Burns pan and scan approach. Three of the filmstrips were just images that were edited together via pans and fadeouts and truck-ins and truck-outs. Then three of them were pieces of flash animation using more sort of geometric, iconic shapes.

No, we didn’t. It was a little bit of an experiment. We assumed that it would work simply because we have similar sensibilities about things, which is what the title refers to. So I didn’t know exactly how well it would work, but I thought that it would work and I think it did. It was kind of a refined connoisseur’s treat. I think that people who go to hear Bill improvise and rock out on guitar didn’t get what they wanted and people who like to pore over drawings didn’t get what they wanted. It existed somewhere between the two and for some people I know it worked really great. I know a number of people who really liked it or at least said they did. Then I know it was totally wasted on some other people. It was art, goddamnit. It was a big, high-faluting art project and if anybody didn’t get it, they can go fuck themselves.

No, as a matter of fact, I grew up in cultural isolation. My son has grown up knowing artists and writers just because they’ve been around the house. But when I was growing up, I lived in a town that was so lily-white I didn’t go to school with a black person any of the years I went to school, from kindergarten to high school. I lived in the whitest, the most sterile, most pampered place. It wasn’t pampered like Beverly Hills or anything but it was this upper-middle class, cream of nowhere place. I didn’t know anybody who was interested in anything intriguing or deep or mysterious or artistic or adventurous. It was just work at some job making money, come home, get drunk and have a barbeque. That was it. It was fucked. It was a terrible situation for me; I was beating my head against the wall all the time because I couldn’t relate to anything.

What happened was is that I’ve always had this vision I’ve wanted to express and I’ve done that ever since I was able to focus from the age of 12 or 13 on. But I really had no idea what kind of career I would or could have as an artist. I didn’t have the sophistication to plan to be a gallery artist or a cartoonist or illustrator; I just worked on trying to learn to draw and to express this vision. I was in my late 20’s when I started self-publishing this thing called Jim, which was this illustrated, autojournal that dealt entirely with inferior issues that I had. I met Gary Groth through my friend Gil Kane and Gary offered to publish Jim if I would put some comics in it. That’s when I started drawing comics. I’d always drawn cartoons, but I hadn’t thought seriously about being a professional cartoonist because I had no idea to go about it. So once the opportunity was offered to me, that’s what I did.

Sometimes it is. There’s a drawing in Seeing Things called Crash, which shows a skeleton in an airplane about to crash into a great, big, pompous-looking toad. I remember when I drew that; my wife and I laughed ourselves sick over it. We thought it was an absolutely hilarious image. So under those circumstances, yeah I thought that was funny. Unfortunately, I drew that thing on September 9th, 2001. There’s a local tabloid here in Seattle called The Stranger. It used to run my drawings in the back with the ads where nobody would see them. That drawing was slated to run that week and then 9/11 happened two days after I did the drawing. It looked like that drawing referred to 9/11 with the airplanes crashing into things and the skeletons, so I had them pull it. I was afraid if it was printed, it would look like I was making fun of it or something. I came to look at that cartoon with a certain loathing but before that event I thought it was hilariously funny. There are other drawings in that book that I think are really, really terrifying. There’s a drawing called The Holy Land in there, that just upset me when I was doing it because it so perfectly expressed some profound art-related fears that I had. Then there’s a drawing called Good Standing that I was laughing all the time I was drawing and I thought it was funny.

Oh sometimes. There are fleeting moments of satisfaction but those are short-lived. I generally feel spurred on by anxiety and a sense that I hadn’t achieved anything. I used to have this really infantile attitude that one day I would create a picture that was so good that would absolve me from all human responsibilities. I always thought that if you were a really great artist or a cartoonist that you didn’t have to worry about anything anymore. You could knock on any door and say, “I’m Jack Davis and I’m hungry and I need a place to sleep” and they’d go, “Jack Davis! Come in.” Or that the government would say, “I was looking at Jack Davis’ income tax return. He’s not doing that well, I think we ought to lower his taxes.” I just had this feeling that if you were a success as an artist that your future would be made. I don’t know why I thought that, like I said, it’s an infantile notion. But that feeling took a long time to fade out. It took me a long time to grasp the fact that people can do work that’s as good as they can possibly do and still end in squalor and despair.

Oh, you think not?

It very well could.

I’m through with The Stranger. The new art director fired me in a way that pissed me off, so I don’t think I’ll ever do anything for them again.

He calls me up and goes “I’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is, I still like your work and want to use it from time to time. The bad news is that we won’t be needing your cartoons anymore.” I was giving these people the very cream of what I had to offer for a mere 50 bucks a week. They decided that they didn’t need my cartoon anymore. I was so irritated so I think I’m through with them.

Right now I’m painting a poster with an owl in it for some water conservation group. But I don’t do that much commercial work, really. I just did a CD cover for a friend to put out a band, but I didn’t get paid anything, so I guess it wasn’t really commercial. I just did the image that’s going to go on the cover of this big Ramones box set that Rhino is putting out. It’s called Weird Tales of The Ramones.

I have some golden age Dutch painting reproductions like a Vermeer and a Rembrandt. I have some cartoon artwork like the original art for Why I Hate Christians by Dan Clowes hanging up. Also I’ve got a bunch of medical models and scientific equipment. I’ve got a giant statue showing a frog’s nervous system. I have some luminous discharge tubes, other scientific equipment and stuff like that.

Yeah, there’s not that much of it and it’s a great, big house so it’s kind of spread thin.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck