224 FRANK BOOK, THE
the Cartoon Collector’s Lifetime Achievement Award; she was inducted into the Will
Eisner Hall of Fame in 2006.
In 2007, Fradon wrote Th e Gnostic Faustus: the Secret Teachings Behind the Classic
Text , published by Inner Traditions. Th e book is her unique study of the Faustus
myth.
Trina Robbins
FRANK BOOK, THE. Th e Frank Book collects visionary cartoonist Jim Woodring’s
“Frank” stories from his JIM and FRANK comics, Tantalizing Stories , and other pub-
lications between 1991 and 2001, along with related covers and art. Th ese episodic,
mostly black-and-white, nearly wordless comics typically chronicle a day in the life of
Frank, a bipedal, short-tailed, buck-toothed animal resembling a cross between Bugs
Bunny, Mickey Mouse, and Felix the Cat. According to Woodring, who once worked
in the animation industry, Frank is his idea of “a pure cartoon,” with “a cartoon char-
acter who lives in a cartoon landscape with other cartoon characters in a situation
where forces could be explored outside of any... [c]ultural or... [s]ocial context”
(Groth 2002, 85). Th e everyman Frank explores with curiosity and occasional under-
standing the wonders and horrors of an idyllic-looking but violent and amoral world
in which characters’ desires for self-gratifi cation contend with their instincts for self-
preservation, yielding slapstick antics and harrowingly tragic consequences. Inspired
by, yet transcending, such diverse visual sources as animated cartoons, funny animal
comics, and Surrealist paintings, the ethereal and symbolic stories of Th e Frank Book
provide a voyeuristic glimpse into a familiar but ultimately mysterious and alien place
that follows its own rules, and where things are not always what they seem, much like
Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland.
Frank’s early years furnish many of the distinctive elements of his idiosyncratic
stories. As Woodring explains in his afterword to Th e Frank Book , he fi rst drew Frank in
1989 “out of the impulse to create a sui generis cartoon character; not a cat, or a mouse,
or a beaver, or any other kind of creature, but a generic anthropomorph, beholden to
nobody and with no expectations to fulfi ll” (351). In 1990, Frank made his fi rst appear-
ance in the comic book BUZZ after editor Mark Landman invited Woodring to do a
comic “that looks normal but isn’t” (Woodring 351). Th at four-page story, included in
the appendix to Th e Frank Book , features many of the hallmarks of the Frank stories:
an absence of dialogue or narration, which heightens the narrative’s ambiguity and oth-
erworldly feel; violence (in this case, inadvertent); an inscrutable, transcendent power;
and Frank and his swinish foil, Manhog, a would-be usurper and the personifi cation of
animal appetite and human sin. Weeping over the death of a worm in an apple in his
debut, Frank shows more empathy than in most tales, including the Harvey Award -
winning Frank in the River (1992), Woodring’s longest color story and the fi rst comic
in Th e Frank Book. Th ere, in an apparent pastiche of “Th e Sorcerer’s Apprentice” from
Disney’s Fantasia , an indentured Frank butchers a horde of river monsters before his
clones dispose of Manhog and Frank earns his freedom.
