frankpost

A new Jim Woodring book, Quacky, will be released on July 14, 2026, featuring two new stories:

With Quacky, Woodring adopts the format of 1930s Big Little Books to deliver a text story with illustrations, in which the typically nonplussed Frank’s reactions are told to us explicitly, through narration and his own thoughts. Frank is buffeted by generosity, anguished to see how loving friends perceive him, distraught by the process of aging and physical transformation in a beloved pet, delighted by nature and physical experiences shared with others, and ultimately sees a path toward radical acceptance in the face of trauma.

https://mindlessones.com/2008/05/09/fraaoooooooooiiiiink-detourning-the-dream-factory/

The cartoon depiction of the body is symbolic as opposed to literal, and the symbolic body is subject to very different laws from the physical. See Wile E Coyote squashed flat as a pancake by a passing boulder, or Tom unspooling out of a blind while Jerry runs for it, if you need further proof. It can be mashed, stretched, twanged and dissecated. It undergoes imposible violations, inaccessible to us, but for Daffy Duck these permutations and contortions are just part of the nine-to-five. He is essentially expressive in nature and, if his creators so will it, his *body* will become a space for the child to explore crushedness or pan-facedness. It cannot be irrevocably changed, but it will be perpetually transformed. And like a child, our cartoons are still testing the limits of the tangible world. ‘What does it feel like to be drawn like a bow?’, ‘How does it feel to blown up?’, it asks, but Frank, goes even further, to posit a body so reactive and polymorphously perverse that it responds not just to physical impacts, but to more abstract impressions too.

Jim Woodring, 2006

Jim Woodring, Made in the Shade, 2025, ink on paper, 5 3/4" x 7"