Word: wordless
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...remember "Henry," the wordless gag strip about the boy with the chipmunk cheeks? Imagine he has a stubby tail and a triangle nose - that's Frank. Now imagine "Henry"'s simple, "silent" stories taking place in a world of abstract angels, mutated frogs and other Jungian visions of the unconscious, and you have "Frank," the comic by Jim Woodring, published by Fantagraphics Books...
Issue No. 4 has just appeared in what has shaped up as an annual publishing schedule. The wordless plots are simple and archetypal, tapping into primal-process stories of food, fear and friendship. "Frank's High Horse," the lead story that continues across issues, involves Frank's finding a vicious protector called the High Horse (though it looks more like a giant, floating planarian worm). Soon Frank becomes addicted to the power this brings him, desperately following it as it slips through a slit in the sky, back to its own plane of existence...
...Woodring keeps the stories wordless, both as a challenge to himself - "like writing a novel without the letter 'e,'" he has said - but, more importantly, as a way of avoiding cultural currency. Not using words keeps the "Frank" stories timeless and universal. If you share "Frank" with your Bushman friends and even your Oxford don friends, everyone will be able to "get it." Wordless, sequential drawings have been the purest form of communication since prehistory. "Frank" continues the tradition...
...Yankee, Andy Pettitte, would, when his turn came, stare down the same tunnel with a look of smoldering Sicilian sanpaku. He looked like Rudolph Valentino playing a dark, wordless, dangerous loverboy. Valentino beat Winters. Mike Piazza flied out at exactly the stroke of midnight, and the Yankees took the World Series in five games...
...back into the underground with alternative rock. With horrifyingly generic teen-pop acts blaring out from MTV's Total Request Live day in and day out, it's a wonder more kids haven't turned to drugs to escape the awful racket. Sure, a fair amount of electronica is wordless wallpaper, but slip on Moby's soulful, cerebral Play, and you won't need any substances to get high. The music will take you there all by itself...