In Woodring’s huge new graphic novel, “ One Beautiful Spring Day,” each panel is drawn in a style that looks like an eccentric woodcut. They leave behind not broad moral lessons but the harsh laws and uncrossable boundaries that apply only in a fictional world unlike any other. The process is painful, but its results are unique-the Frank stories are both utterly foreign and purely lucid, a set of gnomic parables that always end in a puff of irony or ambiguity. The Unifactor allows him to draw and write about it only in a certain way if he tries to go against its instructions, the Unifactor may interfere or abandon him. Woodring calls this place the Unifactor, and says that it tells him what to draw, and how. Woodring has published four book-length comics and an enormous collection of short stories that follow the distressing adventures of his hero, a woodland creature called Frank, who lives in a dreamlike world filled with deserts, forests, minareted castles, hot-air balloons, a devil, and the occasional cylindrical chicken. The cartoonist Jim Woodring has a simple answer, although it’s likely to elicit more and stranger questions. “Where do you get your ideas?” is a question that most authors dread. Photograph by RL Rejmaniack / Courtesy Fantagraphics Books “I don’t trust my mind for everyday thinking,” Woodring writes.
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