Jim

It's a colossal understatement to call the work of writer/illustrator Woodring (Weathercraft) idiosyncratic. Literally drawn from the "autojournals" the graphic novelist has long kept of his dreams, his subconscious spills out over all the pages of Jim, a collection of the best of Woodring's work featuring his titular cartoon alter ego and more. The unique mix of surrealism, kitsch, and Robert Crumb-style cartooning, with threatening undercurrents throughout (images of malevolent animals that look like they want to leap off the page occur frequently), obeys genuine oneiric logic; even Woodring's prose contains abrupt narrative shifts and bizarre apparitions. Admirably uncompromised but thoroughly unpleasant, these comics seem to have no particular meaning other than what individual readers bring to them—unless the intent is to remind us of the things that lurk in our own psyches, emerging only when we sleep.