4 out of 5

I first got turned on to Jim Woodring by, I believe, Tantalizing Stories, which I was checking out due to the other featured artist in that book, Mark Martin.  Woodring’s strange, beautiful, maybe funny nightmare dreamscapes were thus given a kind of context by Martin’s more elastic and bombastic stuff; your brain was tuned in for the weirdness.

It’s super cool of Fantagtaphics to’ve spotlighted Jim’s first legit graphic novel (as opposed to prior compilations) with a FCBD offering, but I wonder how receptive my brain would’ve been to this without the Tantalizing “framing,” and for that reason alone – that the book, while it offers a cast of characters, doesn’t necessarily give much to a new Jim reader to set the stage for his style – that Id knock a star off of the experience.  Not that I know a better way to do this; the Weathercraft snippet plus the character page plus some Frank shorts (which I believe all previously appeared) are as good of a Woodring intro as I can imagine, I’m just not sure it would necessarily sell me if I wasn’t already sold.

Such are the difficult philosophical discussions one must have with oneself as a reviewer.