Jim Woodring's Frank finally speaks in a 3.5-inch Big Little Book

For 35 years, Jim Woodring's character Frank has wandered the hallucinatory landscape of the Unifactor without saying a word. Readers interpreted the allegories on their own. Now Frank has a voice. Quacky, out August 11 from Fantagraphics, is a prose-and-pictures story built to look and feel like those palm-sized Big Little Books from the 1930s — 3.5 inches tall, 1.25 inches thick, drawings on the right-hand pages and prose on the left.

Big Little Books were cheap, palm-sized children's books sold at dime stores from the 1930s through the 1960s. They had beautiful covers and, as Woodring puts it, "lackluster guts" — stiff art by hired hands and text that "seldom rose to the level of mediocre children's literature." He says he's made every effort to preserve the "traditional dumbness" of the originals while making the content meaningful.

The format change gives Frank an interior life for the first time. As Library Journal said in its starred preview, naming Frank's impressions rather than just enacting them "offers a new angle on characters and themes that have animated his work for decades." The usual cast — Pupshaw, Pushpaw, Manhog — shows up, along with a backup story starring Cunningham, the Clever Pig Who Helps All His Friends, in a tale Woodring describes as "charming, disturbing."

Woodring is also holding an art sale on April 15 at his online store — 40 original works from $50 to $15,000, posted one at a time starting at 9 AM Pacific.

Previously:

• The wordless "Frank" by Jim Woodring is one of the first comics I ever read
• Jim — A collection of Jim Woodring's non-Frank comics work, starring "Jim"