Graphic Novel Review: One Beautiful Spring Day by Jim Woodring

Posted on May 4, 2023 at 6:32 am by Gene Ambaum

One Beautiful Spring Day by Jim Woodring. Fantagraphics, 2022. 9781683965558. 402pp.

If you’ve never read a Frank book by Woodring this is the one to pick up. It’s a combination of material originally published as three books — Congress of Animals, Fran, and Poochytown — with an extra hundred pages around those stories, connecting and completing them. It is epic, plus it’s completely wordless, insanely weird, and somewhat gory and horrible in a way that I never quite recall. Frank and his friends remind me of classic cartoons, which are also often filled with suffering and awfulness in a way that’s both amusing and unreal and that I don’t really remember.

Bonus: I can almost guarantee that the art will make you stop reading to admire individual lines in the a drawing at some point.