Pim & Francie: "The Golden Bear Days" [Hardcover]

Al Columbia (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 30, 2009

Nominated for two 2010 Ignatz Awards (Outstanding Artist and Outstanding Graphic Novel): Al Columbia's lavishly produced portal into the fantastic and frightful world of Pim & Francie.

This gorgeous grimoire is part alchemy, part art book, part storybook, part comic book, and part conceptual art from the pen of Al Columbia, a longtime fan favorite contributor to comics anthologies like Zero Zero, Blab!, and more recently, MOME. Collecting over a decade’s worth of ‘artifacts’, excavations, comic strips, animation stills, storybook covers, and much more, this broken jigsaw puzzle of a book tells the story of Pim & Francie, a pair of childlike, male and female imps whose irresponsible antics get them into horrific, fantastic trouble. Their loosely defined relationship only contributes to the existential fear that lingers underneath the various perils they are subjected to. Columbia’s brilliant, fairytale-like backdrops hint at further layers of reality lurking under every gingerbread house or behind every sunny afternoon. Never have such colorful, imaginative vistas instilled such an atmosphere of dread, and with such a wicked sense of humor.

This is a comprehensive collection of Columbia’s Pim & Francie work, including paintings, comics, character designs, and much more, all woven into something greater than the sum of its parts, with Pim & Francie careening from danger to danger, threaded together through text and notes by the artist.

This is the first book collection by Columbia, a well-regarded talent amongst longtime fans of the alternative comic book scene, and one who will thrill an entirely new audience with the singular, inspired, fully-realized fantasies within Pim & Francie. 240 b&w illustrations

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Columbia's legend over the last two decades has as much to do with the work he's destroyed or never finished as with the few spectacular, horrifying pieces that actually have seen publication. This, his first book, makes a point of being unfinished and unfinishable. These aren't actually stories about Pim and Francie, a pair of little-kid characters (drawn in a vintage animation style) who are perpetually stumbling into ghastly, wrenchingly violent scenarios: they're mangled fragments of stories, closeups of incomplete comics pages and animation storyboards, stained and crumpled sketches and notes. The book's spine calls its contents artifacts and bone fragments, as if they're what's left for a forensic scientist to identify after a brutal murderer has had his way with them; Columbia obsessively returns to images of bloody bloody killers. (His cartoon shorthand for destruction is a human tornado with lots of bent arms holding knives at daffy angles.) Many of the pieces are just one or two drawings, as if they've been reduced to the moment when an idyllic piece of entertainment goes hideously awry. But they're also showcases for Columbia's self-frustrating mastery: his absolute command of the idiom of lush, old-fashioned cartooning, and the unshakable eeriness of his visions of horror. (Nov.)
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From Booklist

Pim and Francie are a boy and a girl right out of early animation: crisply drawn in a handful of stock positions, with big shoes and three-fingered gloves, and usually identically posed when shown together, except when one or the other is in a chopped-up state. Chopped-up? Well, their grandpa and grandma as well as the Bloody Bloody Killer often turn up flourishing big knives and straight razors. This is all done in black and white, of course, like the early, silent, deadly Felix the Cat cartoons, and also in various apparent states of wear, tear, and draftsmanship (penciled, inked, half-inked, overlaid, palimpsest). Only vaguely narrative, nightmarish, but fascinating, especially for connoisseurs of pure cartooning. --Ray Olson

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Fantagraphics (November 30, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1606993046
• ISBN-13: 978-1606993040
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 1 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #436,450 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Al Columbia's high-octane nightmare fuel December 15, 2009

By Author Bill Peschel

Last night I had a dream in which a shadowy figure appeared at the end of my bed. As it approached me, I aimed my bedside lamp at it and tried to turn it on. My desperation woke my wife, who in turn woke me up and spared me the sight of whatever it was that was tormenting me.

I have no doubt my rare nightmare of shadows was fueled by "Pim & Francie," Al Columbia's collection of horrors published by Fantagraphic Books.

Pim and Francie are children trapped in a nightmare world, threatened by knife-juggling multi-armed circus freaks, menaced by murderous (or worse) relatives, walking stiffly past gamboling disemboweled infants and innocent kittens stalking through grass, unaware of their gruesome fates. Then, like The Simpson's "Itchy and Scratchy" cartoons, the lil tykes reappear whole to be threatened and frightened all over again.

Columbia renders these retro figures, if not lovingly then at least accurately. He leaves the backgrounds unfinished or penciled in, as if the artist went made for awhile and committed horrible crimes before returning, panting and bloodied, to his work table.

In his overview of "Creepy 'alt-horror' cartoonists" at Robot 6, Sean T. Collins writes that what he likes about Columbia's work "is how they look like the product of some doomed and demented animation studio. It's as though a team of expert craftsmen became trapped in their office sometime during the Depression and were forgotten about for decades, reduced to inbreeding, feeding on their own dead, and making human sacrifices to the mimeograph machine, and when the authorities finally stumbled across their charnel-house lair, this stuff is what they were working on in the darkness."

But "Pim & Francie" are not stories. They're flashes of nightmares, a slide show of one man's hell, revealing an insane mind and a very creative and doomed soul. Each story carries with it an implied promise that there was order, meaning and purpose underneath it. "Pim & Francie" shatters those promises, and in addition to the unsettling memories implanted by these terrifying images, you can't help but be concerned about the mental health of the man who created them.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars So Much Potential December 7, 2009

By E. David Swan VINE™ VOICE

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Al Columbia is one of the most enigmatic cartoonists alive and this collection will only add to his mystery. This book contains no story, only ideas and sketches pulled together and presented with some attempt to produce a very loose narrative. Collected here are the raw and disturbing images from the mind of an artist with seemingly no boundaries. If you've ever read anything by Columbia you'll know that he really doesn't do any self censorship and if anything this book is tamer than much of what he has produced. Columbia is generally characterized as such a perfectionist that his productivity is almost non-existent. This book would definitely back up that theory since many of these drawings are absolutely stunning and would only need some slight cleanup to be presented to the public in an actual story. As someone with a small bit of background in graphic design it saddens me to see pictures that clearly took many hours to create torn and taped back together.

If the book did have a theme you might say it's the loss of innocence. It isn't the innocence of Pim and Francie since they are clearly corrupted from the get go. Early in the book Francie is shown attached to a laughing monstrosity by an umbilical cord while Pim, cigar in hand and face obscured by shadows, shouts, `whore, he looks nothing like me'. No, the innocence that Columbia tries to take is that of the reader. The book is littered with images of beloved Disney characters including one haunting drawing featuring badly damaged statues of Mickey, Pluto and Donald Duck's nephews. Mickey's mouth is a gaping smashed hole; an image that's hard to shake made all the more sickening by the skill and precision of Al Columbia. Columbia's `Bloody Bloody Killer' bears a slight resemblance to Goofy if Goofy had leering bulging eyes, a mirthless smile and a butcher's knife in each hand. There is an insane looking picture of what appears to be Pluto with his face carved up and a look of masochistic delight while in another image Pim has Bambi on a leash having hacked off two of the young doe's legs and his tail. I would suggest visiting Fantagraphics website which offers 24 pages from the book as a preview.

Al Columbia reuses a lot of ideas but again this is a sketch book of experimentation and not a finished product. There are a lot of images of multi-limbed creatures with arms at unnatural angles and a butcher's knife in each hand. Sometimes the creatures seems to literally have multiple arms while in others it appears that the knives may be getting juggled and the extra arms are meant to show movement. Besides being inspired by Disney and Fleischer I see similarities to a lot of comics from the 1920's, 30's and 40's. Some of the characters resemble political cartoons from the 40's that featured disgusting distorted images of opposing world leaders. They were typically drawn grotesquely fat with demonic claws and greedy tongues licking thick slobbering lips. In one picture two of these beasts are selling kittens to what appears to be the `Bloody Bloody Killer' for God knows what purpose. If you look back at a lot of comics like `The Yellow Kid', from the turn of the last century, many of the drawings look very disturbing today and I sense that this was one of the sources of inspiration. Not everything in the book will repulse. A lot of pictures are quite lovely and could easily be featured in a children's book without complaint but you always get the feeling of dread that one turn of the page will be a return to hell.

One thing about Fantagraphics is they clearly care about what they put out. The cover is fantastic giving the appearance that the book is taped up. The paper stock is very nice and the binding is perfect. No worries at all in the presentation. I just can't help but feel that this whole endeavor is a desperate attempt to get anything out from Al Columbia. What I would have preferred was a compilation of his works from various comics many of which are extremely hard to get but the ultimate would be an all new book. I just cannot in good conscience give this book the full five stars because in the end it's an incomplete project. It's more of a tease or perhaps a sad reminder of lost potential. Al Columbia has some amazing stories rattling around in his head and hopefully someday they will get polished up and presented in a finished format.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Loins and Blisters and Knives, Oy Vey December 2, 2009

By P. M. Cooper

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This book is easily one of the most unsettling creations to surface in comics history. If one chooses to stay at surface-level, the artwork by itself is worthy of repeated gazes. Disney characters, deconstructed and busted, and Fleischer Bros. dream ghouls abound. To the passers-by, it may appear to be just a nice and ugly collection of distorted funnies. However, the thin thread of narrative has to be found by delving beneath that exterior. It can and has been said that this is not a conventionally plotted story, but that actually makes the jumps all the more jarring. By leaving out exposition and conventional dialogue, the remains tend to create an even more disturbing mood. Who knows if this was an intentional structure by Mr. Columbia or a result of editing? Either way, it almost seems like a new way of telling a horro-comic story. The Sketches and enlarged fragments, tape boogers and smudges all make it seem as if you've happened on some derelict from cartoon hell. Oily Recommitted!