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 Books (November 30, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1606993046
• ISBN-13: 978-1606993040
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 8.1 x 1 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: #739,846 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

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 "Writers Gone Wild" (Hershey, PA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Pim & Francie: "The Golden Bear Days" (Hardcover)

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:

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

By 

P. M. Cooper (Under the Bed in Alabama) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Pim & Francie: "The Golden Bear Days" (Hardcover)

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!

3.0 out of 5 stars Genuinely Unsettling, November 2, 2011

By 

Brian Callahan (Arlington, VA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Pim & Francie: "The Golden Bear Days" (Hardcover)

Columbia is incredibly talented, and his work is stunning to look at, but this beautifully crafted book is pretty close to evil. Owning it is a curse, because you want to pick it up and leaf through it, but when you do, you are disturbed by its content all over again. Its fractured structure makes it even more nightmarish. I couldn't in good conscience recommend this to anyone, but guiltily admit that I do- gulp- enjoy it in a twisted way.