Customer Reviews

Pim & Francie: "The Golden Bear Days"

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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!

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.

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.

Al Columbia has broke new ground in comics. This book is an honest look into the thought process of stories, ideas and moments in a very fantastic nightmare world beyond the imaginations of most. This book demands the attention of readers who want more from comic-land, this is something very fresh and new. Pim and Francie is just as groundbreaking as H.P. Lovecraft's Outsider and others was in literature in 1939. It wouldn't be fair to say this is the darkest and most imaginative book ever published in the comics industry, but I think it's safe to mention that Al Columbia has taken ten steps ahead of the genre and has never looked back.

Pim & Francie is the kind of unique artistic work that draws me to indie and small press sequential art. While it contains no story in a conventional sense, Pim & Francie weaves a peculiar narrative through story fragments and consistent main characters. If the experience is enough for you, you will enjoy the book. If a conventional structure, with a true beginning middle and end is more to your liking, then you may find this less interesting.

I've been a fan of Al Columbia's work for a long time. From the entire game of telephone involving "Big Numbers" down to his contributions in "Blab!" and "Mome".
The Pim and Francie book seemed to be in the works for years. When a release date was finally confirmed, I took it with a grain of salt. Thinking to myself it would either get pushed back again, or canceled entirely. So I was pleasantly surprised to see this book get released a tad earlier than expected.
First and foremost, the artwork is amazing. But at the same time, that's all this book is. Random scraps of artwork, it may as well could have been called The Al Columbia Sketchbook (Pim and Francie Edition).
Ive seen some of these pages before, either from Columbia's own website, or redrawn just a tad differently in the pages of "Swallow". Which makes wonder if he was asked to do an entire series of Pim and Francie books, but he was never satisfied with the outcome, causing him to redraw the same pages over and over again. That seems apparent in this book, as some of the pages seemed to be scanned from torn up illustration boards which were re-taped back together. Seeing that alone adds to his near legendary trait of being a perfectionist. Making me think there's a stack of other proposed, then self rejected projects that will never see the light of day.
Again, I will stress the artwork is amazing. And considering how infrequent his output is, Id recommend getting it. But don't expect any cohesive storyline with a beginning middle and end. If there was to be any sort of Pim and Francie series, this is probably as close as we're ever going to get to seeing it.

If you like Al Columbia's dark artwork and want a piece of his work to put on your shelf, by all means pick it up. but other than that, this book doesn't have any story line at all. it jumps around between little adventures, but unlike the Biologic show which actually carries a plot beginning to end, this is just a compilation of incomplete work.