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 creature 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.
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![Pim & Francie: The Golden Bear Days: "The Golden Bear Days" by [Al Columbia]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51Z5yA4XBXL._SX260_.jpg)
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Funneling Gottfredson-style, seminal black-and-white Disney illustration into an uncanny deconstructionist woodchipper, Pim & Francie's nonlinear glimpses into a grotesque cartoon infraverse is the reading equivalent of stumbling onto a pile of grimy film negatives in a darkened alleyway, holding up a few unspliced pieces to the dim light, and finding scenes of an unfinished silent-era cartoon about two psychotic cherubim and their misadventures in a darksome, upside-down comix nightmare. Junji Ito looks like Bill Watterson when Columbia picks up the brush.With each lurch of the film reel, the world(s) are remade; Pim and Francie's behavior & relationship inverts; events are undone and rewritten with fresh atrocities. I found I could not read its sporadic dialogue without my imagination superimposing the hissing and popping of an old film reel over its characters' distorted voices.The meta-narrative techniques of severed panels, incomplete pages, scrawled margin notes, snatches of "capsule" stories written in crabbed & barely-visible handwriting, the skeletal pencil scaffolding underlying partially-inked pages, interludes of beautiful, realistically-rendered paintings depicting a desolate counter-reality, abrupt shifts in time & locale, monstrous one-off characters and scenarios alluding to still darker possibilities -- all conspire to imbue one's reading with the vertiginous sense of gazing over the brink and into some backward twilight world one was never meant to see.In this Ub-Iwerks-cum-David-Lynch fever dream broods an atmosphere wholly unique in my experience of the medium; Pim & Francie is bar none one of the most fiercely original comics I've ever read.
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Top reviews from the United States
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Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 24, 2019
Funneling Gottfredson-style, seminal black-and-white Disney illustration into an uncanny deconstructionist woodchipper, Pim & Francie's nonlinear glimpses into a grotesque cartoon infraverse is the reading equivalent of stumbling onto a pile of grimy film negatives in a darkened alleyway, holding up a few unspliced pieces to the dim light, and finding scenes of an unfinished silent-era cartoon about two psychotic cherubim and their misadventures in a darksome, upside-down comix nightmare. Junji Ito looks like Bill Watterson when Columbia picks up the brush.
With each lurch of the film reel, the world(s) are remade; Pim and Francie's behavior & relationship inverts; events are undone and rewritten with fresh atrocities. I found I could not read its sporadic dialogue without my imagination superimposing the hissing and popping of an old film reel over its characters' distorted voices.
The meta-narrative techniques of severed panels, incomplete pages, scrawled margin notes, snatches of "capsule" stories written in crabbed & barely-visible handwriting, the skeletal pencil scaffolding underlying partially-inked pages, interludes of beautiful, realistically-rendered paintings depicting a desolate counter-reality, abrupt shifts in time & locale, monstrous one-off characters and scenarios alluding to still darker possibilities -- all conspire to imbue one's reading with the vertiginous sense of gazing over the brink and into some backward twilight world one was never meant to see.
In this Ub-Iwerks-cum-David-Lynch fever dream broods an atmosphere wholly unique in my experience of the medium; Pim & Francie is bar none one of the most fiercely original comics I've ever read.
With each lurch of the film reel, the world(s) are remade; Pim and Francie's behavior & relationship inverts; events are undone and rewritten with fresh atrocities. I found I could not read its sporadic dialogue without my imagination superimposing the hissing and popping of an old film reel over its characters' distorted voices.
The meta-narrative techniques of severed panels, incomplete pages, scrawled margin notes, snatches of "capsule" stories written in crabbed & barely-visible handwriting, the skeletal pencil scaffolding underlying partially-inked pages, interludes of beautiful, realistically-rendered paintings depicting a desolate counter-reality, abrupt shifts in time & locale, monstrous one-off characters and scenarios alluding to still darker possibilities -- all conspire to imbue one's reading with the vertiginous sense of gazing over the brink and into some backward twilight world one was never meant to see.
In this Ub-Iwerks-cum-David-Lynch fever dream broods an atmosphere wholly unique in my experience of the medium; Pim & Francie is bar none one of the most fiercely original comics I've ever read.
Images in this review
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 31, 2022
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 22, 2022
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 1, 2022
A definite need for comic book collectors or anyone in love with having something creepy within arms reach
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 19, 2018Top reviews from other countries
mechadendrion
Either you get it or you don't.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on December 1, 2012
Ryuk
What Walt Disney's nightmares would look like.
Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on January 17, 2014Michael D'Amour
Al Columbia a un grain mais le bon. ;)
Reviewed in France 🇫🇷 on November 23, 2013
