"[Music] is a limited idiom, like an artificial language, only even less successful; for music at its highest, though clearly a symbolic form, is an unconsummated symbol. Articulation is its life, but not assertion; expressiveness, not expression. The actual function of meaning, which calls for permanent contents, is not fulfilled; for the assignment of one rather than another possible meaning to each form is never explicitly made."-- Susanne Langer, PHILOSOPHY IN A NEW KEY, p. 240.
However, wordless pictures are not nearly as bereft of "permanent contents" as wordless musical compositions. Though I've never agreed with comics-critics who privilege the art over the words in every respect, art by itself can convey particularized forms of expression, rather than just "expressiveness." However, I tend to think that pantomime comics with overt fantasy-content are more likely to avoid the representational simplicity that I've found in, say, the works of Anderson and Soglow.
In the 1990s Fantagraphics published four issues of FRANK, featuring the titular "generic anthropomorph," to use Woodring's term for him. Since there are no words in the stories, one can only know the main character's name from the cover, and the same is true for other regular cast-members, whose roles in the stories are fluid and vary from story to story: "Whim," a devil-like figure with a thin body and a crescent-moon face, the Manhog, a conflation of man and hog, Frank's faithful pet Pupshaw, who looks like a sofa-cushion with features, legs and a tail, and "the Jersey Chickens," various intelligent chickens. FRANK'S REAL PA was also published by Fantagraphics in a one-shot comic, after having first appeared in segments in THE MILLENNIUM WHOLE EARTH CATALOG.
Though the title suggests that the titular character may at some time go looking for his "real pa," Frank doesn't show much interest in such parent-quests in the early pages of the story. Frank's first seen looking at various sights in what turns out to be an enclosed city. As he looks through a particular window, he sees a well lined with eye-motifs (or maybe real eyes). Frank experiences a vivid dream in which he imagines himself falling into the well and being transformed into a weird geometrical shape. He awakes from the dream and leaves the city, whereupon he encounters one of the Jersey Chickens selling a rug that looks like the eye-well. Frank buys the rug and takes it home.
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At home Frank's greeted by Pupshaw, but the pet doesn't like the rug and tries to throw it out. Frank retrieves the rug, but he's so fascinated by the eye-motifs that he falls asleep on it rather than sleeping in his bed. He dreams of walking around with his father-- who looks largely like Frank, but walks around on all fours like Pupshaw. He sees another well and experiences more bizarre things in his dream. Pupshaw sees his master suffering amid nightmares and destroys the rug.
However, horrific dreams notwithstanding, Frank is well and truly hooked on, well, the well. He wanders into the wilderness, and happens upon yet another real well in a cave-dwelling. This well is tended by another of Woodring's regulars, Lucky, a fellow with an absurdly elongated face. Frank can''t reach this well any more than he could get to the first one, but he sees Lucky take some water out of the well. The reader-- though not Frank, who gets left behind-- watches as Lucky takes a long, water-filled jar through his caves, invites the crescent-faced Whim to jump into the jar, and then ties the Manhog so that he'll drag the jar outside the cave. Once outside, the pig-man gets loose of his traces and leaves the jar behind. Frank claims it. However, a giant spectre pours out of the jar and resolves itself into Whim.
Whim takes Frank into the caverns but shuts him up in a room that has a few random objects in it: a pistol, a bicycle, and a ladder leading down into a hole in the floor. Lucky brings in the disobedient Mamhog and sticks him in the room with Frank. For no reason I could see, the pig-man threatens to shoot Frank, who takes the gun away. He dumps the gun into the hole and then climbs down the ladder.
In an otherwise dark chamber below, Frank meets two identical versions of his father. He apparently feels he has to choose between them, and does so, though Woodring gives no input as to whether Frank has made the correct choice or not.
Finally, accompanied by his maybe-real pa, Frank finally comes across the eye-well, and jumps into its waters. He almost drowns, but faithful Pupshaw has tracked his mater to the cave and rescues him. Frank has been weirdly transformed even as he was in the dream, so Pupshaw manages to pester Whim into reversing the transformation. The maybe-real pa escorts Frank and his pet to the exit, but stays behind while Frank and Pupshaw implicitly go home.
So what does it all mean? Normal textual analysis is obviously impossible, but if I were to reduce the symbolic complexity FRANK'S REAL PA to a Levi-Straussian binary, I'd probably say that Frank is an "ordinary guy" who becomes so captivated by the allure of an extra-ordinary experience that he risks his life to obtain it. It's interesting that Woodring joins Frank's obsessive quest for a horrific experience with the more universally accepted motif of "the quest for the lost father." Given that the reader never knows whether or not Frank's made the right choice re: the two fathers, FRANK'S REAL PA qualifies for the Fryean mode of the irony, in which the reader never knows as to the certainty of the characters' experiences.
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