PIM & FRANCIE by Al Columbia (Fantagraphics 2009)

This is all relatively new material, but it reads like the kind of deluxe archival production Fantagraphics specializes in, collecting fragments of a Golden Age comic strip that never was. As the cover suggests, the fragments appear in various stages of completion (see the unfinished background), preservation/repair (see the yellowed, crusty tape around the edges), and destruction/decay (see the stain in the upper-right corner).

What the cover doesn't quite suggest is that the strip is like something one of the masters of the form might have labored to create under the control of a sociopathically demented alter-ego. In an interview for Comics Comics, Columbia has this exchange with Nicole Rudick:

[AC:] My dad, for some reason, didn’t have the sense that a child shouldn’t see horror movies. He took me to see a lot of horror movies when I was a kid, or I’d get to see them on TV or HBO. He didn’t seem to have that filter: “Oh yeah, maybe he shouldn’t watch that. It could be disturbing.” So I was exposed to a lot of very disturbing images at a young age, which later in life came back in a strange way to haunt me, which I would never have expected.

[NR:] In what way did they haunt you?

[AC:] Intrusive thoughts of a violent nature haunted me, made me pretty sick, actually, for a few years. I couldn’t get them out of my head.

[NR:] Images from those films?

[AC:] I believe they had to have been, or the movies had to have influenced something. They were unwanted images. They weren’t fantasies but constant terrifyingly violent images or ideas piercing into my everyday life.

Reader be warned--Pim & Francie seems designed to replicate that dynamic. Once you've read it, you can't unread it. Honestly, as I closed the book upon finishing it, I almost regretted having exposed myself to it, and I've since experienced some intrusive thoughts of unwanted imagery from its pages. The content of the images is upsetting enough, but Columbia employs a whole battery of formal techniques that sear them in the brain like a woodburning tool.

So many of those techniques derive in some way from the fragmentary and unfinished nature of the comics, it's tempting to wonder, as Dan Nadel did in a roundtable discussion, whether "the book looks the way it does intentionally," and the unfinished parts should be construed, "[not] as 'sketches' but rather as full blown drawings." One commenter at Robot 6 felt confident enough on this point to insult reviewer Chris Mautner for suggesting otherwise: "Who ever wrote this review is an idiot. These are not unfinished works." Actually, yes they are. There's no more need to speculate, as Columbia has addressed this aspect of the work in interviews. When asked by Brian Heater for Daily Crosshatch if the comics were meant to be incomplete from their original conception, he replies:

No, no. at the time, all of those pieces were meant to be completed. I really wanted to make a comic book out of each and every one of those. I just didn’t have the patience to stick to one thing. I suppose I’d get really excited about another idea. I was just rapidly going through a lot of ideas, instead of just sticking to one. It bugged me out, too. I really wanted to put out a comic. But after a while, I just really stopped caring. I stopped caring about publishing any of it. it didn’t matter. But most of the efforts were intended to be comics.

I think it contributes greatly to the power of these comics that Columbia meant to finish them. They read as if they're stillborn because they really, truly are. The ghost of their animating spirit lingers, in a way that it wouldn't if they'd never been "alive" and growing in the first place. To put the same point in less metaphorical terms, with a work of art this original and complex, it's almost impossible to contrive, through deliberate craft, all the fine-grained marks left by the unpredictable interplay of conscious and nonconscious factors (both internal and external) that shapes the early creative process and, just as importantly, its interruption. This organic effect would be especially difficult to counterfeit convincingly at the level of intensity we find in Pim & Francie.

Ultimately, of course, Columbia did decide to publish the comics unfinished:

A friend of mine basically convinced me that these pieces would look really neat appearing the way that they did. He’s a really good friend and he’s a really great artist and he convinced me that the pieces would look good like that. he said, “I know you want to finish that, but you should just go this way with it.” I got into it, and I really loved it.

If Pim & Francie benefits from Columbia's original intention to finish the comics, we might well ask what it gains from his failure to do so.

Sometimes narrative originates with the idea for a story. Sometimes, though, it forms around a potent scene or image that's bubbled up from the imagination. Ideally, in the latter case, a creator is able to weave the scene or image into a larger fabric that supports and even intensifies it--through immersive setting, engaging characters, and effective storytelling. Sometimes the opposite occurs, and the surrounding narrative serves, however inadvertently, rather as a magic circle drawn around these images and scenes to contain their power and pacify the reactions they might otherwise provoke (interestingly in this regard, Freud describes the imposition of narrative onto dream imagery as a censoring function of the superego, in a process he calls "secondary elaboration"). Most commonly, I think, the surrounding narrative serves as a relatively dull, adequate frame for the hot, vibrant image, resulting in the typically uneven aesthetic experience discussed by Ian Johnston:

The Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins coined the term Parnassian to describe a writer's normal uninspired style in order to distinguish that from the moments when the style becomes transformed by an imaginative power and excitement. . . .

Hopkins's distinction is a useful analytical method of dealing with all writers of longer works, many (perhaps most) of which consist of a mixture of Parnassian writing and moments of inspiration. A Parnassian style is shaped by the writer's conscious use of his or her skill and may set a high level or may be quite laboured. A writer like, say, Melville in Moby Dick or Wordsworth in the Prelude writes consciously in a style which is often very pedestrian, even confused and awkward much of the time (a characteristic which makes them very easy to parody). We put up with this uninspired stuff in order to find within it the extraordinary moments when the imagination of the writer suddenly takes wing (as in the birth of the whales or the journey over the Alps). Other writers (like, say, Alexander Pope and Jane Austen) set a normal Parnassian style which is highly skilful and interesting (and much more difficult to parody). Few writers of long works, however, can establish and maintain a full sense of intense imaginative excitement from start to finish (Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights or Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano might be examples of exceptions to this observation).

From what Columbia says in interviews (see one of the quotes above) and the comics themselves, it would seem that as soon as his "full sense of intense imaginative excitement" for one comic flamed out, he started on another for his next fix. That yielded lots of inspired fragments with no Parnassian accretions.

Well, "lots of inspired fragments" don't amount to much, at least not so long as they remain fragmentary. What makes Pim & Francie extraordinary is that Columbia figured out a way to organize these fragments into something greater than their sum, that didn't require any Parnassian connective tissue. So far from submitting a haphazard sheaf of everything he had, he tells Rudick:

It took me about five months to sequence the pages, initially just so they’d have some kind of cool flow. I wasn’t trying to make any narrative. I just tried to have the bits flow into one another—the fragments and vignettes—so that if you to read it from page 1 to the end, it would have some kind of neat flow. It was a lot of heavy lifting, a lot of editing and arranging. A lot of material didn’t end up in it, but this seemed to make the best book without being ridiculously over long or too short.

I'm convinced Pim & Francie could have been nothing more than a handsome, intermittently haunting sketchbook or miscellany, but that Columbia's meticulous selection, editing, and arrangement gives it the visceral thrust that prompts Tom Spurgeon to confess, "I know for certain that it upsets me in far bigger ways than I care to admit," and that leads Sean T. Collins to observe:

It's comic book as Samara's video from The Ring, Lemarchand's box from Hellraiser, Abdul Alhazred's Necronomicon from Lovecraft, the titular toy from Stephen King's "The Monkey"--an inherently horrific object.

To call it "comic book as nightmare" would certainly sound too glib by half and too cliche by whole orders of magnitude, and yet nothing else provides so apt a model for the kind of experience Columbia has crafted here.

Matthew Brady (Warren Peace) complains that, "the title page doesn't show up until 24 pages into the book," but there's nothing arbitrary about that placement. The whole sequence preceding the title page is a kind of Prologue that teaches us how to read the rest of it. This Prologue is such a tour de force that I'm tempted to reproduce the whole thing here, but I think I can make the points I need to with a smaller sample.

Early on, we get a lot of sketches of a very weird scene in a field. Objectively, it looks like Columbia was playing around, trying to decide how various elements should appear. The order in which he presents them, though, produces a marvelous subjective effect. He never just draws an element in isolation, but always roughs in the others, establishing relationships and distances, etc. As we encounter first one element and then another, the finished and unfinished portions take on the aspect of in-focus and out-of-focus. Our attention seems to be sliding from one and settling on another:


The different versions of an element that naturally result from the sketching process of fiddling around and trying out variations on this or that detail, when presented in succession, lend the scene a dreamlike instability and mercurial quality. Things seem to change when we're not looking, or when we look at them more closely. What makes this so nightmarish is that they're presented in order of least to most disturbing. The more we focus on something, the more horrible it reveals itself to be:


These lesser transformations build toward more significant transitions that take place around the Prologue's midpoint, most crucially in this spread of pages:

The dreamlike fluidity established by the preceding pages creates a context in which these images not only "rhyme" (the similar postures, the similar suggestion of graceful motion, the similar handling of objects, and the mirroring), but in which one figure gives way to the other in a manner uncannily approaching metamorphosis. Turn the page . . .

. . . and we pull back to find the setting, too, has shifted on us.

To accept this transition, which would border on non sequitur in any other context, is basically, on some level, to commit to experiencing everything that follows as a single unfolding vision, "from page 1 to the end," as Columbia says above.

It's a commitment he amply rewards and reinforces, mainly through the rhythms of various recurring motifs, each iteration of which helps to suture together everything between.

Thus, the umbilical cords that seem almost ornamental in the earliest panels get progressively uglier in that episode. A particularly revolting example kicks off the first panel after the title page:

Free-associatively, it recurs as rope:

Which, par for course, accumulates more sinister and macabre significance every subsequent time we see it:




And that's just one example (not the most visually striking, and certainly not the most troubling, but I want to leave some "joy" of discovery for anyone who hasn't read this yet).

The recurrence of motifs and the unusual transitions that hold them together draw us so deeply into a dreamlike mode that I think they put a weirdly subjective complexion on the rips, tape, erasures, and other signs of material distress to the original pages. To me, these latter seemed to represent the synaptic static that must snap, crackle, and pop through the fevered kind of brain that would generate such imagery in the first place.

In short, Pim & Francie is a monumental achievement. Columbia's brilliance is on full display--not least in the astounding formal use he makes of signs of his own failure that surely would have discouraged a lesser artist--to some of the most truly dreadful effect I've ever experienced. Of course, I haven't said anywhere near all there is to be said about it. I haven't even said a word about the characters of Pim and Francie! Somehow, I've neglected to link to Tim Kreider's superlative review for TCJ, which covers much of what my discussion lacks.

As for whether I'd recommend it . . . ? You're on your own. As a final word of warning, I'll say reading it is like the mental/emotional equivalent of this: