For three years, without even knowing it, I lived a few blocks from Jim Woodring. Both of our homes sat on the border of Seattle’s old-growth Ravenna Park, a wooded gorge that has now been immortalized in comic history by Charles Burns’s graphic novel Black Hole. During that period, I spent a lot of time wandering through the park and, coincidentally, discovering Woodring’s surreal comic narratives, which could easily be interpreted as guides for the wandering mind.

His Frank books follow the eponymous main character, a “generic anthropomorph” (not quite a cat, a mouse, or any other kind of animal), as he explores a world that is vaguely similar to early surrealist paintings and Disney cartoons. Since 1980, when Woodring self-published his “illustrated auto-journal,” JIM, he has developed the “Uni-factor” (as he calls it) or “Frank-verse” (as his fans call it) into a fully realized dreamworld that seems to stretch far beyond the page. In the introduction to The Frank Book, Francis Ford Coppola describes this world as “wordless, timeless, placeless.” The cast of characters who inhabit it have also grown, and include Pupshaw (Frank’s pet), Man-hog (a snarling, naked fat man), a vast array of frogs, and all sorts of unnameable phantasmagoric bystanders, each of which serves its own tiny purpose in Woodring’s expansive, ineffable vision.

Woodring’s artwork has never fit into common categories of comics, fine art, or graphic novels. His narratives are slow and silent, with the arc of a calm spiritual quest or an introspective acid trip. Despite the utterly abstract nature of his stories, they seem to follow a consistent visual logic and somehow evoke the menial actions of our everyday lives. In addition to his Frank and Jim books, all released by Fantagraphics, he has collaborated with the jazz guitarist Bill Frisell to make musically inspired images and multimedia performances that have been presented at Carnegie Hall, among other places. He seems to be in a constant state of creating toys, drawings, and paintings, all of which he sells at galleries and on his website, sometimes to private collectors. Recently, he learned to read and write a little Sanskrit.

This interview was conducted in Jim’s home in the summer of ’08. He looked bearded, wild-eyed—a self-described “bear of man.” When I arrived, he was in the middle of the Antonio Gaudí documentary by Hiroshi Teshigahara, an unhurried tour of Gaudí’s otherworldly architecture, released by the Criterion Collection. While we talked, Woodring let it play with the sound off. Sometimes...