Quacky

Woodring (One Beautiful Spring Day) returns to the hallucinatory cosmos of his long-running Frank stories in a retro format modelled after Big Little Books of the 1930s, with meticulously rendered illustrations appearing on right-hand pages, opposite pages of prose narration. Set within the Unifactor—the seemingly conscious, surreal ecosystem Frank inhabits—the story begins with an old acquaintance offering Frank an unexpected gift in the form of a puppy that grows and transforms into a vast temple evoking “a faint mood of convoluted alien spirituality.” The addition of prose to Woodring’s typically wordless Frank stories grants his wide-eyed protagonist a more explicit interior life; by naming rather than enacting Frank’s impressions of his friends and neighbors and his reactions to the world around him, Woodring offers a new angle on characters and themes that have animated his work for decades. A backup story, “Hoggy Goes Hogwild,” featuring anthropomorphic pigs in a deceptively wholesome setting, inevitably veers into disturbing territory, further complicating the book’s nostalgic format by echoing the grimmer implications that have always lurked beneath Woodring’s clean lines.