This is a comprehensive collection of Columbia’s Pim & Francie work, including paintings, comics, character designs, and much more, all woven into something greater than the sum of its parts, with Pim & Francie careening from danger to danger, threaded together through text and notes by the artist.Īl is an old friend and contributor to Wow Cool. Never have such colorful, imaginative vistas instilled such an atmosphere of dread, and with such a wicked sense of humor. Columbia’s brilliant, fairytale-like backdrops hint at further layers of reality lurking under every gingerbread house or behind every sunny afternoon. Their loosely defined relationship only contributes to the existential fear that lingers underneath the various perils they are subjected to. Collecting over a decade’s worth of ‘artifacts,’ excavations, comic strips, animation stills, storybook covers, and much more, this broken jigsaw puzzle of a book tells the story of Pim & Francie, a pair of childlike, male and female imps whose irresponsible antics get them into horrific, fantastic trouble.

This gorgeous grimoire is part alchemy, part art book, part storybook, part comic book, and part conceptual art from the pen of Al Columbia, a longtime fan favorite contributor to comics anthologies like Zero Zero, Blab!, and more recently, Mome. A work over 15 years in the making, and never now likely to be ‘finished’, the pieces of it have been assembled as Pim & Francie: The Golden Bear Days (Fantagraphics Books, 2009). Octoin Funny Books, Music, Upcoming Blasts, Wow Cool 1Īs Orson Welles and Terry Gilliam have film adaptations of Don Quixote as their great incomplete masterworks Al Columbia has Pim And Francie.

Al columbia pim and francie