Sequences of pictures used to tell a story
This article is about the narrative genre. For the Christian evangelistic book, see
Wordless Book
.
The
wordless novel
is a narrative genre that uses sequences of captionless pictures to tell a story. As artists have often made such books using
woodcut
and other
relief printing
techniques, the terms
woodcut novel
or
novel in woodcuts
are also used. The genre flourished primarily in the 1920s and 1930s and was most popular in Germany.
The wordless novel has its origin in the
German Expressionist
movement of the early 20th century. The typically
socialist
work drew inspiration from medieval woodcuts and used the awkward look of that medium to express
angst
and frustration at
social injustice
. The first such book was the Belgian
Frans Masereel
's
25 Images of a Man's Passion
, published in 1918. The German
Otto Nuckel
and other artists followed Masereel's example.
Lynd Ward
brought the genre to the United States in 1929 when he produced
Gods' Man
, which inspired other American wordless novels and a parody in 1930 by cartoonist
Milt Gross
with
He Done Her Wrong
. Following an early-1930s peak in production and popularity, the genre waned in the face of competition from
sound films
and anti-socialist
censorship in Nazi Germany
and the US.
Following World War II, new examples of wordless novels became increasingly rare, and early works went out of print. Interest began to revive in the 1960s when the American comics
fandom
subculture came to see wordless novels as prototypical book-length comics. In the 1970s, the example of the wordless novel inspired cartoonists such as
Will Eisner
and
Art Spiegelman
to create book-length non-genre comics?"
graphic novels
". Cartoonists such as
Eric Drooker
and
Peter Kuper
took direct inspiration from wordless novels to create wordless graphic novels.
Characteristics
[
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]
Wordless novels use sequences of expressive images to tell a story.
Socialist
themes of struggle against
capitalism
are common; scholar Perry Willett calls these themes "a unifying element of the genre's aesthetic".
In both formal and moral aspects, they draw from
Expressionist
graphics,
theatre
, and
film
.
Wordless novelists such as
Frans Masereel
appropriated the awkward aesthetic of mediaeval woodcuts to express their anguish and revolutionary political ideas
and used simple, traditional iconography. Text is restricted to title and chapter pages, except where text is a part of the scene, such as in signs.
The storytelling tends to be melodramatic,
and the stories tend to focus on struggles against social oppression in which characters are silenced by economic, political, and other social forces. The characters are clearly delineated as good or evil?the good drawn sympathetically and the evil with the contempt of the artist's moral indignation.
Most wordless novelists were not prolific; few besides Masereel and
Lynd Ward
produced more than a single book.
The books were designed to be mass-produced for a popular audience, in contrast to similar but shorter portfolios by artists such as
Otto Dix
,
George Grosz
, and
Kathe Kollwitz
, which were produced in limited editions for collectors. These portfolios of typically from eight to ten prints also were meant to be viewed in sequence. Wordless novels were longer, had more complex narratives, and were printed in sizes and dimensions comparable to those of novels.
A large influence was the most popular silent visual medium of the time:
silent films
. Panning, zooming, slapstick, and other filmic techniques are found in the books; Ward said that in creating a wordless novel, he first had to visualize it in his head as a silent film.
Typically, wordless novels used
relief printing
techniques such as
woodcuts
,
wood engraving
,
metalcuts
, or
linocuts
. One of the oldest printing techniques, relief printing has its origins in 8th-century China and was introduced to Europe in the 15th century. It requires an artist to draw or transfer an image to a printing block; the areas not to be printed (the white areas) are cut away, leaving raised areas to which ink is applied to make prints.
The monochrome prints were usually in black ink, and occasionally in a different colour such as
sienna
or orange.
Relief printing is an inexpensive but labour-intensive printing technique; it was accessible to socially conscious artists who wanted to tell wordless stories of the working classes.
History
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]
In 15th-century
medieval Europe, woodcut
block books
were printed as religious guides; particularly popular was the
Ars moriendi
. The early 16th century saw block books disappear in favour of books printed with the
movable type
of
Gutenberg
's presses.
Woodcut printing persisted into the 16th century under artists such as
Durer
,
Holbein
, and
Amman
,
after which engraving techniques superseded woodcuts. Pioneered by
Thomas Bewick
, wood engraving enjoyed popularity beginning in the 18th century, until the method gave way by the 19th century to more advanced printing methods such as
lithography
.
Post-impressionist
artist
Paul Gauguin
revived woodcut printing in the late-19th century, favouring it for its
primitivist
effect.
Early in the 20th century, woodcut artists such as Kathe Kollwitz (1867?1945) and
Max Klinger
(1857?1920) published portfolios of woodcuts, thematically linked by themes of social injustice.
Expressionist graphic artists such as
Max Beckmann
(1884?1950), Otto Dix (1891?1969), Kollwitz, and
Karl Schmidt-Rottluff
(1884?1976) were inspired by an early-20th-century revival of interest in medieval graphic arts?in particular Biblical woodcut prints such as the
Biblia pauperum
. These artists used the awkward look of woodcut images to express feelings of anguish.
In Europe
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The wordless novel grew out of the Expressionist movement.
The Belgian Frans Masereel (1889?1972) created the earliest example,
25 Images of a Man's Passion
,
[a]
in 1918.
It was a commercial success
and was followed by
Passionate Journey
,
[b]
which at 167 images was Masereel's longest book. It was also the most commercially successful,
particularly in Germany, where copies of his books sold in the hundreds of thousands throughout the 1920s and had introductions by writers such as
Max Brod
,
Hermann Hesse
, and
Thomas Mann
. Masereel's books drew strongly on Expressionist theatre and film
in their exaggerated but representational artwork with strong contrasts of black and white.
Masereel's commercial success led other artists to try their hands at the genre;
themes of oppression under capitalism were prominent, a pattern set early by Masereel.
At age thirteen, Polish-French artist
Balthus
drew a wordless story about his cat; it was published in 1921 with an introduction by poet
Rainer Maria Rilke
.
In
Destiny
(1926),
[c]
Otto Nuckel
(1888?1955) produced a work with greater nuance and atmosphere than Masereel's bombastic works;
where Masereel told tales of Man's struggle against Society, Nuckel told of the life of an individual woman.
Destiny
appeared in a US edition in 1930
and sold well there.
Clement Moreau
(1903?1988) first tried his hand at the genre with the six-plate
Youth Without Means
[d]
in 1928.
Istvan Szegedi-Szuts
(1892?1959), a Hungarian immigrant to England, made a wordless book in brush and ink called
My War
(1931). In simple artwork reminiscent of
Japanese brush painting
, Szegedi-Szuts told of a Hungarian cavalryman disillusioned by his World War I experiences.
Helena Bocho?akova-Dittrichova
(1894?1980) was the first woman to produce a wordless novel,
Childhood
(1931),
which presented middle-class life, rather than the working-class struggle found in the works of Masereel or Nuckel.
Bocho?akova described her books as "cycles" rather than novels.
Surrealist
artist
Max Ernst
made the silent collage novel
Une semaine de bonte
in 1934.
Following World War II,
Werner Gothein
[
de
]
(1890?1968), a member of the German Expressionist group
Die Brucke
, produced
The Tightrope Walker and the Clown
[e]
(1949).
In North America
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]
In 1926, the American Lynd Ward (1905?1985) moved to Leipzig to study graphic arts; while there, he discovered the works of Masereel and Otto Nuckel.
He produced six such works of his own;
he preferred to call them "pictorial narratives".
The first,
Gods' Man
(1929), was his most popular.
Ward used wood engraving rather than woodcutting
and varied image sizes from page to page.
Gods' Man
sold 20,000 copies, and other American artists followed up on this success with their own wordless novels in the 1930s.
Cartoonist
Milt Gross
's
He Done Her Wrong
(1930) was a parody of the genre; the book uses varying panel designs akin to those of comics: the action sometimes takes place outside the panel borders
and "dialogue balloons" show in images what the characters are saying.
Cartoonist and illustrator
William Gropper
's
Alay-oop
(1930) tells of three entertainers' disappointed dreams.
In
Abraham Lincoln: Biography in Woodcuts
(1933)
Charles Turzak
documented
the American president
.
Animator
Myron Waldman
(1908?2006) wrote a wordless tale of a plump young woman looking for a glamorous husband. The book,
Eve
(1943), also uses "picture balloons" as
He Done Her Wrong
does.
Inspired by mediaeval religious block books and working in an
Art Deco
style, American illustrator James Reid (1907?1989) produced one wordless novel,
The Life of Christ
(1930);
due to the book's religious content, the
Soviet Union
barred its importation under its
policies on religion
.
In 1938, Italian-American
Giacomo Patri
(1898?1978) produced his only wordless novel, the linocut
White Collar
. It chronicles the aftermath of the 1929 stock market crash and was intended to motivate
white-collar workers
to unionize.
It also deals with controversial topics such as abortion, accessibility of health care for the poor, and loss of Christian faith.
From 1948 to 1951, Canadian
Laurence Hyde
(1914?1987) produced his single wordless novel, the woodcut
Southern Cross
, in response to the American
atomic tests in the Bikini Atoll
.
The work tells of an American evacuation of an island for nuclear tests, where one family is left behind.
Polish-American
Si Lewen
's (1918? ) first book,
The Parade: A Story in 55 Drawings
(1957), won praise from
Albert Einstein
for its anti-war message.
Canadian George Kuthan's
Aphrodite's Cup
(1964) is an erotic book drawn in an ancient Greek style.
In the early 21st century, Canadian
George Walker
made wordless woodcut novels, beginning with
Book of Hours
(2010), about the lives of those in the
World Trade Center
complex just before the
September 11 attacks
.
Decline
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The popularity of wordless novels peaked around 1929 to 1931, when "
talkies
" were introduced and began to supersede silent films.
In the 1930s the Nazis in Germany suppressed and detained many printmakers and banned Masereel's works
as "
degenerate art
".
Following World War II, US censors suppressed books with socialist views, including the works of Lynd Ward, on whom the
FBI
kept files over his socialist sympathies; this censorship has made early editions of wordless novels scarce collectors' items in the US.
By the 1940s, most artists had given up on the genre. The most devoted practitioners, Masereel and Ward, moved on to other work for which they became better known; Masereel's obituary did not even mention his wordless novels.
Many wordless novels remained out of print until the rise of the graphic novel revived interest amongst readers and publishers in the early 21st century.
Relation to comics and graphic novels
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"... Ward's roots were not in comics, though his work is part of the same large family tree ..."
There have been sporadic examples of textless comics (see
Pantomime comics
) throughout the medium's history. In the US, there were comic strips such as
Otto Soglow
's
The Little King
, begun in 1931, and
Carl Anderson
's
Henry
, begun in 1932.
German cartoonist
E. O. Plauen
's wordless domestic comic strip
Father and Son
[f]
(1934?37) was popular in Germany, and was collected in three volumes.
Antonio Prohias
's textless
Mad
magazine feature
Spy vs. Spy
began in 1961.
Cartoonist
Will Eisner
(1917?2005) first came upon the work of Lynd Ward in 1938. Eisner was an early pioneer in the
American comic book
industry and saw in Ward's work a greater potential for comics. Eisner's ambitions were rebuffed by his peers, who saw comics as no more than low-status entertainment. Eisner withdrew from the commercial comics industry in the early 1950s to do government and educational work. He returned in the 1970s when the atmosphere had changed and his readers and peers seemed more receptive to his ambitions. In 1978, he began a career of creating book-length comics, the first of which was
A Contract with God
; the book was marketed as a "graphic novel", a term that became standard towards the end of the 20th century.
Eisner called Ward "perhaps the most provocative graphic storyteller"
of the 20th century. He wrote that Ward's
Vertigo
(1937) required considerable investment from readers in order to fill in the story between images.
Interest in the wordless novel revived with the rise of the graphic novel.
Comics fans discussed the works of Masereel and others in fanzines, and the discussions turned to talk of the
Great American Novel
being made in comics. These discussions inspired cartoonist
Art Spiegelman
(b. 1948),
who in 1973 made a four-page strip, "Prisoner on the Hell Planet", in an Expressionist style inspired by Ward's work. Spiegelman later incorporated the strip into his graphic novel
Maus
(1992).
While graphic novels generally use captions and dialogue,
cartoonists such as
Eric Drooker
,
Peter Kuper
,
Thomas Ott
,
Brian Ralph
,
Masashi Tanaka
,
Lewis Trondheim
, and Billy Simms have made wordless graphic novels.
As Gross did in
He Done Her Wrong
,
Hendrik Dorgathen
[
de
]
's wordless
oeuvre
uses textless
word balloons
containing symbols, icons, and other images.
The influence of the wordless novel is prominent in Drooker's
Flood
(1992) and Kuper's
The System
(1997), both metaphorical stories that focus on social themes.
Since 2011, the
Pennsylvania State University Libraries
and the
Pennsylvania Center for the Book
have awarded the annual Lynd Ward Prize for Graphic Novel, a cash prize established by Ward's daughters to highlight their father's influence on the development of the graphic novel.
See also
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Notes
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- ^
French
:
25 images de la passion d'un homme
- ^
French:
Mon livre d'heures
; the book was translated into English as
My Book of Hours
(1919),
- ^
German
:
Schicksal
- ^
German:
Erwerbslose Jugend
- ^
German:
Die Seiltanzerin und ihr Clown
- ^
German:
Vater und Sohn
References
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Works cited
[
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]
Books
[
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- Berona, David A. (2001).
"Pictures Speak in Comics Without Words"
. In Varnum, Robin; Gibbons, Christina T. (eds.).
The Language of Comics: Word and Image
.
University Press of Mississippi
. pp. 19?39.
ISBN
978-1-60473-903-9
.
- ——— (2008).
Wordless Books: The Original Graphic Novels
.
Abrams Books
.
ISBN
978-0-8109-9469-0
.
- Chute, Hillary (2012).
"Graphic Narrative"
. In Bray, Joe; Gibbons, Alison; McHale, Brian (eds.).
The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature
.
Routledge
. pp. 407?419.
ISBN
978-0-415-57000-8
.
- Kaplan, Arie (2010).
From Krakow to Krypton: Jews and Comic Books
.
Jewish Publication Society
.
ISBN
978-0-8276-1043-9
.
- Rewald, Sabine (1984).
Balthus: Catalog of an Exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Feb. 29, 1984 to May 13, 1984
.
Metropolitan Museum of Art
.
ISBN
978-0-8109-0738-6
.
- Walker, George, ed. (2007).
Graphic Witness: Four Wordless Graphic Novels
. Firefly Books.
ISBN
978-1-55407-270-5
.
- Ward, Lynd
; Berona, David (2005). "Introduction".
Mad Man's Drum: A Novel in Woodcuts
.
Dover Publications
. pp. iii?vi.
ISBN
978-0-486-44500-7
.
- Willett, Perry (2005).
"The Cutting Edge of German Expressionism: The Woodcut Novel of Frans Masereel and Its Influences"
. In Donahue, Neil H. (ed.).
A Companion to the Literature of German Expressionism
.
Camden House Publishing
. pp. 111?134.
ISBN
978-1-57113-175-1
.
Magazines and journals
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Further reading
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External links
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]