Review by New York Times Review
LONG before graphic novels earned a dedicated section in bookstores -indeed, before the terni "graphic novel" was even coined - the American wood engraver and illustrator Lynd Ward (1905-85) created six enduring examples of the form. Ward was one of only a handful of artists in the world who bucked literary convention by eliminating all words but the title from standard narrative works. His novels often contained more than 100 pages, with one image per righthand page. The pictures, influenced by German Expressionism, were dark and melodramatic, as though taken directly from an early film noir storyboard. Ward's thematically related sequences and cinematic pacing bridged the divide between mass comics and the more rarefied illustrated book. Now this groundbreaking work, originally published between 1929 and 1937, has been collected in "Six Novels in Woodcuts," the first graphic fiction from the Library of America. In his enlightening introduction to this hefty two-volume collection, the editor, Art Spiegelman, notes it was only a few decades ago that extended comics, published in book format with actual spines instead of staples, started being referred to as graphic novels. "The ungainly neologism seems to have stuck since Will Eisner, creator of the voraciously inventive 'Spirit' comic book of the 1940s, first used it on the cover of his 1978 collection of comics stories for adults, 'A Contract With God,'" Spiegelman writes. "It was a way to distance himself from the popular prejudices against the medium." Were it not for Spiegelman's own role in raising comics to a bona fide artistic and literary form, this Ward retrospective might not have been published. In large part owing to the continued success of Spiegelman's Pulitzer Prize-winning "Maus," about his parents' experiences at Auschwitz, graphic novels are now widely accepted. Perhaps calling them something other than comic books has made reading them less discomfiting for adults, as when Leonard Bernstein validated the Beatles by attesting to their classical underpinnings. Or perhaps comics simply came into their own, thanks to the earlier work of Ward and others. Spiegelman, who has long acknowledged his debt to these pioneers (and who introduced me to their work 30 years ago), uses this opportunity to celebrate Ward while expanding the definition of what constitutes a graphic novel. Totally wordless picture books for adults were published in the 1920s and '30s, most notably by the Belgian expressionist Frans Masereel (1889-1972) and the German engraver Otto Nückel (1888-1956). It was a time of social and political crisis in Europe. Working in the unforgiving woodcut and the slightly more fluid wood engraving mediums, theirs were complex pictorial stories of war and peace, love and hate, contentment and despair, even fame and anonymity, with leftist political undertones. Their stories examined the human comedy and were appropriately dark in texture and tone. Nücket produced only one, "Destiny: A Novel in Pictures," a wrenching narrative about a prostitute's life and death. Masereel did about 50 so-called image novels, including "The City" and "Passionate Journey," which, Spiegelman notes, had the ability to "communicate past national and linguistic barriers." (Both artists' books have been reprinted in various editions over the last 20 or so years. And the Masereel reprints are fairly easy to find in paperback editions.) These books had a huge impact on other popular printmakers and illustrators in the United States. The German-born wood engraver Fritz Eichenberg, among the most prolific illustrators of Russian and other classics, once told me that the absence of text demanded that the artist be extraordinarily skilled at "speaking" through graphic nuance. And Rockwell Kent, whose romantic and heroic woodcuts had an emblematic art moderne aesthetic typical of Depression-era American graphics, clearly drew inspiration from this form. Neither man, however, specialized in wordless books. In fact, the artist most directly influenced by Masereel and Nuckel - and ultimately the most prolific American graphic storyteller - was Ward, the son of a progressive Chicago minister who was the first chairman of the American Civil Liberties Union. Ward was enamored of Gustave Doré's Bible drawings, since (as Spiegelman notes) "his father forbade anything as profane as the Sunday funnies in their home." Without comics as a model, he developed a hybrid vocabulary for visual storytelling. Although his sharp-edged faces and bodies, as well as his use of dramatic lighting, bear a strong resemblance to Eichenberg's work, Ward's images were grittier than his counterparts' and invested with subtle nuances all his own. "Six Novels in Woodcuts" collects all of Ward's books, including his best known, the Faustian "Gods' Man," along with "Madman's Drum," "Wild Pilgrimage," "Prelude to a Million Years," "Song Without Words" and "Vertigo," a weighty look at injustice against the jobless workers in the Hooverville on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Although a few of Ward's books, including "Gods' Man" and "Wild Pilgrimage," have been republished as free-standing editions, and while a 1974 coffee-table book called "Storyteller Without Words" included all of his books as well as dozens of prints and drawings, this new edition places Ward's work firmly on the literary shelf where it belongs. Spiegelman further argues for Ward's role as a godfather of graphic novels - "It seems natural now to think of Lynd Ward as one of America's most distinguished and accomplished graphic novelists" - even though his inspirations were not comics, and the only comic he seems to have read was "Prince Valiant." IF Ward's work appears familiar to contemporary readers of comics and graphic novels, it's surely in part because his technique and style have been so influential. The artist Eric Drooker, for instance, whose current book is a graphic adaptation of Allen Ginsberg's "Howl," uses many of the same dramatic visual conceits and a similar linear quality. Spiegelman himself also looked to Ward as a role model: "When I was beginning to seriously explore the limits and possibilities of comics, I drew a four-page comics story about my mother's suicide called 'Prisoner on the Hell Planet,'" he writes in the introduction, "I was then 24 years old (the same age as Ward when he made 'Gods' Man') and the scratchboard drawings I did were very influenced by Ward's engravings." Yet Ward is not entirely contemporary: while most graphic novelists today depend on a combination of words and images to tell their stories, Ward let his pictures speak for themselves. This could be challenging for the audience. "Gods' Man" - 139 wood engravings about a destitute artist seeking fame and fortune, who accepts a magic brush from a mysterious stranger - almost demands that the reader insert imaginary dialogue between the pictures, even within each frame. Yet the brilliance of Ward's work is that it's not so hard to imagine what that dialogue would be. As in the best silent movies, the images really do carry the narrative. I was a young art director for the Op-Ed page of this newspaper when I first read "Gods' Man" and "Wild Pilgrimage." In addition to commissioning illustrations, I sometimes used existing artwork by the likes of Francisco de Goya, Thomas Nast, George Grosz and other strong black-and-white conceptualists. Ward joined their ranks. Every image he made had its own integrity. On at least three occasions I took an engraving from the books and paired it with an Op-Ed article - a perfect marriage of text and image. But this was heresy. Ward's images were designed to be seen in their original contexts, not forced to illuminate arguments that Ward never heard. For the experience of seeing all his wordless books as they were meant to be read, the Library of America set is essential. If graphic novels have come into their own, it's thanks in part to the groundbreaking work of Lynd Ward. "Gods' Man," the first of Lynd Ward's six novels in woodcuts, is a Faustian tale about a destitute artist and a magic brush. Steven Heller, the former art director of the Book Review, writes the Visuals column.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 10, 2010]
Review by Booklist Review
This two-volume boxed set collects the six woodcut novels, each composed of a single wordless image per page, that Ward created in the 1920s-30s, from the first, oddly apostrophied Gods' Man to the triumphantly bleak, dissertation-worthy Depression tale Vertigo. In his entertaining and perceptive introduction, Spiegelman attests that Ward is one of only a handful of artists anywhere who ever made a graphic novel' until the day before yesterday, and it is indeed likely that acolytes of comics and visual narrative will be the most rewarded by this collection. Ward's work is dense with the stark symbolism of an expressionist and predominantly concerned with the nature of art, on one hand, and the prevailing social and labor issues of the day, on the other; the miscues he makes in clapping these two hands together are often as revealing as his successes. Elegant, harsh, ambitious, flawed, and deeply fascinating if not for the themes Ward explored, then certainly for the painstaking channels he carved into a new medium.--Chipman, Ian Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Library Journal Review
A forefather of the modern graphic novel, American artist Ward (1905-85) created his first woodcut novel, Gods' Man, in 1929, inspired by an all-woodcut work by the Belgian engraver Frans Masereel. While Ward illustrated over 100 children's books and won the Caldecott Medal, his dramatic and lovely woodcut novels depict adult themes. For example, Gods' Man depicts an artist's struggle to remain true to his craft against the seductions of money and power. Library of America (LOA) publishes "authoritative editions of America's best and most significant writing," but here "writing" is to be understood metaphorically, since the Ward novels are wordless. Other editions of Ward's work are in print, but this set represents acceptance as classics by the nonprofit LOA and apparently embody the first graphic narratives in LOA's catalog. Let's hope more will follow! See sample art here.-Martha Cornog, "Graphic Novels Prepub Alert," BookSmack! 7/15/2010 (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
