Southern Cross (wordless novel)

The high-contrast artwork of Southern Cross features dynamic curving lines uncommon in wood engraving and combines abstract imagery with realistic detail.

The only work he knew of the Flemish artist Frans Masereel, the form's first and most prolific practitioner, was Passionate Journey (1919), which he had read in a 1949 American edition.

[8] When Southern Cross appeared, the genre had been out of the public eye for so long that Hyde included a historical essay to orient the reader.

[10]Hyde made Southern Cross to express his anger at American nuclear tests in the Bikini Atoll in 1946 following the atomic bombings in Japan.

[6] Southern Cross was published in a limited edition by Ward Ritchie Press in 1951[11] on Japanese paper[14] with the images on the recto and the verso left blank.

[4] The book was republished twice in 2007: Drawn & Quarterly released a deluxe facsimile edition with additional essays by Hyde and an introduction by wordless novel historian David Beronä,[15] and George Walker included Southern Cross in his anthology of wordless novels Graphic Witness.

[13] Man ... can tie himself up in words to the point of persuading himself that dropping atom bombs on people he's never seen is a kind of shrewd move in an exciting chess game.

[17]In a talk with the CBC in 1952, literary critic Northrop Frye praised Hyde's visual skills, but said, "There's no point in getting the book for your library unless you like the engravings themselves as separate works of art.

Rogers found the anti-nuclear message less effective than that of later comics such as Keiji Nakazawa's Barefoot Gen or Gary Panter's Jimbo.

[18] Reviewer Erik Hinton praised the artwork while calling the story "the progeny of historical lip-service and the hot-button anxiety of the destructivity of modern warfare", and considered Ward and others of Hyde's predecessors more proficient at the medium.