Wordless novel

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.

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.

[3] Wordless novelists such as Frans Masereel appropriated the awkward aesthetic of mediaeval woodcuts to express their anguish and revolutionary political ideas[3] and used simple, traditional iconography.

[6] 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 Käthe Kollwitz, which were produced in limited editions for collectors.

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.

It was also the most commercially successful,[2] 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.

[1] 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.

[26] István Szegedi-Szüts (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-Szüts told of a Hungarian cavalryman disillusioned by his World War I experiences.

[28] Surrealist artist Max Ernst made the silent collage novel Une semaine de bonté in 1934.

[30] Following World War II, Werner Gothein [de] (1890–1968), a member of the German Expressionist group Die Brücke, produced The Tightrope Walker and the Clown[e] (1949).

[28] 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 Nückel.

[27] 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.

[40] 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.

[30] 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.

[30] 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.

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.

[49] As Gross did in He Done Her Wrong, Hendrik Dorgathen [de]'s wordless oeuvre uses textless word balloons containing symbols, icons, and other images.

[52] 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.

Four high-contrast black-and-white images in sequence. In the first, a man, facing left with his right arm aloft, marches with a crowd towards a group of gun-wielding figures. In the second, uniformed figures are taking the man away amongst a crowd. In the third, the man is seen from behind at the bottom, with a group seated behind a bench in the distance near the top in an apparent courtroom. A crucifix hangs prominently above the bench, bathed in light in the darkened room. In the fourth, the man has his back to a wall, hands bound behind him, with another figure lying apparently dead at his feet. He faces right, apparently awaiting his execution by gunfire.
Wordless novels flourished in Germany in the 1920s and typically were made using woodcut or similar techniques in an Expressionist style. ( Frans Masereel , 25 Images of a Man's Passion , 1918)
A black-and-white film still. Three figures stand facing each other on a heavily stylized street set.
Expressionist film and graphics inspired early wordless novels. ( The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari , 1920)
Photograph of an engraved piece of wood, on which is an image of a man kneeling.
Wordless novelists favoured relief printing such as in this wood engraving from Ward 's Prelude to a Million Years (1933).
A monochromatic woodcut print of a page from a mediaeval book depicting a bible scene.
Expressionist woodcut artists expressed angst using the look of medieval woodcuts such as this Biblia pauperum .
A black-and-white drawing of woman opening a window.
In He Done Her Wrong (1930), Milt Gross parodied Lynd Ward 's Gods' Man (1929).