Wordless Books

WORDLESS BOOKS. The outstanding figure in a small field of leftwing “wordless books,” the precursor form to graphic novels created mostly if not entirely through a process of wood engraving, is undoubtedly Lynd Ward. The form itself gained modern social content thanks mainly to the “novels” of Belgian artist Frans Masereel, during the 1910s-20s introduced to readers across Europe by prominent novelists, above all Thomas Mann.

Ward, son of a famed leftwing minister Harry F. Ward, traveled to Germany to study wood engraving, and there discovered the work of Masereel. Making a living as a commercial book illustrator, creating some of the outstanding children’s books of the 1920s-60s, Ward gave his genius to four works. God’s Man (1926) traced the saga of an idealist, Madman’s Drum (1930) the bad karma of imperialism’s cruelty in Africa, Prelude to a Million Years (1933), the study of a sculptor seeking to make art for art’s sale; and Song Without Words (1936), a sort of prose poem of a common woman’s fate. These books were created in a highly specialized manner for a limited audience, and Ward abandoned this work after his four classics.

Further Left-wing American books of this kind were few, none of them wood engravings. William Gropper (1897-1977), famed cartoonist for the Daily Worker and New Masses, drew in the conventional manner Alay-Oop (1930, reprinted in 2019) about the rough life of a woman trapeze artist. The forgotten Giacomo Patri (1897-1977) likewise drew White Collar (1940), describing the life of the lower middle class desperately and hopelessly seeking dignity and security. Patri himself, an instructor at the leftwing California Labor School, was driven out of his profession in the McCarthy Era, created a small art school for blue collar young people and died, purportedly, from shaping his ink-loaded brushes with his tongue.

Two otherwise notable, largely wordless or at least limited dialogue examples might be mentioned. Hugo Gellert’s Karl Marx’s “Capital” in Lithographs (1932), published like Ward’s work in a small edition, depicted workers of almost superhuman musculature within the system of exploitation, along with Marx quotations. Even more remarkably, a book-length series of linoleum cuts dating to 1935, discovered in the personal papers of Joseph North at the Tamiment Library, was republished at last in 2003 as Scottsboro, Alabama: a Story in Linoleum Cuts. About creators Lin Shi Kahn and Tony Perez, little is known, but the inspiration is clear: the Scottsboro Defendants. We might properly view these two books, more than the others, as the work of artists whose work was less suited to the printed page than to other art forms.

A small handful of post-1970 radical artists used newer methods of comic arts in place of woodcuts. Those associated with World War 3 Illustrated artists seem to have monopolized the Left side of the field. Peter Kuper, is the best known, with The System (1997). Two other have done outstanding work: Eric Drooker’s Flood! (1992) and Blood Song (2009) and Seth Tobocman’s The Face of Struggle: Allegory Without Words (2020), each in its own way, like the work of Kuper, channeled or referenced Lynd Ward in style and spirit. All three, but especially Tobocman, have personally drawn and/or constructed materials for political demonstrations of various kinds.

Berona, David A., ed. Wordless Books: The Original Graphic Novels. New York: Abrams, 2008.

Gellert, Hugo. Karl Marx’s “Capital” in Lithographs. Foreword by Paul Buhle, New York: International Publishers, 2021 edition.

Khan, Lin Shi and Tony Perez. Scottsboro: Alabama: A Story in Linoleum Cuts. Edited by Andrew Lee. Foreword by Robin D.G. Kelley. New York University Press, 2003.

Spiegelman, Art. “Reading Pictures: A Few Thousand Words on Six Books Without Any,” an introduction to Lynd Ward, ix-xxv. New York: The Library of America, 2010.