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
Woodcut is a relief printing technique in printmaking. An artist carves an image into the surface of a block of wood—typically with gouges—leaving the printing parts level with the surface while removing the non-printing parts. Areas that ...
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
Socialism is a left-wing economic philosophy and movement encompassing a range of economic systems characterized by the dominance of social ownership of the means of production as opposed to private ownership. As a term, it describes the e ...
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
''25 Images of a Man's Passion'', or ''The Passion of a Man'' is the first wordless novel by Flemish artist Frans Masereel (1889–1972), first published in 1918 under the French title . The silent story is about a young working-class man wh ...
'', published in 1918. The German
Otto Nückel
Otto Nückel (Cologne, 6 September 1888 – Cologne, 12 November 1955) was a German painter, graphic designer, illustrator and cartoonist. He is best known as one of the 20th century's pioneer wordless novelists, along with Frans Masereel and Ly ...
and other artists followed Masereel's example.
Lynd Ward brought the genre to the United States in 1929 when he produced , which inspired other American wordless novels and a parody in 1930 by cartoonist
Milt Gross with ''
He Done Her Wrong
''He Done Her Wrong'' is a wordless novel written by American cartoonist Milt Gross and published in 1930. It was not as successful as some of Gross's earlier works, notably his book ''Nize Baby'' (1926) based on his newspaper comic strips. ''He ...
''. Following an early-1930s peak in production and popularity, the genre waned in the face of competition from
sound film
A sound film is a motion picture with synchronized sound, or sound technologically coupled to image, as opposed to a silent film. The first known public exhibition of projected sound films took place in Paris in 1900, but decades passed before ...
s 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
A fandom is a subculture composed of fans characterized by a feeling of empathy and camaraderie with others who share a common interest. Fans typically are interested in even minor details of the objects of their fandom and spend a significant ...
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
William Erwin Eisner (March 6, 1917 – January 3, 2005) was an American cartoonist, writer, and entrepreneur. He was one of the earliest cartoonists to work in the American comic book industry, and his series ''The Spirit'' (1940–1952) was no ...
and
Art Spiegelman to create book-length non-genre comics—"
graphic novel
A graphic novel is a long-form, fictional work of sequential art. The term ''graphic novel'' is often applied broadly, including fiction, non-fiction, and anthologized work, though this practice is highly contested by comic scholars and industry ...
s". Cartoonists such as
Eric Drooker
Eric Drooker is an American painter, graphic novelist, and frequent cover artist for ''The New Yorker''. He conceived and designed the animation for the film ''Howl'' (2010).
Drooker grew up in Manhattan's Stuyvesant Town, adjacent to the Lower E ...
and
Peter Kuper took direct inspiration from wordless novels to create wordless graphic novels.
Characteristics
Wordless novels use sequences of expressive images to tell a story.
Socialist
Socialism is a left-wing economic philosophy and movement encompassing a range of economic systems characterized by the dominance of social ownership of the means of production as opposed to private ownership. As a term, it describes the e ...
themes of struggle against
capitalism
Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for Profit (economics), profit. Central characteristics of capitalism include capital accumulation, competitive markets, pric ...
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
Expressionism is a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Northern Europe around the beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it rad ...
graphics,
theatre
Theatre or theater is a collaborative form of performing art that uses live performers, usually actors or actresses, to present the experience of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place, often a stage. The perform ...
, and
film
A film also called a movie, motion picture, moving picture, picture, photoplay or (slang) flick is a work of visual art that simulates experiences and otherwise communicates ideas, stories, perceptions, feelings, beauty, or atmosphere ...
. 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
George Grosz (; born Georg Ehrenfried Groß; July 26, 1893 – July 6, 1959) was a German artist known especially for his caricatural drawings and paintings of Berlin life in the 1920s. He was a prominent member of the Berlin Dada and New Objec ...
, and
Käthe Kollwitz
Käthe Kollwitz ( born as Schmidt; 8 July 1867 – 22 April 1945) was a German artist who worked with painting, printmaking (including etching, lithography and woodcuts) and sculpture. Her most famous art cycles, including ''The Weavers'' and ''T ...
, 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 film
A silent film is a film with no synchronized recorded sound (or more generally, no audible dialogue). Though silent films convey narrative and emotion visually, various plot elements (such as a setting or era) or key lines of dialogue may, when ...
s. 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.
![Prelude to a Million Years, plate 29, by Lynd Ward](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b8/Prelude_to_a_Million_Years%2C_plate_29%2C_by_Lynd_Ward.jpg)
Typically, wordless novels used
relief printing techniques such as
woodcut
Woodcut is a relief printing technique in printmaking. An artist carves an image into the surface of a block of wood—typically with gouges—leaving the printing parts level with the surface while removing the non-printing parts. Areas that ...
s,
wood engraving
Wood engraving is a printmaking technique, in which an artist works an image or ''matrix'' of images into a block of wood. Functionally a variety of woodcut, it uses relief printing, where the artist applies ink to the face of the block and ...
,
metalcuts, or
linocut
Linocut, also known as lino print, lino printing or linoleum art, is a printmaking technique, a variant of woodcut in which a sheet of linoleum (sometimes mounted on a wooden block) is used for a relief surface. A design is cut into the linoleum s ...
s. 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
In 15th-century medieval Europe, woodcut
block book
Block books or blockbooks, also called xylographica, are short books of up to 50 leaves, block printed in Europe in the second half of the 15th century as woodcuts with blocks carved to include both text (usually) and illustrations. The content ...
s were printed as religious guides; particularly popular was the . The early 16th century saw block books disappear in favour of books printed with the
movable type
Movable type (US English; moveable type in British English) is the system and technology of printing and typography that uses movable components to reproduce the elements of a document (usually individual alphanumeric characters or punctuatio ...
of
Gutenberg's presses. Woodcut printing persisted into the 16th century under artists such as
Dürer,
Holbein Hans Holbein may refer to:
* Hans Holbein the Elder
Hans Holbein the Elder ( , ; german: Hans Holbein der Ältere; – 1524) was a German painter.
Life
Holbein was born in free imperial city of Augsburg (Germany), and died in Issenheim, Alsa ...
, and
Amman
Amman (; ar, عَمَّان, ' ; Ammonite language, Ammonite: 𐤓𐤁𐤕 𐤏𐤌𐤍 ''Rabat ʻAmān'') is the capital and largest city of Jordan, and the country's economic, political, and cultural center. With a population of 4,061,150 a ...
, 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
Lithography () is a planographic method of printing originally based on the immiscibility of oil and water. The printing is from a stone (lithographic limestone) or a metal plate with a smooth surface. It was invented in 1796 by the German a ...
.
Post-impressionist
Post-Impressionism (also spelled Postimpressionism) was a predominantly French art movement that developed roughly between 1886 and 1905, from the last Impressionist exhibition to the birth of Fauvism. Post-Impressionism emerged as a reaction ag ...
artist
Paul Gauguin
Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin (, ; ; 7 June 1848 – 8 May 1903) was a French Post-Impressionist artist. Unappreciated until after his death, Gauguin is now recognized for his experimental use of colour and Synthetist style that were distinct fr ...
revived woodcut printing in the late-19th century, favouring it for its
primitivist
Primitivism is a mode of aesthetic idealization that either emulates or aspires to recreate a "primitive" experience. It is also defined as a philosophical doctrine that considers "primitive" peoples as nobler than civilized peoples and was an o ...
effect. Early in the 20th century, woodcut artists such as Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945) and
Max Klinger
Max Klinger (18 February 1857 – 5 July 1920) was a German artist who produced significant work in painting, sculpture, prints and graphics, as well as writing a treatise articulating his ideas on art and the role of graphic arts and printmak ...
(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
Karl Schmidt-Rottluff (Karl Schmidt until 1905; 1 December 1884 – 10 August 1976) was a German expressionist painter and printmaker; he was one of the four founders of the artist group Die Brücke.
Life and work
Schmidt-Rottluff was born in ...
(1884–1976) were inspired by an early-20th-century revival of interest in medieval graphic arts—in particular Biblical woodcut prints such as the . These artists used the awkward look of woodcut images to express feelings of anguish.
In Europe
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
''25 Images of a Man's Passion'', or ''The Passion of a Man'' is the first wordless novel by Flemish artist Frans Masereel (1889–1972), first published in 1918 under the French title . The silent story is about a young working-class man wh ...
'', in 1918. It was a commercial success and was followed by ''
Passionate Journey
''Passionate Journey, or My Book of Hours'' (french: Mon livre d'heures), is a wordless novel of 1919 by Flemish artist Frans Masereel. The story is told in 167 captionless prints, and is the longest and best-selling of the wordless novels Ma ...
'',; the book was translated into English as ''My Book of Hours'' (1919), 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
Max Brod ( he, מקס ברוד; 27 May 1884 – 20 December 1968) was a German-speaking Bohemian, later Israeli, author, composer, and journalist.
Although he was a prolific writer in his own right, he is best remembered as the friend and biog ...
,
Hermann Hesse
Hermann Karl Hesse (; 2 July 1877 – 9 August 1962) was a German-Swiss poet, novelist, and painter. His best-known works include ''Demian'', ''Steppenwolf (novel), Steppenwolf'', ''Siddhartha (novel), Siddhartha'', and ''The Glass Bead Game'', ...
, and
Thomas Mann
Paul Thomas Mann ( , ; ; 6 June 1875 – 12 August 1955) was a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and the 1929 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate. His highly symbolic and ironic epic novels and novella ...
. 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
Balthasar Klossowski de Rola (February 29, 1908 – February 18, 2001), known as Balthus, was a Polish-French modern artist. He is known for his erotically charged images of pubescent girls, but also for the refined, dreamlike quality of his image ...
drew a wordless story about his cat; it was published in 1921 with an introduction by poet
Rainer Maria Rilke
René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke (4 December 1875 – 29 December 1926), shortened to Rainer Maria Rilke (), was an Austrian poet and novelist. He has been acclaimed as an idiosyncratic and expressive poet, and is widely recogni ...
. In ''
Destiny'' (1926),
Otto Nückel
Otto Nückel (Cologne, 6 September 1888 – Cologne, 12 November 1955) was a German painter, graphic designer, illustrator and cartoonist. He is best known as one of the 20th century's pioneer wordless novelists, along with Frans Masereel and Ly ...
(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, Nückel told of the life of an individual woman. ''Destiny'' appeared in a US edition in 1930 and sold well there.
Clément Moreau
Joseph Carl Meffert (26 March 1903 in Koblenz, Germany – 27 December 1988 in Sirnach, Switzerland), better known by his ''nom de plume'' Clément Moreau, was a politically and socially conscious graphic designer and artist. His best-known work i ...
(1903–1988) first tried his hand at the genre with the six-plate ''Youth Without Means'' in 1928.
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
Ink wash painting ( zh, t=水墨畫, s=水墨画, p=shuǐmòhuà; ja, 水墨画, translit=suiboku-ga or ja, 墨絵, translit=sumi-e; ko, 수묵화, translit=sumukhwa) is a type of Chinese ink brush painting which uses black ink, such as tha ...
, Szegedi-Szüts told of a Hungarian cavalryman disillusioned by his World War I experiences.
Helena Bochořáková-Dittrichová (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 Nückel. Bochořáková described her books as "cycles" rather than novels.
Surrealist artist
Max Ernst made the silent collage novel ''
Une semaine de bonté
''Une semaine de bonté'' ("A Week of Kindness") is a collage novel and artist's book by Max Ernst, first published in 1934. It comprises 182 images created by cutting up and re-organizing illustrations from Victorian encyclopedias and novel ...
'' in 1934. Following World War II, (1890–1968), a member of the German Expressionist group
Die Brücke
The Brücke (Bridge), also Künstlergruppe Brücke or KG Brücke was a group of German expressionist artists formed in Dresden in 1905. Founding members were Fritz Bleyl, Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. Later memb ...
, produced ''The Tightrope Walker and the Clown'' (1949).
In North America
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. He produced six such works of his own; he preferred to call them "pictorial narratives". The first, (1929), was his most popular. Ward used wood engraving rather than woodcutting and varied image sizes from page to page. sold 20,000 copies, and other American artists followed up on this success with their own wordless novels in the 1930s.
![He Done Her Wrong - Gross does Ward](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e3/He_Done_Her_Wrong_-_Gross_does_Ward.jpg)
Cartoonist
Milt Gross's ''
He Done Her Wrong
''He Done Her Wrong'' is a wordless novel written by American cartoonist Milt Gross and published in 1930. It was not as successful as some of Gross's earlier works, notably his book ''Nize Baby'' (1926) based on his newspaper comic strips. ''He ...
'' (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
William Gropper (December 3, 1897January 3, 1977) was a U.S. cartoonist, painter, lithographer, and muralist. A committed radical, Gropper is best known for the political work which he contributed to such left wing publications as '' The Rev ...
'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
Art Deco, short for the French ''Arts Décoratifs'', and sometimes just called Deco, is a style of visual arts, architecture, and product design, that first appeared in France in the 1910s (just before World War I), and flourished in the Unite ...
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
The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen national ...
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 worker
A white-collar worker is a person who performs professional, desk, managerial, or administrative work. White-collar work may be performed in an office or other administrative setting. White-collar workers include job paths related to government, ...
s 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
Crux () is a constellation of the southern sky that is centred on four bright stars in a cross-shaped asterism commonly known as the Southern Cross. It lies on the southern end of the Milky Way's visible band. The name ''Crux'' is Latin for c ...
'', 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 Si Lewen (8 November 1918, Lubin, Poland – 25 July 2016) was a Polish-American painter and member of the Ritchie Boys, a unit of the United States Army during World War II.
Lewen was born in 1918 into a Polish-Jewish family, who moved to Berlin ...
's (1918– ) first book, ''The Parade: A Story in 55 Drawings'' (1957), won praise from
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein ( ; ; 14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist, widely acknowledged to be one of the greatest and most influential physicists of all time. Einstein is best known for developing the theory ...
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
World Trade Centers are sites recognized by the World Trade Centers Association.
World Trade Center may refer to:
Buildings
* List of World Trade Centers
* World Trade Center (2001–present), a building complex that includes five skyscrapers, a ...
complex just before the
September 11 attacks
The September 11 attacks, commonly known as 9/11, were four coordinated suicide terrorist attacks carried out by al-Qaeda against the United States on Tuesday, September 11, 2001. That morning, nineteen terrorists hijacked four commercia ...
.
Decline
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
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is the domestic Intelligence agency, intelligence and Security agency, security service of the United States and its principal Federal law enforcement in the United States, federal law enforcement age ...
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
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
''The Little King'' is a 1930-1975 American gag-a-day comic strip created by Otto Soglow, telling its stories in a style using images and very few words, as in pantomime.
Publication history
Soglow's character first appeared on June 7, 1930, in ...
'', begun in 1931, and
Carl Anderson's ''
Henry'', begun in 1932. German cartoonist
E. O. Plauen's wordless domestic comic strip ''
Father and Son'' (1934–37) was popular in Germany, and was collected in three volumes.
Antonio Prohías's textless ''
Mad'' magazine feature ''
Spy vs. Spy
''Spy vs. Spy'' is a wordless comic strip published in '' Mad'' magazine. It features two agents involved in stereotypical and comical espionage activities. One is dressed in white, and the other in black, but they are otherwise identical, and ...
'' began in 1961.
Cartoonist
Will Eisner
William Erwin Eisner (March 6, 1917 – January 3, 2005) was an American cartoonist, writer, and entrepreneur. He was one of the earliest cartoonists to work in the American comic book industry, and his series ''The Spirit'' (1940–1952) was no ...
(1917–2005) first came upon the work of Lynd Ward in 1938. Eisner was an early pioneer in the
American comic book
An American comic book is a thin periodical originating in the United States, on average 32 pages, containing comics. While the form originated in 1933, American comic books first gained popularity after the 1938 publication of ''Action Comics'' ...
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
''A Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories'' is a graphic novel by American cartoonist Will Eisner published in 1978. The book's short story cycle revolves around poor Jewish characters who live in a tenement in New York City. Eisner pro ...
''; 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
The Great American Novel (sometimes abbreviated as GAN) is a canonical novel that is thought to embody the essence of America, generally written by an American and dealing in some way with the question of America's national character. The ter ...
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
''Maus'' is a graphic novel by American cartoonist Art Spiegelman, serialized from 1980 to 1991. It depicts Spiegelman interviewing his father about his experiences as a Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor. The work employs postmodern technique ...
'' (1992).
While graphic novels generally use captions and dialogue, cartoonists such as
Eric Drooker
Eric Drooker is an American painter, graphic novelist, and frequent cover artist for ''The New Yorker''. He conceived and designed the animation for the film ''Howl'' (2010).
Drooker grew up in Manhattan's Stuyvesant Town, adjacent to the Lower E ...
,
Peter Kuper,
Thomas Ott
Thomas Ott (born 10 June 1966) is a Swiss comic artist. His comics have been published in German-speaking countries, France, the United States, Spain, Denmark, Italy and other places.
Ott's often wordless comics feature a dark, grim atmosphere; ...
,
Brian Ralph
Brian Ralph (born 1973) is an American alternative cartoonist. His illustrations have appeared in ''Wired'' and the ''New York Post''. His debut graphic novel, ''Cave-In'', was nominated for three Harvey Awards, one Eisner Award, and listed as on ...
,
Masashi Tanaka
Masashi Tanaka (田中 政志, born June 10, 1962) is a Japanese manga artist best known for '' Gon'', his silent manga starring a miniature dinosaur. He began publishing ''Gon'' in 1991. GON is possibly his most well known work, famous for bei ...
,
Lewis Trondheim
Lewis Trondheim (born Laurent Chabosy, , on 11 December 1964), is a French cartoonist and one of the founders (in 1990) of the independent publisher L'Association. Both his silent comic ''La Mouche'' and Kaput and Zösky have been made into animat ...
, and Billy Simms have made wordless graphic novels. As Gross did in ''He Done Her Wrong'', '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
*
Wordless picture book
*''
Frank'', wordless comics by
Jim Woodring
Notes
References
Works cited
Books
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
Magazines and journals
*
*
*
*
*
Web
*
*
Further reading
*
External links
Silence Speaks: The Quiet Power of Wordless Novels An online exhibition from Western Washington University Libraries.
*
Frans Masereel Foundationinternet portal. Includes
page with online versions of Masereel's books.
*
{{Wordless novels
Expressionism
History of comics
Narrative forms
Woodcuts