Lynd Ward – 1929
Long before the comic-based graphic novel, there were
“wordless novels,” and American illustrator Lynd Ward was one of the genre’s
greatest practitioners. In God’s Man, Ward uses nearly 150 woodcut
images to tell a Faustian morality tale about an aritist who finds success in a
futuristic metropolis after being given a magical paint brush in exchange for
his soul. The nameless, everyman hero
first appears in a small row boat on the ocean in the middle of a storm,
bravely committing a seascape to canvas.
Taking shelter in an inn, he is approached by a sinister character with
a proposal, and from there succombs to all the known temptations of fame and
glory in the big city. Without the aid
of captions or any text at all, it’s a fascinating experience to turn each page
and have to actively examine the image on it to glean the stage in the story
that it represents. Made at the height
of Art Deco, the woodcuts are at once modern and primitive, and also worth
viewing out of sequence and appreciating them as individual works of art.
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