In a Silent Way

Graphic Witness: Four Wordless Graphic Novels, selected and introduced by George A. Walker, (C) George A. Walker. Published by Firefly Books Ltd. $29.95. Reprinted with permission. http://www.fireflybooks.com/

“Since the time of my youth, I have protested against the society in which I am living,” Franz Masereel once said. In Graphic Witness: Four Wordless Graphic Novels, George A. Walker gathers together four of the greatest wordless woodcut novels of the twentieth century. “Only now, at the beginning of the 21st century, is Masereel being rediscovered as one of the most important graphic artists of the 20th century and the grandfather of the modern graphic novel,” Walker writes in his introduction. In addition to Masereel, Walker introduces a new generation to the art of Lynd Ward, Giacomo Patri, and Laurence Hyde. In addition to their obvious artistry in the field of woodcuts, the thread that holds these four artists together is their thirst for social justice. “The politics and social issues they address are specific to their times,” Walker says, “but the broader issues are, sadly, still relevant to our contemporary eyes.” Regardless of place or time, these artists speak in a silent way through pure imagery against the oppression of the weak by the strong, and offer some hope for a brighter future.

Walker begins with Masereel’s The Passion of a Man (1918), which set the standard for later graphic novels. A friend of George Grosz, Masereel works in a highly Expressionist style, favoring dramatic angles and lighting effects to heighten the drama and emotional impact of his images, similar to the best woodcut art of Die Brucke artists such as Emil Nolde and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. Masereel follows his nameless hero from his birth in poverty to a young adulthood marked by hard labor and life in a fearsome city full of the temptations of alcohol and prostitution. Suddenly, he begins to read and a literal light from above illuminates his existence. After leading a strike against the cruel bosses, he is imprisoned and executed. The nameless hero radiates with an inner light before the firing squad much like Goya’s central figure of The Third of May, 1808. Such glorification of martyrdom in the name of resistance to authority earned Masereel the condemnation of the Nazis years later. By placing those condemning the hero to death beneath a cross, Masereel most likely didn’t endear himself to the churches, either.

Lynd Ward’s Wild Pilgrimage gives an American perspective on the deprivations of the early twentieth century. Ward studied in Germany and discovered Masereel’s work there. But, where Masereel’s technique demonstrates Expressionism, Ward creates images with finer detail that pulsates with the textures he generates. Ward introduced America to the wordless novel in 1929 with God’s Man, which sold 20,000 copies. Ward published Wild Pilgrimage in 1932, when the wounds of the 1929 Stock Crash were fresh and the Great Depression dominated the American consciousness. Wild Pilgrimage relates the odyssey of a young man who escapes the city and seeks a better life in the country. “In the American experience there is probably no more basic or recurrent impulse than to leave society,” Ward wrote of Wild Pilgrimage. “It is a madness—or a sanity—that can take hold of any citizen when the daily grind becomes suddenly more abrasive than anyone should be asked to endure.” Interspersing dream sequences with real events, Ward powerfully justifies Walker’s claim for a relationship between these early graphic novels and the early storyboard techniques for filmmaking. After witnessing a lynching in the countryside, Ward’s pilgrim encounters a farmer who educates him on standing up to the powers that be. The pilgrim returns to the city and joins a battle between union agitators and the police sent to disrupt them. In a final dream sequence, the pilgrim tears the head off of a whip-wielding boss. Looking into the disembodied head’s eyes, the pilgrim recognizes his own face, symbolizing the self-destructiveness of violent means even towards the proper ends. Such statements and his Socialist beliefs eventually gained Ward a place on the F.B.I.’s list of persons of interest.

From White Collar by Giacomo Patri, Copyright Estate of Tamara Rey Patri, courtesy of Georges Rey, excerpted from Graphic Witness: Four Wordless Graphic Novels, selected and introduced by George A. Walker, (C) George A. Walker. Published by Firefly Books Ltd. $29.95. Reprinted with permission. http://www.fireflybooks.com/

Another Depression era graphic novel, Giacomo Patri’s 1938 White Collar expresses that Socialist trend even more strongly, emphasizing the senseless of the division between white and blue collar workers. “White Collar was to be my contribution to, what I believed then, an indispensible understanding of the necessity of unity among all American workers and voters,” Patri later said. Surrealist images such as the huge, starch-stiffened white collar imprisoning the individual (above) convey Patri’s message more powerfully and concisely than any words possibly could. Patri’s semi-autobiographical story follows the path of a respectable, office-working family man who loses everything in the aftermath of the Stock Crash. A portrait of Christ as the Man of Sorrows looks down upon the worker and his family as their sorrows mount, until suddenly it disappears—either sold with other possessions to pay the bills or removed in a rejection of religion. Such ambiguities and gaps that beg the reader to fill in the details comprise just one of the great pleasures of these graphic novels, which paradoxically carry a greater narrative power for not using words.

Patri’s white collar worker later happens upon a union rally and slowly begins to understand the unity of all workers, eventually becoming an agitator for fairness himself. Rockwell Kent’s introduction to the 1940 edition of White Collar praised its uplifting message: “Into the darkness of depression it throws light; the tragic dissonances it resolves; and to the dead hope it brings resurrection.” The McCarthy hearings and “Red Menace” days of the 1950s forced Patri’s pro-labor California school to close, demonstrating the powerful threat that his ideas of unity posed to the establishment.

Laurence Hyde’s 1951 Southern Cross completes the quartet. Through his strong draftsmanship full of moving lines and rhythmic textures, Hyde denounces in Southern Cross the testing by the United States Government of the hydrogen bomb on the Bikini Atoll. Hyde juxtaposes the simple, harmonious life of the natives with the discordant “civilized” world of the sailors who come to take them off their homeland before the test begins. The two worlds collide violently in an exchange between a brutish seaman and a native defending his wife from sexual assault. Hyde’s sly humor comes across in the scenes in which the sailors explain the bomb to the natives. Festooning the bomb with an olive branch-bearing dove and angels and placing a rainbow over the post-detonation mushroom cloud, Hyde presents the same false, fantasy rationale that the American government gave to their own citizens to justify the arms race.

From Graphic Witness: Four Wordless Graphic Novels, selected and introduced by George A. Walker, (C) George A. Walker. Published by Firefly Books Ltd. $29.95. Reprinted with permission. http://www.fireflybooks.com/

Himself a woodcut artist, Walker clearly and illuminatingly explains many of the intricacies of the art. Several illustrations in his introduction (such as the one above) present an image from a woodcut, enlarge a single detail, and then show the tool used to achieve certain effects. Walker’s insider knowledge of the craft as well as his clear affinity for the spirit of these works makes him the perfect presenter of their art. My only complaint with Graphic Witness is that I wish they had included all of the introductions and other essays that accompanied the original works. Walker alludes to and frequently quotes from these pieces, but those bits only create a hunger for more. Knowing that Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse wrote introductions to Masereel’s The Passion of a Man makes me want to track down those original responses to the images. Rockwell Kent’s words on both White Collar and Southern Cross would provide not only a perceptive viewpoint on those works but also reinforce the influence of Kent’s work on the genre. Drawn and Quarterly in 2007 printed a facsimile edition of Southern Cross that included both Kent’s words and Hyde’s own that truly enhanced the experience. (My review of that facsimile is here.) As powerful as these silent works are, even that silence can be taken too far.

From White Collar by Giacomo Patri, Copyright Estate of Tamara Rey Patri, courtesy of Georges Rey, excerpted from Graphic Witness: Four Wordless Graphic Novels, selected and introduced by George A. Walker, (C) George A. Walker. Published by Firefly Books Ltd. $29.95. Reprinted with permission. http://www.fireflybooks.com/

“The artist is a witness of his time, but he can also be an accuser, a critic,” Masereel once wrote, “or he can celebrate in his works the uneasy greatness of his day.” Like the final scene of Patri’s White Collar (above), in which white collar and blue collar families march side by side in solidarity, these four wordless graphic novels stand together and transcend nationality and local politics to achieve a universality of the basic struggle of the haves versus the have nots. Each witnesses the ills of their time as well as the “greatness,” i.e., the indomitable spirit of the people. In an afterword, the modern graphic novelist Seth dismisses any true link between today’s graphic novels and these works. “Ultimately it’s a mistake to see these sublimely crafted wordless novels as mere precursors to today’s picture-novels,” Seth argues. “They stand on their own as fully realized artworks and don’t need to be drafted into someone else’s history.” Fortunately, the ideas these novels embody belong so inextricably to human history that no drafting is necessary.


[Many thanks to Firefly Books for providing me with a review copy of this book as well as the images above.]