Earlier this week I was invited by Professor Gretchen Scharnagl to share some material from The Wolfsonian Library relating to sequential art storytelling and the origins of the graphic novel in the United States. My presentation focused on the work of the American artist, Lynd Ward (1905–1985), his mentors and influences in Europe in the interwar era, and the “wordless novels” he published during the Depression decade. Today’s post will share some of Ward’s woodcut and wood-engravings with my readers.

Lynd Ward self portrait (1930)
Lynd Ward was born in Chicago in 1905, the same year that two hundred socialist, anarchist, and labor organizers converged on the city at a convention that led to the founding of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). His father, Harry F. Ward, was a Methodist minister of the Social Gospel tradition, and at the time of Lynd’s birth was serving as a social worker at a settlement house in a working-class barrio. Reverend Ward ministered to the immigrant laborers living in squalid tenements and working for poor wages in the filthy and dangerous stockyards and meat-packing industries and was likely radicalized by that experience. Young Lynd Ward imbibed and adopted his father’s socialist political views and penchant for social justice activism. As an adult he would integrate social criticism into the graphic novels he published throughout the 1930s.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
From an early age, Lynd Ward gravitated to the arts and book illustration, learning linoleum-block printing in high school. After graduating from the Columbia Teacher’s College in New York with a degree in fine arts in 1926, Ward married and spent his honeymoon in Europe. The young couple set up house in Leipzig, Germany where Lynd spent a year studying printmaking and book design at the prestigious Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst. Ward learned the intricacies of woodcut, etching, engraving, and lithography from the German masters: Hans Alexander Mueller, Alois Kolb, and Georg A. Mathéy.



From Georg A. Mathéy, Junge Kunst, (1929)
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
Though he learned the techniques of book illustration inside the classroom, Ward’s artistic sensibilities and interest in the “wordless novel” were inspired by his extra-curricular activities. Ward appears to have been greatly influenced by German expressionism and the moving images he saw in such popular silent films as Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari.

While browsing the book stalls, he also encountered a series of graphic novels by a Belgian engraver. Frans Masereel was a socialist who had opposed the war and fled to neutral Switzerland rather than participate in the mass slaughter. The dark graphic novels Masereel published during and after the First World War reflected the general disillusionment and cynicism of the era; they also encouraged Ward to produce his own wordless novels upon his return to the United States in September 1927.

From My Book of Hours / Frans Masereel
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Purchased with Founder’s Fund
After providing illustrations for several other authors, Ward published his first wordless novel, God’s Man the same week that the Stock Market crashed in October 1929. Considered to be the first American graphic novel, the book includes nearly 150 woodcut images to tell the story of a young man who unwittingly strikes a Faustian bargain with Death to achieve success as an artist.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
The protagonist of God’s Man learns that money, urban life, and bourgeois values are anathema to art, truth, and beauty. Fleeing to the countryside, he finds true love and artistic freedom before his deathly patron collects on his debt.



The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
The black and white images and dark theme of the corrupting influence of money struck a chord with many ordinary Americans still reeling from the repercussions of the economic crisis. Over the next four years, God’s Man sold more than 20,000 copies.
During the decade-long Depression, Ward published five more graphic novels. All of these wordless novels provided biting pictorial commentary about such burning social issues as capitalist greed, starvation wages, chronic unemployment, homelessness, lynching and racial injustice, the repression of labor, and the violent suppression of protesters by police and national guardsmen.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
Lynd Ward’s next novel, Madman’s Drum (1930) told the story of a man who amassed a fortune by participating in the trafficking of African slaves. Returning with a stolen drum, the slave-trader finds his personal relationships poisoned and his heirs cursed by his valuing of profit over human life. In focusing on slavery and the enduring legacy of racism, Ward was also providing an implicit critique of segregation and prejudice in “Jim Crow” America.



The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
Ward’s next wordless novel, Wild Pilgrimage (1932) was set in depression-era America and included illustrations that used many of his typical tropes, (human-beings dwarfed by skyscrapers and industrial smokestacks), and touched on a wide variety of social problems.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
The ironic title and images referenced the wanderings of millions made homeless by the economic crisis. More than half a million youth dropped out of school, hitchhiking across the highways or hopping freight cars and riding the rails in a desperate search for work. Word’s protagonist, a rootless wanderer searching for love and meaning in his life, instead encounters only violence, indifference, and injustice on his own “pilgrimage.” In this gritty graphic novel, Ward alternated between orange and black inks to contrast the heroic dreams and fantasies of the protagonist with the bleak and harsh reality he experiences.


The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
In one instance, the would-be hero of the story witnesses, but only dares to dream of stopping the lynching of a Black man in the woods.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
At the climax of the novel, the young man enters a company town populated by unemployed or striking workers who resemble the walking dead.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
Finally impelled to action by an attack of baton-wielding police on a group of picketers, the wanderer imagines himself David slaying Goliath, but is killed in the melee.



The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
Published at the nadir of the Great Depression, Ward’s Prelude to a Million Years (1933) is a dystopian tale of the fate of art and civilization.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
The protagonist of this illustrated tale is an artist obsessed with beauty, who, against his will and inclination, is forced to recognize the ugliness and brutality of modern urban life. The disillusioned sculptor is robbed at gunpoint, witnesses the violent repression of striking workers by the police, is forced to kiss the flag by chauvinistic American legionnaires, and sees his idealized vision of female beauty reduced to drunken prostitution in this profoundly pessimistic tale.



The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
Composed of twenty-one wood engravings, Song Without Words (1936) was the fifth and briefest of the six wordless novels Ward published during his lifetime. The novel centers on the anxieties of an expectant mother terrified by the prospect of bringing a child into the nightmarish world dominated by starvation, rising fascism, and the looming threat of war.


The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
The most intimate and personal of his graphic novels, Ward’s engravings were made while his wife, May, was pregnant with their second child, Robin.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
Vertigo (1937) was Ward’s longest and most ambitious wordless novel, deploying 230 wood-engravings to relate the intertwined stories of three central characters: a young woman, a young man, and a dying captain of industry.



The story follows the fate of a young couple whose musical talents, career ambitions, and matrimonial aspirations are thwarted by the Crash and subsequent Depression. Even as the novel focuses on the personal plight of the protagonists, it includes images of: demoralized people standing in relief lines; vigilante thugs beating union organizers; and National Guardsmen in gas masks bayoneting striking workers.



The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
Lamenting the squandering of youthful talent and potential, Vertigo symbolically ends with the dying capitalist being kept alive by a vampire-like infusion of the young man’s blood, followed by the terrified couple clinging tightly to one another while riding the rollercoaster that was the Great Depression.


The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
Despite his contributions to the development of the graphic novel in the United States during the Great Depression, Lynd Ward has not become a household name. But given the social unrest and police and vigilante violence against contemporary Black Lives Matter protesters and demonstrations, Ward’s social conscience-driven graphic illustrations may yet again be rediscovered for their enduring emotive power and relevance.
