Gods' Man

Gods' Man is a wordless novel by American artist Lynd Ward (1905–1985) published in 1929. In 139 captionless woodblock prints, it tells the Faustian story of an artist who signs away his soul for a magic paintbrush. Gods' Man was the first American wordless novel, and is considered a precursor of the graphic novel, whose development it influenced.

Ward first encountered the wordless novel with Frans Masereel's The Sun (1919) while studying art in Germany in 1926. He returned to the United States in 1927 and established a career for himself as an illustrator. He found Otto Nückel's wordless novel Destiny (1926) in New York City in 1929, and it inspired him to create such a work of his own. Gods' Man appeared a week before the Wall Street Crash of 1929; it nevertheless enjoyed strong sales and remains the best-selling American wordless novel. Its success inspired other Americans to experiment with the medium, including cartoonist Milt Gross, who parodied Gods' Man in He Done Her Wrong (1930). In the 1970s, Ward's example of wordless novels inspired cartoonists Art Spiegelman and Will Eisner to create their first graphic novels.

The wordless novel Gods' Man is a silent narrative made up of prints of 139 engraved woodblocks. Each image moves the story forward by an interval Ward chooses to maintain story flow. Ward wrote in Storyteller Without Words (1974) that too great an interval would put too much interpretational burden on the reader, while too little would make the story tedious. Wordless novel historian David A. Beronä likens these concerns with the storytelling methods of comics.

The artwork is executed in black and white; the images vary in size and dimension, up to 6 by 4 inches (15 cm × 10 cm), the size of the opening and closing images of each chapter. Ward uses symbolic contrast of dark and light to emphasize the corruption of the city, where even in daylight the buildings darken the skies; in the countryside, the scenes are bathed in natural light. Ward exaggerates facial expression to convey emotion without resorting to words. Composition also conveys emotion: in the midst of his fame, an image has the artist framed by raised wineglasses; the faces of those holding the glasses are not depicted, highlighting the isolation the artist feels. The story parallels the Faust theme, and the artwork and execution show the influence of film, in particular those of German studio Ufa.

The placement of the apostrophe in the title Gods' Man implies a plurality of gods, rather than Judeo-Christianity's monotheistic God. It alludes to a line from the play Bacchides by ancient Roman playwright Plautus: "He whom the gods favor, dies young".

A poor artist signs a contract with a masked stranger, who gives him a magic brush, with which the artist rapidly rises in the art world. He is disillusioned when he discovers the world is corrupted by money, personified by his mistress. He wanders around the city, seeing his auctioneer and mistress in everyone he sees. Enraged by the hallucinations, he attacks one of them, who turns out to be a police officer. The artist is jailed for it, but he escapes, and a mob chases him from the city. He is injured when he jumps into a ravine to avoid recapture. A woman who lives in the woods discovers him and brings him back to health. They have a child, and live a simple, happy life together, until the mysterious stranger returns and beckons the artist to the edge of a cliff. The artist prepares to paint a portrait of the stranger but fatally falls from the cliff with fright when the stranger reveals a skull-like head behind the mask.

Chicago-born Lynd Ward (1905–1985) was a son of Methodist minister Harry F. Ward (1873–1966), a social activist and the first chairman of the American Civil Liberties Union. Throughout his career, Ward displayed in his work the influence of his father's interest in social injustice. He was early drawn to art, and decided to become an artist when his first-grade teacher told him that "Ward" spelled backward was "draw". He excelled as a student, and contributed art and text to high school and college newspapers.

In 1926, after graduating from Teachers College, Columbia University, Ward married writer May McNeer and the couple left for an extended honeymoon in Europe. After four months in eastern Europe, the couple settled in Leipzig in Germany, where, as a special one-year student at the National Academy of Graphic Arts and Bookmaking [de], Ward studied wood engraving. There he encountered German Expressionist art, and read the wordless novel The Sun (1919), a modernized version of the story of Icarus, told in sixty-three wordless woodcut prints, by Flemish woodcut artist Frans Masereel (1889–1972).