Wordless novel

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 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 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, published in 1918. The German Otto Nückel and other artists followed Masereel's example. Lynd Ward brought the genre to the United States in 1929 when he produced Gods' Man, which inspired other American wordless novels and a parody in 1930 by cartoonist Milt Gross with He Done Her Wrong. Following an early-1930s peak in production and popularity, the genre waned in the face of competition from sound films 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 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 and Art Spiegelman to create book-length non-genre comics—"graphic novels". Cartoonists such as Eric Drooker and Peter Kuper took direct inspiration from wordless novels to create wordless graphic novels.

Wordless novels use sequences of expressive images to tell a story. Socialist themes of struggle against capitalism 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 graphics, theatre, and film. 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, and Käthe Kollwitz, 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 films. 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.

Typically, wordless novels used relief printing techniques such as woodcuts, wood engraving, metalcuts, or linocuts. 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.

In 15th-century medieval Europe, woodcut block books were printed as religious guides; particularly popular was the Ars moriendi. The early 16th century saw block books disappear in favour of books printed with the movable type of Gutenberg's presses. Woodcut printing persisted into the 16th century under artists such as Dürer, Holbein, and Amman, 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.