Gods' Man; Madman's Drum; Wild Pilgrimage

Gods' Man; Madman's Drum; Wild Pilgrimage by Lynd Ward, edited by Art Spiegelman, 833 pages

I hadn’t heard of Lynd Ward’s work before reading McCloud’s Understanding Comics last month. I took printmaking classes in college, had an art history prof who specialized in German Expressionism, and am a pretty avid reader of comics - perhaps I'm giving myself too much credit, but how in the world did I go so long without hearing Lynd Ward’s name?! Baffling. The two volume Library of America reprintings of Ward’s six woodcut novels are fairly recent (2010) and I suspect (?) it was difficult to locate copies of these works prior to the reprints. His children’s book illustrations (Johnny Tremain, The Biggest Bear, etc.) are easy to find, but I was totally unaware of his adult proto-graphic-novels. I hope these reprints mark a resurgence in Ward’s popularity and renown. 

Art Spiegelman’s introduction is a wonderful addition to the works; he provides a context for Ward’s art in the history of literature, cinema, comics and visual art. Ward’s own essays at the end of the volume reflect the ethos of the era in which he worked. The paring of Spiegelman’s and Ward’s critical essays bookend the three wordless volumes nicely. In his intro, Spiegelman writes, “Wordless novels are filled with language, it just resides in the reader’s head rather than on the page.”

Gods’ Man was originally published the same week that the stock market crashed in 1929. Its plot follows a struggling artist and the consequences after he strikes a Faustian bargain with a mysterious hooded figure. Madman’s Drum follows the life of a slave trader’s son and the events that cause him to lose faith in every major cultural institution (including religion, love, family, law). Wild Pilgrimage depicts the outer and inner life of a man trapped in an industrial world and his attempts to return to nature. I found the storytelling in all three novels to be fairly heavy handed (in Gods’ Man the decadence of the roaring 20s is at one point depicted by a woman who is literally branded with a dollar sign), but the lack of subtlety did little to deter my enjoyment of Ward’s prints. I’m looking forward to reading Volume II, which contains Ward’s other three proto-graphic-novels.