Throughlines: The Influence of Wordless Novels on Comics
By the late-1940s, the wordless novel had largely fallen out of fashion, and out of print. It took the rise of underground and alternative comix a generation later to revive interest in the form.
Art Spiegelman, creator of Maus (1989), described Lynd Ward as a direct influence on his work, starting with his 1972 strip, "Prisoner on the Hell Planet." To Spiegelman, Ward’s wordless novels were "part of the same large family tree as comics." And cartoonist Will Eisner paid homage to the form when he coined the term "graphic novel," in the 1970s, to describe his artistically ambitious book-length comics.
In the 1980s and 1990s, alternative comic artists Peter Kuper, Seth Tobocman and Carel Moiseiwitsch, among others, embraced the stark visual style and radical social conscience of the wordless novel in their own work.
Comic artists continue to acknowledge their debt to their wordless forbears in a variety of ways, including in the page featured above from Jason Lutes’ graphic novel, Berlin.
