A pioneering American graphic novel

Posted on December 28, 2024 by John Mark Ockerbloom

Lynd Ward’s Gods’ Man is a novel without words (apart from chapter titles) about an artist who makes a Faustian bargain with a masked stranger for artistic success. Told in 139 woodcuts, it was the first of 6 wordless novels by Ward, and the first American novel of its kind. Selling well when published in 1929, it influenced artists like Art Spiegelman and Will Eisner, who made graphic novels a genre of widespread ongoing interest. The public domain claims it in 4 days.

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About John Mark Ockerbloom

I'm a digital library strategist at the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia.
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1 Response to A pioneering American graphic novel

  1. Unknown's avatar John Mark Ockerbloom says:
    December 28, 2024 at 12:33 pm

    @everybodyslibraries.com A bit of copyright-nerd trivia: I'd initially missed this book when I was compiling a list of active 1929 copyrights I might want to write about, because the full renewal record was inadvertently left out of the relevant volumes of the Catalog of Copyright Entries. It is, however, mentioned in the Catalog's *index* from 1957, and a search of the Copyright Office's virtual card catalog turns up a renewal record: https://copyright.gov/vcc/

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