Graphic Novels

-



Sanctuary, The Ivory Tower Above The Fray.  An Artist Is One Of The Residents.  1939.
This is by Lynd Kendall Ward, just one of the best.  I was given a copy of Kidnapped that he illustrated c.1965, and I still have it and I still love it.  Lynd published the first graphic novel in English in 1929, Gods' Man.  You will notice that the apostrophe is placed to indicate plurality and not possession.


He was influenced by Otto Nuckel, who put out Destiny.  Woodcut from Gods' Man, 1929.  I have no fucking idea whatsoever about what is happening here.  I cannot buy comics and these things are never in libraries.


Gods' Man.


Gods' Man.  Could this be a reference to the Serpent in the Garden?


Destiny, Otto Nuckel, 1926   He was influenced by the Flemish artist Frans Masereel with his graphic novel Passionate Journey, 1919.


Destiny.


 Destiny.


Frans Masereel, Passionate Journey.


Salute!  Passionate Journey.

Passionate Journey.  All three of these books I have mentioned are wordless.


This leads us to Will Eisner, who popularized the graphic novel in the U. S.  This is from A Contract With God, his first of the genre.  Will is my favorite artist.  He is unsurpassed in the sequential story telling medium.  Say again, there is no one better.


A Contract With God.


The Spirt.  I started reading this in reprint as a teenager.  This was a newspaper comic, subject to page limitations and deadlines.  It ran from 1940 to 1952, and Eisner quit when it began to lose it's punch.  To this day it remains the most innovative and well written adventure strip ever put out in a daily, or anywhere else.  Every single Sunday installment started with these incredibly imaginative and intricate splash panels. The Spirit was cinematic in approach.  He had the assistance of Jules Feiffer, Jack Cole, Lou Fine and Wally Wood, an all star line-up if there ever was one.  Cole and Fine did the art when Eisner was serving in WWII.  There were several others who worked on the strip that I am not familiar with.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit_(comics)


I tend to overuse superlatives.  But this is pretty good, I think you'll agree!  The Spirit was a comic book insert for Sunday papers, and had a combined circulation of 5 million during the 40's.  It ran for 635 issues.  It is no accident that comic art's highest honor is the Eisner award.  And, bye the bye, I hate the term "graphic novel".  They are comics no matter how they are bound and marketed.


You do not make deals with God.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Father's Last Escape

-
Image
It happened in the late and forlorn period of complete disruption, at the time of the liquidation of our business. The signboard had been removed from over our shop, the shutters were halfway down, and inside the shop my mother was conducting and unauthorized trade in remnants. Adela had gone to America, and it was said that the boat on which she had sailed had sunk and that all the passengers had lost their lives. We were unable to verify this rumour, but all trace of the girl was lost and we never heard of her again.  A new age began - empty, sober and joyless, like a sheet of white paper. A new servant girl, Genya, anaemic, pale, and boneless, mooned about the rooms. When one patted her on the back, she wriggled, stretched like a snake, or purred like a cat. She had a dull white complexion, and even the insides of her eyelids were white. She was so absent-minded that she sometimes made a white sauce from old letters and invoices: it was sickly and inedible.  At that t
Read more

Two Bad Men, Said Their Murderers

-
Image
John Choate, 25 August 1818 - 3 August 1869 Crokett Choate, 1842 -3 August 1869 This tells of a grave by the dashing wave A fond friends lip that did quiver Of an eye that's hid by a leaden lid And a voice now stilled forever. John on the left.  They were originally buried where they were killed but October of that year the Refugio Masons moved the bodies to Rockport.  This was all part of the Sutton-Taylor feud, the Suttons were backed by the U. S. Government and of no particular righteousness, they were badge wearing murderers and bullies.  The two story house with the porch running around the second floor in the left background belongs to my sister.  A lovely house and the best behaved neighbors possible! Photos by Steve Davis. The man who killed them.  Sheriff.  Regulator. Murderer. https://books.google.com/books?id=PUvanZiwzdUC&pg=PA64&lpg=PA64&dq=john+and+crockett+choate+death+jack+helm+gunfight&source=bl&
Read more

Roller Ball Murder

-
Image
The game, the game: here we go again. All glory to it, all things I am and own because of Roller Ball Murder. Our team stands in a row, twenty of us in salute as the corporation hymn is played by the band. We view the hardwood oval track which offers us the bumps and rewards of mayhem: fifty yards long, thirty yards across the ends, high banked, and at the top of the walls the cannons which fire those frenzied twenty-pound balls-similar to bowling balls, made of ebonite-at velocities over three hundred miles an hour. The balls careen around the track, eventually slowing and falling with diminishing centrifugal force, and as they go to ground or strike a player another volley fires. Here we are, our team: ten roller skaters, five motorbike riders, five runners (or clubbers). As the hymn plays, we stand erect and tough; eighty thousand sit watching in the stands and another two billion viewers around the world inspect the set of our jaws on .multivision. The runners, those bastards
Read more