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Woodcuts #1
Gods' Man: A Novel in Woodcuts
The most important work of American artist and illustrator Lynd Ward, Gods' Man is a powerfully evocative novel, told entirely through woodcuts. Ward (1905�85), in employing the concept of the wordless pictorial narrative, acknowledged his predecessors the European artists Frans Masereel and Otto Nückel. Released the week of the 1929 stock market crash, Gods' Man was the first of six woodcut novels that Ward produced over the next eight years. It presents the artist's struggles in a world characterized by both innocence and corruptions and can be considered a forerunner of the contemporary graphic novel, popularized by artists such as Daniel Clowes.
Although best known for his "novels in woodcuts," Ward was also a successful illustrator of children's books. In 1953 he won the Caldecott Medal for The Biggest Bear , which he both wrote and illustrated. His illustrations also appeared in numerous books that received the Newbery Medal. Ward's final work was the acclaimed wordless novel The Silver Pony (1973).
Until now, Gods' Man has only been widely available in high-priced original editions. This top-quality, low-cost republication of Ward's masterpiece will be welcomed by collectors of his work as well as by readers new to his achievement.
Although best known for his "novels in woodcuts," Ward was also a successful illustrator of children's books. In 1953 he won the Caldecott Medal for The Biggest Bear , which he both wrote and illustrated. His illustrations also appeared in numerous books that received the Newbery Medal. Ward's final work was the acclaimed wordless novel The Silver Pony (1973).
Until now, Gods' Man has only been widely available in high-priced original editions. This top-quality, low-cost republication of Ward's masterpiece will be welcomed by collectors of his work as well as by readers new to his achievement.
160 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1929
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1,196 people want to read
About the author
Lynd Ward
176books65followersLYND WARD (1905-1985) illustrated more than two hundred books for children and adults throughout his prolific career. Winner of the Caldecott Medal for his watercolors in The Biggest Bear, Mr. Ward was also famous for his wood engravings, which are featured in museum collections throughout the United States and abroad.
Married to May Yonge McNeer, several of whose works he illustrated. /author/show...
Married to May Yonge McNeer, several of whose works he illustrated. /author/show...
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 129 reviews
September 30, 2024
If you have never read anything by Lynd Ward (LW) I would highly recommend that you look him up! This wordless book about how society forces an artist to make a Faustian bargain is both fascinating and horrifying. Using wood engravings LW very much anticipates German expressionist cinema; would have loved to have seen a collaboration between him and Kafka!
July 6, 2016
I have a hard time with the mostly visual. I need to read the words, then process them into an image, translate that image back to words, and THEN glean the meaning. So when I'm confronted with something like a graphic novel, it can be a challenge—I zoom through all the text and finish the thing in like a half hour, and I always feel like I'm missing something.
I heard about God's Man from a Jim James interview; he credits the novel for almost totally inspiring his solo album and claims he felt its themes parallel his own life. I love Jim James, it was less than ten bucks on Amazon, I needed free shipping, and a couple of days later I had it in my hand. I flipped through it, marveled at the absurd intricacies and craftmanship of the woodblock prints, and just kind of...lost interest for a while.
I kept it on a small table reserved for things I'm in the middle of reading and after a few days it became obscured by titles such as "The Giving Tree" (an awful moral. just awful.), ""Go Dog Go" (P.D. Eastman is suuuuch Dr. Seuss ripoff, it makes me so mad and I tried to explain it to my daughter but she was just like, oh mommy just read), and piles of Entertainment Weekly issues I don't have the heart to read for a variety of reasons (their spoiler policy is infuriating; the overall tone and attempts at humor are cringe-inducing; I basically keep it around for Kit Harrington photo spreads). And so a few days turned into a few months. You know how it is.
My four-year-old daughter has co-opted a beautiful if raggedy very old edition of Grimm's Fairy Tales as her personal "book of knowledge." She flips through it, looking for instructions on how to soothe ill teddy bears and predictions on when her parents will finally take her to goddamn Darien Lake, because the commercial claims it's "only a short drive away!" and when I tried to explain how far Buffalo is from Albany, she stopped listening and scribbled something furiously all over a gorgeous illustration of Rapunzel. I will go ahead and assume it's her murder journal. Anyway, last night she dropped God's Man in my lap. Told me I needed to read it.
It took me about fifteen minutes. I really, really concentrated on it so I didn't miss anything. Once I gathered what story the woodblocks are actually depicting, I was slightly disappointed: the age-old Faustian tale of selling one's soul to the devil in exchange for your heart's desire. Without any disguise or flowery cover-up plot, it straightforwardly depicts a young artist heading into the carnival of earthly delights that is The City and quickly becoming disillusioned. His hopelessness is detected by a shadowy figure who then offers him a magical paintbrush, but he has to sign a contract! He signs it, becomes a wildly successful painter, and yet—he is unhappy. It all feels dirty. And so he runs away to the mountains to build a more simple, happy life complete with loving wife and child. But ah, he signed the contract and the shadowy figure eventually, tragically, comes to collect.
As I turned the last page, my initial disappointment turned into a heavy satisfaction. Maybe the physical reality of creating the woodblock prints had allowed some sort of esoteric imbuement of meaning; maybe the simplicity cut to the chase and allowed the message to pierce a heart more thoroughly; maybe, maybe, maybe. Whatever it was, this book is legit. It has magic.
But why is it called God's Man?
I heard about God's Man from a Jim James interview; he credits the novel for almost totally inspiring his solo album and claims he felt its themes parallel his own life. I love Jim James, it was less than ten bucks on Amazon, I needed free shipping, and a couple of days later I had it in my hand. I flipped through it, marveled at the absurd intricacies and craftmanship of the woodblock prints, and just kind of...lost interest for a while.
I kept it on a small table reserved for things I'm in the middle of reading and after a few days it became obscured by titles such as "The Giving Tree" (an awful moral. just awful.), ""Go Dog Go" (P.D. Eastman is suuuuch Dr. Seuss ripoff, it makes me so mad and I tried to explain it to my daughter but she was just like, oh mommy just read), and piles of Entertainment Weekly issues I don't have the heart to read for a variety of reasons (their spoiler policy is infuriating; the overall tone and attempts at humor are cringe-inducing; I basically keep it around for Kit Harrington photo spreads). And so a few days turned into a few months. You know how it is.
My four-year-old daughter has co-opted a beautiful if raggedy very old edition of Grimm's Fairy Tales as her personal "book of knowledge." She flips through it, looking for instructions on how to soothe ill teddy bears and predictions on when her parents will finally take her to goddamn Darien Lake, because the commercial claims it's "only a short drive away!" and when I tried to explain how far Buffalo is from Albany, she stopped listening and scribbled something furiously all over a gorgeous illustration of Rapunzel. I will go ahead and assume it's her murder journal. Anyway, last night she dropped God's Man in my lap. Told me I needed to read it.
It took me about fifteen minutes. I really, really concentrated on it so I didn't miss anything. Once I gathered what story the woodblocks are actually depicting, I was slightly disappointed: the age-old Faustian tale of selling one's soul to the devil in exchange for your heart's desire. Without any disguise or flowery cover-up plot, it straightforwardly depicts a young artist heading into the carnival of earthly delights that is The City and quickly becoming disillusioned. His hopelessness is detected by a shadowy figure who then offers him a magical paintbrush, but he has to sign a contract! He signs it, becomes a wildly successful painter, and yet—he is unhappy. It all feels dirty. And so he runs away to the mountains to build a more simple, happy life complete with loving wife and child. But ah, he signed the contract and the shadowy figure eventually, tragically, comes to collect.
As I turned the last page, my initial disappointment turned into a heavy satisfaction. Maybe the physical reality of creating the woodblock prints had allowed some sort of esoteric imbuement of meaning; maybe the simplicity cut to the chase and allowed the message to pierce a heart more thoroughly; maybe, maybe, maybe. Whatever it was, this book is legit. It has magic.
But why is it called God's Man?
February 4, 2015
Gods' Man is the generally-acknowledged masterpiece both of Ward and of the American wing of the entire early-20th-century wordless woodcut-novel vogue (described ). As such, it is often cited as a precursor to the graphic novel, even as a masterpiece of comics (per McCloud's expansive "sequential art" definition) in its own right.
The 139-image sequence, in which a storm-tossed painter comes to the City (i.e., Babylon, the corrupting city of the pastoral imagination), strikes a Faustian bargain with a magic-brush-bearing masked man, and finds worldly success as a consequence of the contract he signed. Alas, material rewards prove to be spiritual deficits when he learns that his new lover/model/muse is branded with sign of the dollar and is sleeping around behind his back with men from all walks of life and social institutions. The allegory is clear: money is a prostitute who can be had by anyone, as opposed to those genuinely rare and authentic non-commodities, namely, genius and love. (The sexism of this figure hardly needs remarking—except to say that the socialism of fools comes in many forms, so many that one begins, really, to wonder about socialism.) Our hero leaves Babylon and finds a wife among the mountains, with whom he has a son, also destined for the artistic life; the whole family revels amid the sublime heights in images that will inevitably call to mind fascist kitsch. We seem to have ended happily, except that the artist-hero did sign a contract, and the masked man eventually arrives to collect what was promised: the artist's life.
I had no desire to summarize Gods' Man in the tone of the above, the hip and knowing jadedness of the seen-it-all Internet addict. I dislike the prevalence of that tone in our cultural commentary. Gods' Man, when transformed from image to word, does begin to show its faults, which range from disturbing ideological implications to risible earnestness. When encountered as a set of stark images, though, the book possesses a primordial power that cannot be mocked away. And the images can ironize their own apparent design on the reader just as well as words can: I for one find the alienating city as Ward presents it rather glamorous, even as I share his frustration at the total absorption of art by money that modernity seems to require.
In fact, in this time of omnipresent ideology-critique, we should think carefully about a book like this. Surely, it has a quality of naivete, of outsider art, that renders it fit largely for ironic appreciation (hence its inclusion in ). But I find it far more powerful and memorable, far more rich in texture and implication, than such a contemporary work of perfect tastefulness and impeccable ideology as . What is it about these images, their incised black-and-white edges perfectly miming their binary moralism and their cutting sincerity and fury, that impresses itself on the mind? Wood engraving (which is the more precise name for Ward's method than "woodcut") is a negative art: the artist cuts into the block a negative space in order to depict a positive substance on paper. As such, it is a reverse or backward art, and perhaps all such backward artists are, to quote another engraver, of the devil's party whether they know it or not. Ward's work overruns its own moralism to expand the mind with an energy and vigor unknown to artists whose aspirations remain confined to the homely and the secular. Something seems to demand that truly great art skirt the edge of tastelessness, and that it be complex only incidentally, as a side-effect of trying to be absolutely simple. What is the difference between tastelessness—that quality shared between trash and high art—and banality—signature of the middlebrow? It may have something to do with extremism, with an insistence on putting gods and devils onstage alongside mere man...
To bring this disorderly rumination to an end: in spite of everything I know, I love this book. I would have to write a whole treatise on aesthetics to say why.
The 139-image sequence, in which a storm-tossed painter comes to the City (i.e., Babylon, the corrupting city of the pastoral imagination), strikes a Faustian bargain with a magic-brush-bearing masked man, and finds worldly success as a consequence of the contract he signed. Alas, material rewards prove to be spiritual deficits when he learns that his new lover/model/muse is branded with sign of the dollar and is sleeping around behind his back with men from all walks of life and social institutions. The allegory is clear: money is a prostitute who can be had by anyone, as opposed to those genuinely rare and authentic non-commodities, namely, genius and love. (The sexism of this figure hardly needs remarking—except to say that the socialism of fools comes in many forms, so many that one begins, really, to wonder about socialism.) Our hero leaves Babylon and finds a wife among the mountains, with whom he has a son, also destined for the artistic life; the whole family revels amid the sublime heights in images that will inevitably call to mind fascist kitsch. We seem to have ended happily, except that the artist-hero did sign a contract, and the masked man eventually arrives to collect what was promised: the artist's life.
I had no desire to summarize Gods' Man in the tone of the above, the hip and knowing jadedness of the seen-it-all Internet addict. I dislike the prevalence of that tone in our cultural commentary. Gods' Man, when transformed from image to word, does begin to show its faults, which range from disturbing ideological implications to risible earnestness. When encountered as a set of stark images, though, the book possesses a primordial power that cannot be mocked away. And the images can ironize their own apparent design on the reader just as well as words can: I for one find the alienating city as Ward presents it rather glamorous, even as I share his frustration at the total absorption of art by money that modernity seems to require.
In fact, in this time of omnipresent ideology-critique, we should think carefully about a book like this. Surely, it has a quality of naivete, of outsider art, that renders it fit largely for ironic appreciation (hence its inclusion in ). But I find it far more powerful and memorable, far more rich in texture and implication, than such a contemporary work of perfect tastefulness and impeccable ideology as . What is it about these images, their incised black-and-white edges perfectly miming their binary moralism and their cutting sincerity and fury, that impresses itself on the mind? Wood engraving (which is the more precise name for Ward's method than "woodcut") is a negative art: the artist cuts into the block a negative space in order to depict a positive substance on paper. As such, it is a reverse or backward art, and perhaps all such backward artists are, to quote another engraver, of the devil's party whether they know it or not. Ward's work overruns its own moralism to expand the mind with an energy and vigor unknown to artists whose aspirations remain confined to the homely and the secular. Something seems to demand that truly great art skirt the edge of tastelessness, and that it be complex only incidentally, as a side-effect of trying to be absolutely simple. What is the difference between tastelessness—that quality shared between trash and high art—and banality—signature of the middlebrow? It may have something to do with extremism, with an insistence on putting gods and devils onstage alongside mere man...
To bring this disorderly rumination to an end: in spite of everything I know, I love this book. I would have to write a whole treatise on aesthetics to say why.
September 6, 2018
I thought that this would take longer to read, but I have to say that it is still time well spent. This is a , a sort-of proto-graphic novel. It was based on woodcut paintings of medieval Europe and Asia. This is the story of a Faustian-deal that an artist makes for fame & fortune. It is not an original plot, but the main draw is not art....because it is the only draw. This genre preceded the modern graphic novel, but it is very different in that there are no words beyond signs on buildings. You have to decipher from the action in the picture as to what is happening. Modern graphic novels do sometimes come close (e.g. ), but this is black & white to the point story. I had to study each picture carefully to understand what was happening. Very German Expressionist.
On an interesting note: one of the illustrations from this book was used as the book cover for an edition 's . Huh.
March 14, 2020
El Acorazado Potemkin de los ós
El paradójico género de la novela en imágenes, o wordless novel o novel in woodcuts, tuvo una corta vida, prácticamente limitada a la tercera y la cuarta década del siglo XX. Es el testimonio de un momento histórico peculiar, en el que empezaban a existir los verdaderos medios de masas, y las fronteras entre géneros y formatos todavía no estaban bien establecidas. Pese a su nombre, la novela en imágenes tiene menos en común con la literatura que con el cine mudo, y particularmente con el expresionismo alemán. También recoge características del panfleto político. E, inevitablemente, también tiene mucho en común con las tiras óas, que ya circulaban en los medios gráficos.
Este parentesco es posiblemente el más cercano, pero también el que menos hubiesen querido asumir los autores de este tipo de trabajos. Aún faltaba mucho camino por recorrer para que obras de pretensiones serias se asumieran como historietas, aunque fuese bajo el rótulo tranquilizador de “novelas gráficas� � muy cercano a “novela en imágenes� e igualmente inapropiado.
Lo que es claro es que hoy en día podemos leer God’s Man como un ó, por más que en su momento no quisiera serlo, o incluso aunque verdaderamente no lo fuera. A mí, en lo personal, me resulta difícil verlo como cualquier otra cosa. No es una mera colección de ilustraciones, mucho menos una novela. Si God’s Man prospera es gracias a su dominio del intervalo, el elemento fundamental del lenguaje narrativo del ó.
En esta área, Lynd Ward es ampliamente superior a su maestro, Frans Masereel, cuyas novelas en imágenes tendían a ser mucho menos coherentes y más desorganizadas. Los intervalos que emplea Ward varían mucho en su duración; a veces, entre una imagen y otra transcurren unos cuantos segundos, a veces años y hasta siglos, y en algún caso dos imágenes parecen mostrarnos un mismo instante desde perspectivas distintas, pero la coherencia narrativa nunca sufre en esta sucesión.
En God’s Man, Lynd Ward creó algo nuevo, un lenguaje artístico que las tiras óas de la época estaban muy lejos de alcanzar (para ponerlo en contexto, del mismo año que este libro data la primera aventura de Tintín). Las depuradas xilografías con las que compuso su historia también superan notablemente a las de sus predecesores. Evocan al cine del expresionismo alemán, pero también tienen un aire renacentista muy apropiado para el tema del pacto con el demonio que quiere tratar.
Por desgracia, más allá de las virtudes de God’s Man, Ward no se decidió a explorar todas las posibilidades narrativas de esta forma. Si no hubiese considerado una bajeza combinar texto e ilustraciones, o poner varias ilustraciones en una misma página, y buscar maneras de agruparlas, diría, como en un principio me propuse decir, que God’s Man fue el Ciudadano Kane de los ós. Aunque sea menos marketinero, me veo obligado a decir que fue más bien como El acorazado Potemkin. No fijó la forma definitiva del medio, no mostró toda la gama de sus posibilidades, pero hizo todo lo posible con los recursos de los que disponía su época.
El paradójico género de la novela en imágenes, o wordless novel o novel in woodcuts, tuvo una corta vida, prácticamente limitada a la tercera y la cuarta década del siglo XX. Es el testimonio de un momento histórico peculiar, en el que empezaban a existir los verdaderos medios de masas, y las fronteras entre géneros y formatos todavía no estaban bien establecidas. Pese a su nombre, la novela en imágenes tiene menos en común con la literatura que con el cine mudo, y particularmente con el expresionismo alemán. También recoge características del panfleto político. E, inevitablemente, también tiene mucho en común con las tiras óas, que ya circulaban en los medios gráficos.
Este parentesco es posiblemente el más cercano, pero también el que menos hubiesen querido asumir los autores de este tipo de trabajos. Aún faltaba mucho camino por recorrer para que obras de pretensiones serias se asumieran como historietas, aunque fuese bajo el rótulo tranquilizador de “novelas gráficas� � muy cercano a “novela en imágenes� e igualmente inapropiado.
Lo que es claro es que hoy en día podemos leer God’s Man como un ó, por más que en su momento no quisiera serlo, o incluso aunque verdaderamente no lo fuera. A mí, en lo personal, me resulta difícil verlo como cualquier otra cosa. No es una mera colección de ilustraciones, mucho menos una novela. Si God’s Man prospera es gracias a su dominio del intervalo, el elemento fundamental del lenguaje narrativo del ó.
En esta área, Lynd Ward es ampliamente superior a su maestro, Frans Masereel, cuyas novelas en imágenes tendían a ser mucho menos coherentes y más desorganizadas. Los intervalos que emplea Ward varían mucho en su duración; a veces, entre una imagen y otra transcurren unos cuantos segundos, a veces años y hasta siglos, y en algún caso dos imágenes parecen mostrarnos un mismo instante desde perspectivas distintas, pero la coherencia narrativa nunca sufre en esta sucesión.
En God’s Man, Lynd Ward creó algo nuevo, un lenguaje artístico que las tiras óas de la época estaban muy lejos de alcanzar (para ponerlo en contexto, del mismo año que este libro data la primera aventura de Tintín). Las depuradas xilografías con las que compuso su historia también superan notablemente a las de sus predecesores. Evocan al cine del expresionismo alemán, pero también tienen un aire renacentista muy apropiado para el tema del pacto con el demonio que quiere tratar.
Por desgracia, más allá de las virtudes de God’s Man, Ward no se decidió a explorar todas las posibilidades narrativas de esta forma. Si no hubiese considerado una bajeza combinar texto e ilustraciones, o poner varias ilustraciones en una misma página, y buscar maneras de agruparlas, diría, como en un principio me propuse decir, que God’s Man fue el Ciudadano Kane de los ós. Aunque sea menos marketinero, me veo obligado a decir que fue más bien como El acorazado Potemkin. No fijó la forma definitiva del medio, no mostró toda la gama de sus posibilidades, pero hizo todo lo posible con los recursos de los que disponía su época.
December 3, 2014
را��عة بشكل كبير لا يوجد كلام ولكن كئيبة للغاية
الصراع ما بين الحياة والموت
والخيانة والوفاء
من خلال صور مرسومة بالابيض والاسود
الصراع ما بين الحياة والموت
والخيانة والوفاء
من خلال صور مرسومة بالابيض والاسود
February 21, 2013
Read this in the forty minutes of my first listen to Regions of Light and Sound of God by Jim James, and it was a profoundly moving experience. I know Lynd Ward's work stands alone (and does so well) but the way they complement each other is worth exploring if you're interested.
January 29, 2014
Though it is my first attempt at his work, I am in love with Lynd Ward's style. This book, or rather Ward's oeuvre, is an equivalent to pure cinema. Kubrick believed that a piece of pure cinema should be devoid of words and usual narration and should succeed in telling its story through light and sounds. "2001 Space Odyssey" was a step towards that goal I believe.
But much earlier, Ward had achieved "pure storytelling", I wonder if there in any such word, through his art. German Expressionism is manifested in these sketches (woodcuts), which are so good to look at. Helpless men overshadowed by tall, looming, tower-like buildings - these could very well be scenes from a long forgotten Fritz Lang movie. Above all, the woodcuts are darkly delicious, beautiful also, and horrifying at times. I think Ward is a champion of the medium and I am glad I found him.
But much earlier, Ward had achieved "pure storytelling", I wonder if there in any such word, through his art. German Expressionism is manifested in these sketches (woodcuts), which are so good to look at. Helpless men overshadowed by tall, looming, tower-like buildings - these could very well be scenes from a long forgotten Fritz Lang movie. Above all, the woodcuts are darkly delicious, beautiful also, and horrifying at times. I think Ward is a champion of the medium and I am glad I found him.
February 4, 2015
A retelling of the Faust theme; a struggling young artist sells his soul to a mysterious stranger for a magic paintbrush which brings him fame and wealth. Disillusioned, he returns to the countryside and marries, only to have the stranger return to collect on his bargain. This novel influenced Allen Ginsberg's beat poem Howl and Art Spiegelberg's graphic novel Maus among other works.
March 31, 2017
Do group readings count?
Want to read
May 19, 2015This is copy number 40 of 300 signed numbered books.
August 27, 2024
A friend loaned me a copy of “Gods� Man: A Novel in Woodcuts� by Lynd Ward. I had no idea what I was getting into when I was opening it for the first time.
“Gods� Man� is a wordless narrative told entirely through a series of woodcuts. The narrative, I think, is as follows: an artist on a wind tossed sea ends up at a large city (was there a shipwreck? Was he blown off course? It was unclear to me). The artist then strikes up a Faustian deal of some sort with a shadowy man. The artist seems to get fame and fortune, only to discover that his model and muse had a dollar sign tattooed on her and she is sleeping around with others. The artist leaves the city, finds a wife, and has a child. The shadowy figure returns, reminds him of their contract, and takes the artist to a mountaintop. The artist either falls off or is pushed off. In the final woodcut, we see that the shadowy figure is death himself.
From what I read on the back, this was written in 1929 and is widely considered a forerunner to the sequential art we see in comics and graphic novels today. I loved it and will probably reread it as soon as I’m done writing this review!
“Gods� Man� is a wordless narrative told entirely through a series of woodcuts. The narrative, I think, is as follows: an artist on a wind tossed sea ends up at a large city (was there a shipwreck? Was he blown off course? It was unclear to me). The artist then strikes up a Faustian deal of some sort with a shadowy man. The artist seems to get fame and fortune, only to discover that his model and muse had a dollar sign tattooed on her and she is sleeping around with others. The artist leaves the city, finds a wife, and has a child. The shadowy figure returns, reminds him of their contract, and takes the artist to a mountaintop. The artist either falls off or is pushed off. In the final woodcut, we see that the shadowy figure is death himself.
From what I read on the back, this was written in 1929 and is widely considered a forerunner to the sequential art we see in comics and graphic novels today. I loved it and will probably reread it as soon as I’m done writing this review!
October 18, 2020
This is a masterpiece in "wordless novel", woodcut technique and visual expressionism. It is a sharp, shadowy-black-and-white (like a film noir), partly poetic, mostly sinister story of a young, ambitious painter. Uncanny figures and a hopeless yearning for a creative life, from Great Depression-era U.S.
January 20, 2021
For my German class on graphic novels.
I much preferred this one to the other woodcut novels we took a look at. Perhaps I'm a sucker for messaging that warns its readers against the evils of money, but this was beautifully drawn and the morality in the book is universal in a way that I don't think the other novels were. While the other novels we read focused on the universality of certain facets of life (birth, love, adventure, work, death), this one focused on the universal draw of money/evil on man and the consequences associated (i.e. losing sight of who you are, commodification of one's passions and oneself, people using you for what they can get, etc.)
I much preferred this one to the other woodcut novels we took a look at. Perhaps I'm a sucker for messaging that warns its readers against the evils of money, but this was beautifully drawn and the morality in the book is universal in a way that I don't think the other novels were. While the other novels we read focused on the universality of certain facets of life (birth, love, adventure, work, death), this one focused on the universal draw of money/evil on man and the consequences associated (i.e. losing sight of who you are, commodification of one's passions and oneself, people using you for what they can get, etc.)
May 13, 2018
No hay mucho que decir. Novela gráfica + pacto faustiano + reflexión sobre el mundo del arte + art déco + expresionismo + novela sin palabras = obra maestra.
February 11, 2023
A re-read. I don't love this story. But the art remains very cool.
I read the Lynd Ward Graphic Novel award nominees and winners. But I don't know Lynd Ward at all. When I caught him claimed by David Weisner as a major inspiration, I figured it was time for that to change. This is some pretty amazing art. But not really what I like. And I definitely prefer words to wordless. And it ended pretty creepified. But making a deal with the devil for a magical guitar or fiddle or in this case paintbrush clearly worked even without words. Dark.
I read the Lynd Ward Graphic Novel award nominees and winners. But I don't know Lynd Ward at all. When I caught him claimed by David Weisner as a major inspiration, I figured it was time for that to change. This is some pretty amazing art. But not really what I like. And I definitely prefer words to wordless. And it ended pretty creepified. But making a deal with the devil for a magical guitar or fiddle or in this case paintbrush clearly worked even without words. Dark.
January 6, 2013
In popular culture - maybe it will be interesting to someone to know that concept for Jim James's Regions of Light and Sound of God, is based on this graphic novel, as stated here:
In my opinion music really accompanies novel very well. Someone might want to try it out. :)
In my opinion music really accompanies novel very well. Someone might want to try it out. :)
July 27, 2015
Conheci em boa hora as ilustrações de Lynd Ward num cd de Tomahawk. Custou a acreditar que ele tinha feito ilustrações em livros de crianças perante a agressividade de muitas imagens e que os trabalhos tenham sido feitos por gravuras em madeira. Não custa nada a acreditar porém que é um dos maiores ilustradores norte-americanos e que God's Man tenha sido um precursor das graphic novels, que influenciou muitos ilustradores e obras de culto que se seguiram.
August 18, 2008
My mom owned an edition of this from the 1930's and I would read it as a child, thumbing to the scenes of the dark-eyed temptress. The pages were yellow, soft, and smelled of cigarettes. At the time this book seemed voluptuous and dangerous, but it also seemed to inhabit the worlds of high art and high morality.
June 10, 2008
No words, 136 wonderful wood engravings by one of the finest masters - Lynd Ward. The story is iconic, a very familiar Faustian tale. But the "white line" engravings are superb. A landmark work in graphic fiction which showcases Ward's wonderfully stark white on black, Depression era printmaking. "Read" this book for artistic enjoyment, not for fantasy or adventure.
September 24, 2010
Flat out amazing, from an art standpoint--gorgeous woodcuts. The story--the artist in a world of corrupting commerce, exploiters, and love and beauty--may be old hat now, but was probably fresher in the 1920's. Well worth checking out for the beauty of the woodcuts alone.
May 3, 2011
Wasn't a really huge an of this. It has beautiful artwork, but the story itself was actually quite boring to me.
December 15, 2021
I cannot, for the life of me, remember how I came across this book. I think it was when I was flirting with linocut art. I bought the full kit to craft away to my heart's content and by the time it came the desire to embark was lost. But finding the book in a TBR pile I looked it up online because it looked cool. This is what Wikipedia has to say...
'Gods' Man is a wordless novel by American artist Lynd Ward (1905-1985) published in 1929. In 139 captionless woodblock prints, it tells the Faustian story of an artist who signs away his soul for a magic paintbrush. Gods' Man was the very first American wordless novel, and is considered a precursor of the graphic novel, whose development it influenced.'
Which is a damn good summary and definitely imparted a healthy dose of curiosity.
The artwork has the mark of real singular talent. It must have influenced Tim Burton at some point. There's a hint of the grotesque to a lot of the figures but shining through is a real transcendent divinity also. There are a few scenes where, rendered in the absence of ink is this heavenly light that just feels powerful. Fits the narrative perfectly.
A Bible illustrated like this would end the game... And possibly convert the masses. I'd be in. Sign my soul to it in a heartbeat.
March 3, 2019
An incredible expressionist wordless early graphic novel, really a product of its time and ahead of its time at the same time (too many "times").
August 21, 2024
What the hell? Picked this up randomly at a Half Price Books and now I’ve been confronted with a beautiful, beautiful story? Now I have to binge Lynd Ward and I won’t rest until I do so?
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January 18, 2019this was also a very quick read about a man who worships the sun everyday. the art work was very good and dark it only had color from the sun. the fact that he made all of these images threw carving wood is super cool. would recommend
November 23, 2016
I encountered the book Gods' Man when I was reading a book on documented cases of demon possession. In the book, one of the women who had been possessed revealed that as a child she had often read a book of pictures from her parents' bookcase called "Gods' Man." The book has no words, but is a collection of "woodcuts," a type of picture made from a block of carved wood being pressed on paper. The book was written in the 1930's, and is a precursor of later graphic novels. In Gods' Man, the pictures tell a story. Essentially the story is a retelling of the Faust legend, with some interesting differences.
The story begins with a young man lost at sea, but then sees the clouds part to reveal the glorious sun. Later the young man, who is an artist, paints what he has seen. After giving away all his money, he is unable to pay for his food and tries to bargain using his painting, but unsuccessfully. However a mysterious black-masked figure notices the raw talent of the artist and buys several of his paintings. He makes a contract of some kind with the artist. Again, since there are no words, we are left to guess at what the contract might say. It appears it was an exchange in which the artist would receive a special paintbrush that would give him the same talent that had inspired previous artists from ancient Egypt right up to van Gogh. In return we find later that the artist must paint a portrait of the masked man.
The young artist goes into the city and quickly becomes a successful artist with a good apartment and beautiful girlfriend, all arranged by a manager. However, he soon realizes that his girlfriend is nothing more than a paid escort arranged by his manager, and the artist suffers a shock when he stumbles through the city and becomes disillusioned as he can now see the corruption of money everywhere he looks, even in the church.
The artist is arrested, sentenced, and placed in prison. He attacks a guard to escape and makes his way out of the city where he is cared for by a kind woman who has a herd of animals. Eventually the two fall in love and have a child. The artist begins painting again and the child learns to paint as well. Just then the masked figure returns and the artist goes with him, waving goodbye to his wife and child, to a precipice where the masked man wants his portrait done. He removes the mask and the artist slides back in shock and horror, falling down the precipice to his death. In the final woodcut, we see the unmasked face of the mysterious masked man, and it is a laughing skull, the face of death.
What I found interesting about the book was firstly the title. It is not God's Man, as though the artist is a specially chosen man of God. It is Gods' Man, literally the man of the gods, referring to the old view of artists as ones inspired by the gods or the muses. Secondly, what seems interesting is that the artist is reduced to making the deal not because he isn't a good artist, or because he vainly wants all knowledge and talent, it is rather because he has eaten his meal and can't pay for it. This is really the theme of the book, that artists struggle from poverty and are tempted to "sell out" to relieve their poverty, leading to disillusionment because of the corruptly commercial nature of the world. In the end, the artist is happy not when his talent is recognized and bringing accolades in the city, but when he is an unknown, living in the woods with his small family and painting for pleasure and to teach his child.
I'm glad there are no words in the book, because it forces the reader to really search the pictures for meaning and leaves more room for interpretation and emotion than sometimes text does.
The story begins with a young man lost at sea, but then sees the clouds part to reveal the glorious sun. Later the young man, who is an artist, paints what he has seen. After giving away all his money, he is unable to pay for his food and tries to bargain using his painting, but unsuccessfully. However a mysterious black-masked figure notices the raw talent of the artist and buys several of his paintings. He makes a contract of some kind with the artist. Again, since there are no words, we are left to guess at what the contract might say. It appears it was an exchange in which the artist would receive a special paintbrush that would give him the same talent that had inspired previous artists from ancient Egypt right up to van Gogh. In return we find later that the artist must paint a portrait of the masked man.
The young artist goes into the city and quickly becomes a successful artist with a good apartment and beautiful girlfriend, all arranged by a manager. However, he soon realizes that his girlfriend is nothing more than a paid escort arranged by his manager, and the artist suffers a shock when he stumbles through the city and becomes disillusioned as he can now see the corruption of money everywhere he looks, even in the church.
The artist is arrested, sentenced, and placed in prison. He attacks a guard to escape and makes his way out of the city where he is cared for by a kind woman who has a herd of animals. Eventually the two fall in love and have a child. The artist begins painting again and the child learns to paint as well. Just then the masked figure returns and the artist goes with him, waving goodbye to his wife and child, to a precipice where the masked man wants his portrait done. He removes the mask and the artist slides back in shock and horror, falling down the precipice to his death. In the final woodcut, we see the unmasked face of the mysterious masked man, and it is a laughing skull, the face of death.
What I found interesting about the book was firstly the title. It is not God's Man, as though the artist is a specially chosen man of God. It is Gods' Man, literally the man of the gods, referring to the old view of artists as ones inspired by the gods or the muses. Secondly, what seems interesting is that the artist is reduced to making the deal not because he isn't a good artist, or because he vainly wants all knowledge and talent, it is rather because he has eaten his meal and can't pay for it. This is really the theme of the book, that artists struggle from poverty and are tempted to "sell out" to relieve their poverty, leading to disillusionment because of the corruptly commercial nature of the world. In the end, the artist is happy not when his talent is recognized and bringing accolades in the city, but when he is an unknown, living in the woods with his small family and painting for pleasure and to teach his child.
I'm glad there are no words in the book, because it forces the reader to really search the pictures for meaning and leaves more room for interpretation and emotion than sometimes text does.
April 15, 2015
I first heard of Lynd Ward when I attended a talk given by Art Spiegelman at Oberlin in 2014. Spiegelman was accompanied by a jazz band, which provided a musical accompaniment to the presentation of early "graphic novels" on a large screen. No mere set of slideshows, it was an attempt to dynamically present these wordless stories from the 1920s and 30s, since a weakness of the sequential image format is a certain lack of dynamism. I first experienced "Gods' Man" in that context, but I recently sat down at the library with a physical copy of the book to "read" it in its original format.
Susan Sontag may have considered "Gods' Man" to be camp, and it is certainly hard to deny that it is very cheesy and overwrought in many places. Ward's own comments on his novels seem to indicate he was aware of this, and to be fair to him, it is hard to communicate anything subtly when trying to tell a complete story in a limited number of still frames. The story is melodramatic, the ending predictable, the main character's motivation ultimately obscure, ironically because there is no way for the format to communicate in a manner less obvious. While the format might hamper narrative nuance, it doesn't diminish the power of the images themselves though. This is the true merit of "Gods' Man", and of Ward's work in general: the woodcuts are absolutely stunning. Most of them are striking enough taken as individual images, but it is still worthwhile to view them as individual fragments of a larger story. The flaws of the medium are in full display in this forerunner to the graphic novel, but the art is great enough to let one ignore the triteness of the narrative.
Susan Sontag may have considered "Gods' Man" to be camp, and it is certainly hard to deny that it is very cheesy and overwrought in many places. Ward's own comments on his novels seem to indicate he was aware of this, and to be fair to him, it is hard to communicate anything subtly when trying to tell a complete story in a limited number of still frames. The story is melodramatic, the ending predictable, the main character's motivation ultimately obscure, ironically because there is no way for the format to communicate in a manner less obvious. While the format might hamper narrative nuance, it doesn't diminish the power of the images themselves though. This is the true merit of "Gods' Man", and of Ward's work in general: the woodcuts are absolutely stunning. Most of them are striking enough taken as individual images, but it is still worthwhile to view them as individual fragments of a larger story. The flaws of the medium are in full display in this forerunner to the graphic novel, but the art is great enough to let one ignore the triteness of the narrative.
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June 6, 2014Does one thing lead to another?
Yes it does it explains the character life in order threw pictures. It shows you how in the beginning he was a nobody, but yet a man with a talent for drawing. So he meets this man along the way and the man tells him to sign a certain and he will gain fame for his artistic talents. So the man uninformed signs the deal. He becomes famous meets a girl but just as quick as he got it he lost it. in the finial pages at shows how he meets a girl marries her and has kid and is iving a happy life. When a man come along and tells him he has heard of his talents fro drawing and tells him to draw him something. The artists says, yes and takes him to a remote area. when they are far from the artists home. The man reveals himself and the deal he had signed in the beginning it turned out to be he signed a contract with death.
Yes it does it explains the character life in order threw pictures. It shows you how in the beginning he was a nobody, but yet a man with a talent for drawing. So he meets this man along the way and the man tells him to sign a certain and he will gain fame for his artistic talents. So the man uninformed signs the deal. He becomes famous meets a girl but just as quick as he got it he lost it. in the finial pages at shows how he meets a girl marries her and has kid and is iving a happy life. When a man come along and tells him he has heard of his talents fro drawing and tells him to draw him something. The artists says, yes and takes him to a remote area. when they are far from the artists home. The man reveals himself and the deal he had signed in the beginning it turned out to be he signed a contract with death.
June 21, 2015
Lynd Ward's first novel in woodcuts, and so far my favorite. There is a cleaner element of line in his artwork here, and the story is by far the most coherent of the ones I've read. I'm starting to get the impression that as he progressed in his career he overextended the medium of the wordless novel by making the artwork somewhat busy and the story harder to follow. This lines up with things I've read about his artistic evolution; his style becomes more complex and the he attempts to make the characters more three dimensional. I still have a couple more to read, so maybe he manages to pull off the depth he strives for in his later works; I hope so!
The story is clear, but not original--follows a predictable Faustian template. Maybe Faust was less over-done back when this was published? I give the story a 3, and the artwork a 5--overall a 4.
The story is clear, but not original--follows a predictable Faustian template. Maybe Faust was less over-done back when this was published? I give the story a 3, and the artwork a 5--overall a 4.
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