finished 21 February 2006

This book is a advertised as a novel in woodcuts. It is actually the second in a series of six such thin books produced during a decade (1929-1937) in the life of Lynd Ward, who became a successful illustrator. Dover has also published the first, God's Man as companion to this which I ordered at the same time.

The story is of a 19th century man who makes his fortune as a slaver then retires to a European city to live and raise up his children. The son grows up to become an astronomer of some reknown, but he is framed for a murder in a communist-style labor riot and is hung. The daughter gets charmed by a wealthy man into a life of prostitution. The elder man goes insane and is last seen playing a drum he had taken an African he murders at the start of the story. There is a mystical person, playing a flute, who shows up grinning at certain key points in the plot.

To call these works novels is a little misleading. Mad Man's Drum has only about 139 images in a simple one per page linear sequence with no textual support. The story has only a few recognizeable characters, no real subplots, and takes about half an hour to look at thoroughly. It should really be called a short story by the qualities of its construction and use. The quality of its artwork is good, especially since the medium of woodcut requires a hammer and chisel to carve every line of white that appears in an image. Because of the nature of this labor, the images tend to have a lot of darkness in them, giving a moody feel to the content. The preface claims this to be the forerunner of the graphic novels which illustrators still experiment with today. This claim is also somewhat misleading. While I am certain certain comic artists have known of these woodcuts, the origin of graphic novels come from comic book series which descended from newspaper comic strips. This work was always a transfer of pen and ink-- putting black lines onto a white medium. Graphic novels have never yet come into their own as a form of artistic expression, remaining just a off-shoot of the comic book series production. Storyboards used in the movie industry are probably the most active productive use of a series of images to tell a story, and few of us actually see these. While the amount of labor and skill it took to produce these woodcuts is astonishing, there is nothing much in this medium to recommend the design decisions that went into producing these images.

If Dover Publications will put out all six of these woodcut novels in a single inexpensive book, it would be well worth a modest price to compare this work with modern panel art. But the current presentation on glossy heavy paper is much too expensive for the modest series of images. I buy comic books almost every week and $15 for what amounts to 30 minutes of reading is just not a good value. The artist's labor in making these woodcuts has long ago been realized with the sale of the original books, so the production now after 70 years ought to be just so much for ink and paper and little else. The fact that these were incredible works of artistic labor does not justify incredible prices anymore.