Wordless novel

This article is about the narrative genre. For the Christian evangelistic book, see Wordless Book.

Four high-contrast black-and-white images in sequence. In the first, a man, facing left with his right arm aloft, marches with a crowd towards a group of gun-wielding figures. In the second, uniformed figures are taking the man away amongst a crowd. In the third, the man is seen from behind at the bottom, with a group seated behind a bench in the distance near the top in an apparent courtroom. A crucifix hangs prominently above the bench, bathed in light in the darkened room. In the fourth, the man has his back to a wall, hands bound behind him, with another figure lying apparently dead at his feet. He faces right, apparently awaiting his execution by gunfire.
Wordless novels flourished in Germany in the 1920s and typically were made using woodcut or similar techniques in an Expressionist style. (Frans Masereel, 25 Images of a Man's Passion, 1918)

The wordless novel is a narrative genre that uses sequences of captionless pictures to tell a story. As artists have often made such books using woodcut and other relief printing techniques, the terms woodcut novel or novel in woodcuts are also used. The genre flourished primarily in the 1920s and 1930s and was most popular in Germany.

The wordless novel has its origin in the German Expressionist movement of the early 20th century. The typically socialist work drew inspiration from medieval woodcuts and used the awkward look of that medium to express angst and frustration at social injustice. The first such book was the Belgian Frans Masereel's 25 Images of a Man's Passion, published in 1918. The German Otto Nückel and other artists followed Masereel's example. Lynd Ward brought the genre to the United States in 1929 when he produced Gods' Man, which inspired other American wordless novels and a parody in 1930 by cartoonist Milt Gross with He Done Her Wrong. Following an early-1930s peak in production and popularity, the genre waned in the face of competition from sound films and anti-socialist censorship in Nazi Germany and the US.

Following World War II, new examples of wordless novels became increasingly rare, and early works went out of print. Interest began to revive in the 1960s when the American comics fandom subculture came to see wordless novels as prototypical book-length comics. In the 1970s, the example of the wordless novel inspired cartoonists such as Will Eisner and Art Spiegelman to create book-length non-genre comics—"graphic novels". Cartoonists such as Eric Drooker and Peter Kuper took direct inspiration from wordless novels to create wordless graphic novels.