When you take a comic book, you expect literary-visual excitement. But artists and writers, both legendary and upcoming, have saturated readers with verbose plots in an illustrated metaphorical traffic jam worldwide. So it pays to cut off all the creative noise once in a while and pick up a wordless novel.
Xylography, made of wood engravings, is popularly known as a woodcut. Called banhua (in ancient China) and moku hanga (in Japan), this is a relief printing artistic technique, wherein an image is chiselled into the surface of a block of wood. Characters and images are represented in black at the surface level. Woodcut artists usually employ beech wood or cherry wood.
Lynd Kendall Ward, American artist and storyteller, was in the first grade when he discovered that his last name spelled ‘draw’ backwards. This fuelled his desire to be an artist. Then Belgian engraver Frans Masereel’s woodcut novel Die Sonne (The Sun) would later inspire Ward to craft Gods’ Man (1929). This was the first novel-length story of its kind published in the United States.
His work came to the notice of the academic community, specifically in the field of psychology. Henry A Murray used two prints from Ward’s Mad Man’s Drum in the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT). The latter had also contributed images for the adolescent fantasy-oriented Symonds Picture-Story Test (1948).
What is the story of Mad Man’s Drum? It would be inadequate or
unjust to describe it using a single intellect. In Rorschach’s Ink Blot Test, an indistinguishable image will mean something distinct to each person. Or putting it in simpler terms, an optimist and a pessimist see a half-full-half-empty glass in different ways. Still, that should not stop you from attempting to decode the novel. A man kills an African native, takes his drum and a hypothetical curse ensues. The remainder of the story is left to the reader’s imagination.
Ward’s initial challenge in Mad Man’s Drum was to portray unique physical features of each character in a sizeable ensemble. He incorporated a large range of emotions into these people, too. Some expressions had to be exaggerated to achieve a remarkable effect. Ward had such an eye for perfection that he would reject blocks because of visual imbalances or narration interruptions despite the numerous hours that were spent on them. In the end, his results have stood the test of time.
Comic book legend Will Eisner had said in Graphic Storytelling that Lynd Ward was the most provocative graphic storyteller of the 20th century. One can argue that the latter emerged during the dawn of the Depression as a messenger. Ward understands the price of a modern life, and he effortlessly weaves political themes, labour and class issues, and the racial injustice in the United States into Mad Man’s Drum.
The tale is so intriguing that it will make you read it again and again to learn or interpret unforeseen plot angles. Each frame acts as a window for a deaf voyeur, forcing you to listen to your brain, not the printed matter. A picture may speak a thousand words and Mad Man’s Drum tom-toms a new message that is hidden in a missed corner of the book.
— Nithin D Koshy blogs at
www.atlasreborn.blogspot.com