Gods’ Man is a wordless novel by American artist Lynd Ward 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. Ward’s example inspired cartoonists Art Spiegelman and Will Eisner to create their first graphic novels.
About Gods’ Man in brief
Gods’ Man is a wordless novel by American artist Lynd Ward 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. Ward’s example inspired cartoonists Art Spiegelman and Will Eisner to create their first graphic novels. The artwork is executed in black and white; the images vary in size and dimension, up to 6 by 4 inches, the size of the opening and closing images of each chapter. The story parallels the Faust theme, and the artwork and execution show the influence of film, in particular those of German studio Ufa. The placement of the apostrophe in the title implies a plurality of gods, rather than Judeo-Christianity’s monotheistic God. It alludes to a line from the play Bacchides by ancient Roman playwright Plautus: “He whom the gods favor, dies young. The artist is jailed for it, but he escapes, and a mob chases him from the city. A woman who lives in the woods discovers him and brings him back to health.
The artist prepares to paint a portrait of the stranger but fatally falls from the cliff with fright when the stranger reveals a skull-like head behind the mask. He is injured when he jumps into a ravine to avoid recapture. A mysterious stranger returns and beckons the artist to the edge of a cliff. He dies from his injuries and falls to the ground, where he is found by a woman who is a friend of the mysterious stranger and helps him get back to his feet. Ward used symbolic contrast of dark and light to emphasize the corruption of the city, where even in daylight the buildings darken the skies; in the countryside, the scenes are bathed in natural light. Ward was a son of Methodist minister Harry F. Ward, a social activist and the first chairman of the American Civil Liberties Union. He was early drawn to art, and decided to become an artist when his first-grade teacher told him that “Ward was an artist.” spelled backward was “draw”.
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This page is based on the article Gods’ Man published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 01, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
