Destiny

 
 
Destiny

by Otto Nuckel

Farrar & Rinehart

1930 

 

 

Destiny is one of the wordless novels of the early 20th century, an early kind of graphic novel with a single illustration on each page that tells a narrative without words. Last year I read The Sun by Frans Masereel,which depicts a man repeatedly trying to touch the sun in the sky, I think as an allegory for artistic ambition. Masereel seems to have pioneered this style of sequential art, with Otto Nuckel, the artist who wrote Destiny inspired by Masereel, and Lynd Ward, the most famous American to work in this style, apparently inspired by both Masereel and Nuckel.
 

Destiny is a social-realist story about the hard life of a woman born into poverty, who is repeatedly mistreated by men and punished by the legal system. Nuckel used leadcuts instead of the woodcuts favored by Masereel and Ward - as a result, his images are much smaller and finely detailed, with lots of halftones produced by crosshatching. The result is a narrative that falls somewhere between William Hogarth's A Harlot's Progress prints and something like Diary of a Lost Girl or Tess of the d'Urbervilles, somewhere between a morality play and a realistic account of a single life.
 
We follow our protagonist across 17 chapters, depicting her life from childhood to her violent death. In between, she'll just about every kind of harm that could befall a woman in her position. As a child, she is neglected by patents who are too tired and distracted to show her love. Her father, a drunk, is killed by a trolley. Her exhausted and overworked mother has a heart attack and drops her lantern, burning their room down, and half the rooming house with it. 
 
Our protagonist moves from the city to the countryside, where she becomes a servant on a farm. She's courted by a traveling salesman, and when she agrees to a picnic with him, he rapes her and then travels on his way. We see our protagonist continue working throughout her pregnancy. She gives birth by the river, maybe to a stillborn child, or maybe she immediately commits infantacide. Downriver, in the city, the police find the body, and in time she is arrested, but on trial, set to prison, and eventually released. 
 

The traveling salesman pursues the young woman as she works on the farm.

 
After she gets out of prison, a procurer spots her a brings her to a brothel. She lives and works there as a prostitute. After some time in that life, she strikes up a friendship, and maybe a mutual attraction, with the brothel's handyman. He helps her leave, and she moves in with him, enjoying an idyllic period as his girlfriend, both of them working, keeping house, visiting a summer fair and spending time in the park. But the brothel's procurer doesn't tolerate defections, apparently, and he murders the handyman, leaving our protagonist bereft again.
 
Depressed, she goes to the riverside and jumps in, but an older man sees her and calls for help, allowing her to be saved in time. He visits her during her convalescence, then proposes, and they get married. He's a tailor, and as his wife, she has a home and work helping with the sewing, though maybe less romance than with the handyman. Then into their lives comes a fabric salesman, who seems young and better-looking than the tailor... (I'm not sure if Nuckel had an unusually low opinion of salesmen, or if it was like, common at the time to be so anxious about their sexuality.) 
 
The fabric salesman befriends the tailor, socializes with the couple at home, and the three attend the circus together. Afterward, the protagonist and the salesman start a daytime love affair while the tailor is at work. One of the husband's friends spies on the lovers though, and the protagonist flees with the salesman.
 
Sadly, what she gets is not more romance, but more work. The salesman seems to laze about most of the day, forcing her to do all the housework and make an income working in a restaurant kitchen. In the evenings, he likes to go out drinking and gambling. One night, when the protagonist and salesman are out at a bar together, he picks a fight with another guy, who beats him badly, and seems like he might kill him. The protagonist protects her boyfriend by hitting the other guy with an axe, killing him. The police are called, and she goes on the run, holing up in a boarding house like the one she grew up in. The police break down the door to her room, and when she tries to flee out the window, they shoot her in the back, killing her.
 
To Nuckel's credit, all this is rendered in fine detail across over 200 leadcut prints. I think the story goes on a little long, it could've maybe used like one fewer section, both for the sake of narrative coherence, and to avoid the feeling of going overboard with hardship after hardship. Overall, it's an impressive piece of storytelling, and I can see why other artists were inspired to try out this style. 

The Sun

 
The Sun

by Frans Masereel

The Frans Masereel Group

1919, reprinted 2020
 

 

The Sun is a wordless graphic novel, part of a tradition from the early 20th century of books made up entirely of woodblock prints. Lynd Ward is probably the most famous artist in this tradition, but instead, I'm starting with one of the works of Frans Maesreel. Unlike later sequential art, there are no panels here. Each page is a single black-and-white image, although they do clearly tell a linear story.
 

The Sun is framed as being a dream. It begins with a man asleep at his desk, then his avatar appears, goes on an adventure and returns, and then the man wakes up. The avatar looks maybe like a younger, fitter version of the man. His adventure shows him looking at, and repeatedly trying to reach out and grab, the sun. I understand Masereel to mean this metaphorically, rather than literally. The sun, I think, represents some kind of idea or ideal that the man wants to achieve, something that guides him, obsesses him, but also remains ever out of reach. Beyond just the setting, in Europe immediately after WWI, the spirit of The Sun reminds me of the film Metropolis, with its hope that if you could just find the right idea, that idea would solve class conflict.
 
The man climbs to the top of buildings several times, each one higher than before. He climbs a tree, he catches a flock of birds to carry him, he rides in an airplane, he is held aloft by a kite, he jumps really high. The sun is omnipresent in the sky. Each time, he loses his grip or footing while reaching out for the sun, or his support fails, or he gets too close and catches fire. The sun is on almost every page, except in some of the city scenes. The man points out the sun to others. Some try to join him, some seem to laugh, some offer him distraction or try to defeat him, but he's indefatigable. No matter how many times he falls, or how far, he continues. He looks behind library books, he looks behind the crucifix in a church, he looks at the lamplight on the wall of a brothel, but he's not fooled for long by other kinds of light. Eventually he leaves the city and continues his search out in nature. When the dream ends and he wakes up, he laughs at himself, but I don't think he's really given up.
 
Masereel's prints are dominated by black, with white providing the outlines and highlights. The black is really the negative space here, with white creating all the details. You really get a sense of being immersed in a city - the buildings, the monuments, the transportation, the crowds of onlookers. For all that the prints are iconic and simplified, you get a surprisingly detailed look at early 20th century life! 

 

A Small Miracle

 
 

A Small Miracle

by Peter Collington 

Knopf

1997

 

 

I'm visiting relatives for the holidays, and my little niece has a current favorite book. At her request, someone has read it to her several times a day for the past few days, and I've taken a turn as well!

 

A Small Miracle is made like, and employs the painted art style of, other children's picture books, but Collington also put several frames on each page to tell a sequential story - so secretly, it's also a comic. This is a wordless book, so the entire story is told through the art.

 

On a cold winter morning, an old woman wakes up in her small wooden house. There's frost on the windows and holes in the floor. She checks her stove, but she's out of fuel. There's no food either, and no money to buy more. She wraps up in a coat and shawl, and takes her accordion, and goes outside. We see that her house is a wagon at the edge of a field by the woods. Based on the visual cues, I think the old woman is Roma.

 

She walks across several snow-covered fields and passes a church before she gets to town. It looks like she's somewhere in Europe, or maybe Britain, in something like the present day. She sees someone unloading a nativity display from the back of their car. Despite the snow, the town is bustling with people out shopping. She sets up between two shops and plays her accordion, but everyone passes her by. She falls asleep, and when she wakes up, it's nearing the end of the day. She has no money from playing, so she sells her accordion at the pawn shop.

 

As she leaves the shop, a thief on a motorbike drives by and snatches her purse. She follows the trail of his bike through the snow, and sees that he's gone into the church. He bursts out the front door on his bike holding a donation bucket, but the old woman grabs it and wrestles it from him, then rushes into the church and locks the door. She sees that he's knocked over the nativity display. She puts the bucket back and sets the nativity scene back up. She checks outside and the thief has left, so she starts her long walk home.

 

Along the way, she collapses in a field. The colors go from afternoon, to evening, to night. The woman's body is progressively covered by a blanket of snow. It's at this point that the titular small miracle occurs. (I think? You could also read this as the moment of the old woman's death, and what happens next as her symbolic welcome into the afterlife. But for the purposes of reading aloud to kid, it's definitely a miracle!)

 

The figures from the nativity scene - Mary and Joseph, baby Jesus, and the three Wise Men - come to life and rush from the church to the field. They lift the old woman and carry her to her wagon. They put her to bed. Mary and the baby Jesus sit by her bedside to comfort her. Joseph sets to work chopping wood for her stove. 

 

The three Wise Men take their gifts to the pawn shop, where the shopkeeper is thrilled by the gold and gives them a big handful of money. They buy back the accordion and then head to the grocery store. The other shoppers are like, very lightly surprised, but like the pawn shop owner, accept the little walking statues with remarkable aplomb.

 

Back at the wagon, there's fire in the stove, and Joseph is busy repairing the hole in the floor and any other flaws in the woodwork. The Wise Men cook the woman some dinner, and set out the accordion and remaining cash where she can find them. All the nativity figures leave to return to the church. The old woman wakes up, and is hugely surprised to see that she has warmth, and food, and money, and even her accordion back!

 

Contained in this story, I think, is a message from Collington about the worth and dignity of ethnic minorities, and about the proper use of the church's resources.

Haunter

 
Haunter
by Sam Alden

Study Group Comics

2014

 

 

I saw an excerpt of Haunter in the most recent volume of Best American Comics I read, and wanted to see the rest. Alden uses ink lines and watercolor to tell a wordless story about a lone figure discovering a temple in the forest. 

 
The imagery - of the hunter, the temple, and the temple's stone guardian - reminded me of some classic video games, especially Zelda and Metroid. One of the back-cover blurbs mentions the same thing.

 
The hunter uses her bow and arrow to try to kill a boar, which eludes her. The closest to dialogue we get are word bubbles containing a single red X that announce her frustration. She gives chase into the forest and finds an abandoned stone temple decorated with triangle motifs.

 
She enters, explores, and encounters the guardian, a giant stone woman, armed with a giant stone bow and arrow, who pursues the hunter outside and into the forest. The fight, and despite their difference in size and strength, the hunter prevails and the guardian is killed.

 
The hunter seems to feel guilt, and runs away, but we see the start of a transformation, and we know - she will become the next guardian.

 
The story is short, not much longer than a standard comic book issue, I don't think, but its emotions and imagery are both powerful.