The Woodcuts of Lynd Ward

Art Spiegelman, for the Paris Review, takes note of the woodcuts of Lynd Ward.

From the story...

It seems natural now to think of Lynd Ward as one of America’s most distinguished and accomplished graphic novelists. He is, in fact, one of only a small handful of artists anywhere who ever made a “graphic novel” until the day before yesterday. The ungainly neologism seems to have stuck since Will Eisner, creator of the voraciously inventive Spirit comic book of the 1940s, first used it on the cover of a 1978 collection of his seriously intended comics stories for adults, A Contract With God. It was a way to distance himself from the popular prejudices against the medium, and he often cited Ward’s 1930s woodcut novels as an inspiration for his work and for the euphemism. But Ward’s roots were not in comics, though his work is part of the same large family tree, belonging somewhere among the less worm-ridden branches of printmaking and illustration.

In 1970, I briefly met Lynd Ward at the opening of a small Binghamton, New York, gallery show of his prints. I was a twenty-two-year-old cartoonist and told him how much I admired his woodcut novels. As I recall, I was by far the youngest and scruffiest person at the opening (he was just a few years older than I am now), and he expressed surprise that I even knew the books. I asked what newspaper comics had been important to him, and he explained that he hadn’t been allowed to read them as a child. When pressed, he expressed appreciation for Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant, which he discovered as an adult. I didn’t share his enthusiasm—I thought Foster’s work, with its captions positioned safely beneath each of the stately illustrations on his Sunday pages, was barely comics at all—but we went on to find common ground in our mutual esteem for the great old socialist cartoonist, Art Young, before he turned back to talking to his grown-up friends.

The New Yorker also takes note of Ward's work, here.