FRED VAN LENTE
Most folks credit Will Eisner with coining the term “graphic novel” and producing the first actual one, A Contract with God, back in 1978. But while researching my history-of-comics-as-a-comic comic, Comic Book Comics (cocreated and drawn by Ryan Dunlavey), I stumbled across some worthy examples that show, just as Columbus didn’t quite “discover” America, Eisner was working from an obscure, but nonetheless preestablished tradition. Here are three that existed before 1950, even!
1 Histoire d’Albert, by Rodolphe Töpffer (1845). A lot of snooty academic types (not to mention a few of today’s, ahem, more opinionated graphic novelists) will tell you that the true father of the graphic novel and the comic book and the comic strip is Swiss schoolmaster and part-time cartoonist Töpffer, who penned several satiric picture-stories for the amusement of his friends, publishing to a wider audience only when encouraged to by, of all people, Goethe. However, this claim is undermined by the fact that Töpffer’s work has no dialogue balloons, the back-and-forth “imitation of life” that revolutionized the medium with Outcault’s Yellow Kid at the end of the century. And while there are a very few panel-to-panel transitions, most of the action is narrated in captions, leading Töpffer’s work to come across more like picture books for adults than comics. Don’t take my word for it, though; you can download d’Albert, one of his best-known works, for free as a PDF (in French) off Wikipedia Commons (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Toepffer_Histoire_Albert.pdf).
2 God’s Man, by Lynd Ward (1929). Though you can often find a few of these wordless early-twentieth-century woodcut-panel-per-page “comics” in the remainder bin at your local art museum’s gift shop, Ward’s original effort—he was the first American to attempt a “pictorial narrative” (his words)—is quite moving. It shows the tragedy of an impoverished artist who sells his soul for commercial success at far greater cost than he suspects. Recently six of Ward’s “novels in woodcuts” were collected in a two-volume edition by Library of America with introductions by Art Spiegelman.
3 He Done Her Wrong, by Milt Gross (1930). God’s Man sold nearly twenty thousand copies when it debuted and earned the surest sign of success: a parody, in this case by newspaper gagmeister Milt Gross. Specializing in silent movie gags (unsurprising, since it’s a silent comic) He Done Her Wrong’s tale of an Alaska strongman venturing to the Big City to rescue his seduced girlfriend holds up pretty well today (there’s an extended gag involving a job interview that makes me giggle every time I think of it). Fantagraphics recently reprinted Gross’s book in a handsome trade paperback edition.
Fred Van Lente is the #1 New York Times best-selling author of Marvel Zombies, Incredible Hercules (with Greg Pak), and Odd Is on Our Side (with Dean Koontz), as well as the American Library Association award–winning Action Philosophers. His original graphic novel Cowboys & Aliens (cowritten with Andrew Foley) is the basis for the major motion picture starring Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford. Van Lente’s other comics include Comic Book Comics, Taskmaster, X-Men Noir, The Amazing Spider-Man, and Alpha Flight (also with Pak).