WARD, Lynd

An American visual fictioneer, needlessly forgotten, Ward credited Frans Masereel as the first to go beyond the idea of a short sequence of pictures in making extended visual narratives that differ from comic strips, say, but resemble certain silent films in completely eschewing words. Ward’s medium, the woodcut, ideally suited his taste for heavy shading, which in turn reflected a penchant for melodramatic moralizing. Ward’s first visual narrative, God’s Man (1929), starkly portrays...