Wikipedia:Today's featured article/February 10, 2015

The wordless novel uses captionless pictures to tell a story, most often using woodcut and other relief printing techniques. The genre flourished primarily in the 1920s and 1930s, especially in Germany. The typically socialist work drew inspiration from medieval woodcuts and used the awkward look of that medium to express angst and frustration at social injustice. The first such book was the Belgian Frans Masereel's 25 Images of a Man's Passion (illustrated), published in 1918. Other artists, such as the German Otto Nückel, followed Masereel's example. Lynd Ward brought the genre to the United States in 1929 when he produced Gods' Man, which inspired other American wordless novels and was parodied in 1930 by cartoonist Milt Gross in He Done Her Wrong. Following an early-1930s peak in production and popularity, the genre waned in the face of competition from sound films and anti-socialist censorship in Nazi Germany and the US. The graphic novels of cartoonists Will Eisner and Art Spiegelman and the wordless graphic novels of Eric Drooker and Peter Kuper were inspired by the wordless novel genre.

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