Vertigo

Woodcuts #6

by Lynd Ward

In this moving graphic novel without words, one of the finest artists of the 20th century uses 230 intricately detailed woodcuts to tell a dramatic tale of the Great Depression. A young girl who longs to be an accomplished violinist and a boy who hopes to become a builder find their dreams shattered by desperate economic times.

Genres: Graphic Novels, Comics, Art, Fiction, Graphic Novels Comics, Classics, Comic Book

320 pages, Unknown Binding

First published December 1, 1937

About the author

LYND WARD (1905-1985) illustrated more than two hundred books for children and adults throughout his prolific career. Winner of the Caldecott Medal for his watercolors in The Biggest Bear, Mr. Ward was also famous for his wood engravings, which are featured in museum collections throughout the United States and abroad.

Married to May Yonge McNeer, several of whose works he illustrated. https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...

Reviews

[Drew Canole · Rating 4 out of 5]

I finally got my hands on this one. It's perhaps the best looking woodcut graphic novel I've seen yet. Incredibly detailed full page drawings. We follow a few different silent stories set in the Great Depression as people struggle with different economic conditions. Ward depicts all aspects of the brutality of capitalism.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

A novel of woodblock prints created in 1937, and supposedly Ward's best work. It is beautiful, incredibly detailed and overwhelming to consider making such a mountain of block prints. I guess he had many blocks left over which were discarded for their lack of appropriateness within the arc of the story. Much work went into it, saying the least. He was certainly a focused, prolific artist.

Vertigo focuses on the Great Depression and follows the story of three interconnected lives: a boy and girl who fall in love and are separated by financial struggle, and an old business owner who lowers wages and is responsible for breaking up strikes that result in deaths. It so happens that he boy in the story gives his blood for money in a move of desperation and the blood goes to the old man, who falls ill in the midst of the strike. It focuses on the extreme contrasts during the depression, which put him on an FBI watch-list.

Over-all I think it was amazing, greatly due to the fact that block-prints were the medium. I can't imagine how challenging it is to tell such a story block by block.

[Verba Non Res · Rating 5 out of 5]

La Gran Depresión tenía ser contada en forma de wordless novel.

El retroceso de la palabra escrita frente a la imagen, en la primera mitad del siglo XX, se debió no solo a las posibilidades nuevas de la técnica (fotografía, cine, medios gráficos), sino también al hecho de que esa primera mitad del siglo estuviese colmada de eventos catastróficos, y que las palabras no parecieran suficientes para dar cuenta de ellos.



Dos opciones: el exceso o la retirada. Las uvas de la ira (1939), de Steinbeck, que narra este mismo período, suma 169.481 lentas palabras. En Vertigo, hay menos de un centenar.
El arte de Lynd Ward parece haber llegado a la cumbre de sus posibilidades en esta novela silenciosa de 1937. Sus xilografías son más detalladas y complejas que las de God’s Man, y otro tanto puede decirse de su narrativa, que en este caso trabaja con tres líneas argumentales, independientes pero interrelacionadas.



Me llama la atención que Ward, que vivió otros 50 años después de terminar Vertigo, no haya vuelto a producir ninguna wordless novel. La forma misma parece haberse extinguido en los años 40. ¿Tendrá que ver esto con que las catástrofes se habían convertido ya en un panorama habitual, y nuevamente asequible para el lenguaje?

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Vertigo” is Lynd Ward’s last wordless novel. It features three Great Depression-centric stories:

The Girl - A girl falls in love and is engaged. Her lover, however, goes away to find work. Her father loses his job and blinds himself in a botched suicide attempt. In the end, they are evicted from their apartment.

The Elderly Gentleman - As the Great Depression guts his business, he resorts to violence and murder to put down labor movements. Meanwhile, he is bedridden and sick. In the end, he sees his profits rise.

The Boy - This is about the boy from the first story. He returns to his fiancée but is ashamed to approach her. He finds a way to make money: donating blood to the elderly gentleman.

This was exactly what I have come to expect from Ward. Well done.

[Canavan · Rating 5 out of 5]

✭✭✭✭½

[Kate Atherton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Incredible work, these woodcuts- they are absolutely stunning, the figures, the backgrounds, the contrast, the patterns and evenness of the textured cutting...Flawless. Why, though, is this book formatted the way that it is with a SMALL woodcut on each page, sort of centered to the top with TONS of white space around it? Were there not better, higher quality images of these woodcuts? Did the designers fear, because they are all different sizes and proportions, more importantly, it would be too inconsistent to the eye to crop them closer? It would have been really nice to see these woodcuts larger. I must admit, at this small size the eye jumped from frame to frame like a movie and it was very easy to follow. I like the breaking up of and labeling of the passage of time. This is a beautifully composed and, above all, amazingly drawn (woodcut) book. And it's from the GREAT DEPRESSION! It is boots on the ground, illustrated story telling, in the tradition of Charlie Chaplin and Orson Welles, depicting the dream of and disappointment of the American dream.

[Jean-christophe Boudreau · Rating 4 out of 5]

Vertigo is a collection of different stories each one about a different person at a different period in the 1900's. Each one was pretty interesting and they all where kind of sad as they went on through the story of that person. Its all in black and white with each page being a single image not a set of panels like a comic or graphic novel uses but nevertheless told the stories just fine. I would recommend this to people who like to get an idea of what life was like for people in the 1900's.

[Nick Lehr · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've never "read" anything like this (read is in parentheses, because there's no text). It's a book born of the 1930s, and could have never been created during any other era in American history. Perhaps it's appropriate that it's a wordless "novel," because words couldn't possibly describe hopelessness and despair of a crumbling economic system. Leave it to the towering, cold buildings, the buzzing, tangled web of power lines, and the shadowy underbelly of elevated train platforms.

[Tom Coffeen · Rating 3 out of 5]

The woodcuts themselves are fantastic (in particular the landscapes and urbanscapes as well as the physiognomies of cruel greed) but they are yoked to a bland narrative that doesn't rise above the level of agitprop. Also, the prints often take up very little of the page somewhat reducing an appreciation of the exquisiteness of the woodcuts.

[David Ward · Rating 3 out of 5]

Vertigo: A Novel in Woodcuts by Lynd Ward (Random House 1937) (741.5973) (4007).

This is the fifth and final book from Lynd Ward that I plan to read and review. It was Ward’s last complete “wordless woodcut novel” which is a novel that tells an entire novel-length story through the medium of woodblock-engraved prints. In essence, Ward was the original “graphic novelist.”

According to the contemporary graphic novelist Art Spiegelman, “As a tubercular child, Lynd Ward pored over Gustave Dore’s nineteenth-century Bible illustrations since [Ward’s] father forbade anything as profane as the Sunday funnies in their home. Denied a comic strip vocabulary, Ward would grow up to help define a whole other syntax for visual storytelling.” (Six Novels in Woodcuts Vol. 2 by Lynd Ward (Library of America 2010) (quoting Art Spiegelman essay “Reading Pictures” p. ix-x).

Ward certainly created books that are beautifully rendered and singularly unique.

Vertigo is complex in both structure and storyline and is considered one of the key works of Depression-era literature. It is much longer, much denser, and much broader in scope than his other woodcut novels. It is also my least favorite (by far) of Lynd Ward’s works, but I suspect that this appraisal would not be shared by other more introspective readers.

I’ve now thoroughly sampled Lynd Ward’s literary output. My curiosity has been satisfied, and this reader is ready to move on.

My rating: 7/190, finished 12/05/24 (4007).

[Jordan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is separated by three separate narratives: A woman violist succumbing to culture, an old man reflecting on life, and a young man finding his way in life. All of three of these narratives have the common theme that the higher class will stomp on the lower class. The working class people are subjugated to a worse condition than the owning class. And we see this quite clearly, in all of the narratives. The woman violist is forced to quit out of cultural expectation based on the higher class. The older man is forced to see the working class conditions worsen resulting in union strikes. The young man quite literally is forced to come to the reality that his dream of a better future is dead once he realize that all of his hard work made him earn very little money. While the rich class do barely anything and laugh at the poor.

It is honestly quite an explicit critique of unchecked capitalism or maybe even capitalism in itself from the author. I give this book a solid 5 stars because I love the themes discussed and the gritty reality of America during the Great Depression.

[neha]

not rating, because i read this for school.

honestly, i was really surprised at how much i enjoyed it. i didn't think it'd be possible to convey this much emotion and plot through pictures (the only text was part of street signs, newspapers, etc), but ward does such a good job of it. each image is so detailed, and specifically, what stood out to me was the stark contrast between dark and light colors. the images juxtapose this overwhelming darkness, with their blurred edges, against glimpses of light.

it felt atmospheric. it was devastating. i really, really enjoyed this narrative of the great depression, because of how intentional every image felt. every detail represented something, and was meant to be there. ward wanted to tell a very specific, raw, unfiltered story, and he truly did so.

[jesse · Rating 4 out of 5]

it's difficult to fathom that almost 100 years ago, wordless narratives were being created that are still so poignant and different to anything that has been made since. i wouldn't say i liked the majority of Ward's woodcuts, some of the marks made just weren't my cup of tea. But, i did like a couple of them, and was incredibly taken aback by each one. Colour isn't necessary in this book, which speaks to itself.
I would've liked the pictures to fill the page more properly, i'm unsure whether that was the artists original intention or not, regardless, an impressive work.

[Rick Ray · Rating 4 out of 5]

Probably the best of Lynd Ward's surrealist, wordless woodcut graphic novels, Vertigo is a medley of images that evoke the despair felt by people living through the Great Depression. There is substantially more cohesiveness to the various segments found in Vertigo, making it a much more rewarding experience compared to Ward's other major works. This also has some of the most refined looking woodcut images I've seen overall. If you're just gonna try out one woodcut novel, make it this one.

[Nathan BR · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful triple story/portrait. My favorite of Lynd Ward's wood cut novels, followed closely by Gods' Man. It's really interesting to read them in the chronological order to see his evolution as an artist and a storyteller. The art style is refined and Ward as learned lessons from the confusing characters of Madman's Drum. The three stories are intertwined but aren't repetitive and they explain each other. Still, each stands on its own

[Mitchell Friedman · Rating 2 out of 5]

This one is long. And dark. And not quite wordless. There are signs to read on and off throughout. And perhaps because of this, the plot is comparatively easier to follow. Though still not quite easy. There are three main characters and the story is told by them one at a time, though I'm fairly sure they were interleaved. But dark and uncomfortable. And not especially enjoyable.

[Wayne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Vertigo was the last and longest of six ‘novels without words’ written by Ward. ‘Written’ over 70 years ago, the woodcuts and image-driven narratives in his books perfectly capture Great Depression-era issues. I loved all of these books. If you haven’t read him, you really should.

[Robert · Rating 1 out of 5]

While it is a skilled piece - rising to the level of art - that description only applies on the micro level, taken as a whole it's a jumbled mess. The old rules are best - If you need to have it explained to enjoy it, it isn't good.

[Reyel2107 · Rating 4 out of 5]

a great experimental art tale !!!!

[David Finger · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed it. The wood engravings told an effective story despite there being no words.

[Rod · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lynd Ward’s masterpiece; definitely the most naturalistic and emotionally affecting of his woodcut novels. A wordless epic that reminds me of dos Passos or Dreiser.

[Melissa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very thankful for the introduction as I had no idea the artistry behind the pages. Really cool read and very thankful my local library had a copy.

[David Shepard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really 4.5 but why quibble? Several of the woodcuts in this are amazing, so beautiful. Even though there are no words, I would describe the connections that emerge between the three main story lines as very literary. The subject is particularly timely in the context of our global economic struggles and the awareness of injustice that has led people to occupy as a form of civil disobedience. The plot itself tends toward melodrama, but this excess is probably necessary given the medium, and also in the end shows the US of the 1930s to be quintessentially American at its core as much as the time we live in now.

[Chris Miller · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sadly, I don't think Lynd Ward ever pulled it off as a storyteller. This was the last of his six novels in woodcuts that I read, the longest, and the last one he wrote. I was holding out hope that he would deliver a coherent and unique story along with his beautiful artwork, but I don't think he got there.

I did like how this novel was organized--in three sections each about an individual, each further subdivided by different units of time, and each being related to the others.

[ComicNerdSam · Rating 5 out of 5]

2020: God damn I want more! I NEED more! Every moment in this is a masterpiece! IT'S SERIOUSLY SO GOOD!

2021: On reread this had become an even more powerful book. Ward is at his peak stylistically and narratively, each page oozes with a grim inventiveness that is going to be my bible from now on. Each line is perfect. It's like porn for the black-and-white artist.

[liza · Rating 5 out of 5]

my favorite lynd ward. dizzying artwork! :)

[Rodrigo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Antigas estórias sem palavras, só com gravuras.

[John Beckmann · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible book. Surely a master of wood engraving... anyone who does woodcuts and graphic novels needs to see this classic.

[George Walker · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have the original of this but this is a good choice for a reading copy.

[Tim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow.