Visual novel

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The visual novel is a narrative genre in which sequences of images without captions are used to tell stories. Artists often made such books with the help of woodcuts and other relief printing techniques , which is why the term woodcut novel is also used. The heyday of the genre was mainly in the 1920s and 1930s; it was most popular in Germany .

The visual novel has its origins in the German expressionist movement of the early 20th century. The works are typical of socialism and were inspired by medieval woodcuts. The awkward appearance of this medium helped express fear and frustration about social injustice. The first book of this kind was 25 images de la passion d'un homme by Belgian artist Frans Masereel , published in 1918 . The German Otto Nückel and other artists followed Masereel's example. Lynd Ward brought the genre to the US in 1929 when he produced Gods' Man , which inspired other American visual novels and a 1930 parody by cartoonist Milt Gross called He Done Her Wrong . After a production and popularity peak in the early 1930s, the genre dwindled in the face of competition from talkies and anti-socialist censorship in Nazi Germany and the United States.

After the Second World War , visual novels became increasingly rare and early works were out of print. Interest revived in the 1960s when visual novels were recognized in the American comic subculture as prototypical book-length comics . In the 1970s, the visual novel inspired illustrators like Will Eisner and Art Spiegelman to produce book-length comics, which they called " graphic novels ". Illustrators like Eric Drooker and Peter Kuper took direct inspiration from visual novels to create wordless graphic novels.

features

Visual novels tell a story through a series of expressive images. Socialist issues like the struggle against capitalism are widespread; the scientist Perry Willett calls these topics “a connecting element of the aesthetics of the genre”. Both formally and morally they are based on expressionist graphics, theater and film . Visual novelists like Frans Masereel used the awkward aesthetics of medieval woodcuts to express their suffering as well as revolutionary political ideas, using simple, traditional iconography . Text is restricted to the title and chapter pages, unless the text is part of the scene, such as on signs.

The narrative tends towards melodrama, and the stories focus on the struggle against social oppression, in which characters are silenced by economic, political and other social forces. The characters are clearly portrayed as good or bad - the good are drawn with compassion and the bad with disdain for the artist's moral outrage.

Most visual novelists were not productive; apart from Masereel and Lynd Ward, few produced more than a single book. The books were designed for a mass audience, in contrast to similar but smaller portfolios by artists such as Otto Dix , George Grosz, and Käthe Kollwitz , which were made in limited editions for collectors.

These portfolios, usually consisting of eight to ten prints, should also be looked at in order. Visual novels were longer, had more complex plots, and were printed in sizes and dimensions comparable to novels. Silent films , the most popular silent visual medium of the time, were very influential . Pans, zooms, slapstick and other cinematic design tools can be found in the books. Ward said that when he was producing a visual novel, he first had to visualize it as a silent film in his head.

Typically, pictorial novels used relief printing techniques such as woodcuts, wood engravings , metal cuts , or linocuts . With the techniques, the artist draws a picture or transfers one to a printing block. The non-printing areas that remain white are trimmed away, leaving raised areas for ink to be applied to the prints. The monochrome prints were usually black ink and occasionally a different color such as sienna or orange. Relief printing is an inexpensive but labor-intensive printing technique; it was affordable for socially conscious artists who wanted to tell stories about the working class in visual novels.

history

In medieval Europe of the 15th century, woodcut block books were printed as religious edification literature . The ars moriendi was particularly popular . At the beginning of the 16th century, block books disappeared in favor of books that were printed with the movable type of the Gutenberg printing machine. Woodcut printing continued into the 16th century among artists such as Dürer , Holbein and Amman . Engraving techniques later replaced woodcut. The art of wood engraving, brought into being by Thomas Bewick, enjoyed great popularity from the 18th century until the process gave way to more advanced printing processes such as lithography in the 19th century.

The post-impressionist artist Paul Gauguin took up the woodcut again in the late 19th century because of its primitivist effect. At the beginning of the 20th century, woodcut artists such as Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945) and Max Klinger (1857–1920) published woodcut portfolios that deal with social injustice. Expressionist graphic artists such as Max Beckmann (1884–1950), Otto Dix (1891–1969), Kollwitz and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff (1884–1976) indulged in the resurgent interest in medieval graphic art in the early 20th century - especially biblical woodcuts like the Biblia pauperum - inspire. These artists used the awkward look of woodcut images to express feelings of suffering.

In Europe

The visual novel emerged from the expressionist movement. The Belgian Frans Masereel (1889–1972) created the earliest example in 1918, The Passion of a Man ( 25 images de la passion d'un homme) . It was a bestseller and was followed by My Hours (Mon livre d'heures) , which was Masereel's longest book with 167 pictures. It was also the most commercially successful, particularly in Germany, where his books were sold by the hundreds of thousands in the 1920s and had introductions from writers such as Max Brod, Hermann Hesse, and Thomas Mann . In their exaggerated but objective style with striking black and white contrasts, Masereel's books were strongly oriented towards expressionist theater and film.

Masereel's commercial success led other artists to try their hand at the genre. The subject of capitalist oppression was in the foreground; a scheme that Masereel had established early on. When he was thirteen, the Polish-French artist Balthus drew a wordless story about his cat. It was published in 1921 with an introduction by the poet Rainer Maria Rilke . Schicksal (1926) by Otto Nückel (1888–1955) is a work with greater nuance and atmosphere than Masereel's bombastic works; where Masereel told stories about the struggle of men against society, Nückel tells of the life of a single woman. Destiny appeared in the United States in 1930 and sold well there.

Clément Moreau's (1903–1988) first attempt at the genre was Unemployed Youth (1928). The Hungarian István Szegedi-Szüts (1892–1959), who emigrated to England, produced a visual novel called My War (1931) with brush and ink . In artistically simple pictures that are reminiscent of Japanese brush painting, Szegedi-Szüts tells of a Hungarian cavalryman who was sobered by his experiences in the First World War. Helena Bochořáková-Dittrichová (1894–1980) was the first woman to produce a picture novel. Unlike Masereel or Nückel, who captured the struggle of the working class in their works, Childhood (1931) shows bourgeois life. Bochořáková described her books as “cycles” rather than novels. In 1934, the surrealist Max Ernst created the wordless collage novel Une semaine de bonté . After the Second World War, Werner Gothein (1890–1968) created The Tight Dancer and Her Clown (1949).

In North America

In 1926 the American Lynd Ward (1905–1985) moved to Leipzig to study graphics there; during his stay he discovered the works of Masereel and Nückel. He himself produced six such works and called them “pictorial narratives”. The first, Gods' Man (1929), was his most popular. Ward used wood engraving instead of woodblock prints and varied the image sizes from page to page. 20,000 copies of Gods' Man were sold, and other American artists built on that success with their own visual novels in the 1930s.

The cartoonist Milt Gross parodied the genre with He Done Her Wrong (1930); the book uses varying image designs, similar to comics: the action sometimes takes place outside the edges of the image, and speech bubbles in the images show what the characters are saying. Caricaturist and illustrator William Groppers Alay-oop (1930) tells of the disappointed dreams of three entertainers. In Abraham Lincoln: Biography in Woodcuts (1933), Charles Turzak documented the American president. The animator Myron Waldman (1908-2006) wrote a visual novel about a plump young woman looking for a glamorous husband. In the book, Eve (1943), " speech bubbles " are also used, as in He Done Her Wrong .

The American illustrator James Reid (1907–1989) was inspired for his graphic novel The Life of Christ (1930) by religious block books from the Middle Ages and his work in Art Deco style; Due to the religious content of the book, it was forbidden in the Soviet Union as part of the religious policy there.

In 1938 the Italian-American artist Giacomo Patri (1898–1978) produced his only visual novel, the linocut White Collar . It traces the consequences of the stock market crash of 1929 and was intended to motivate employees to form unions. It also covers controversial issues such as abortion , health care for the poor, and the decline in the Christian faith. From 1948 to 1951, the Canadian Laurence Hyde (1914–1987) produced his only visual novel, the woodcut Southern Cross , in response to the American nuclear tests in Bikini Atoll . The novel tells of an American evacuation of an island for nuclear test purposes, where a family is left behind. The first book by the Polish-American Si Lewen (1918-2016), The Parade: A Story in 55 Drawings (1957), was praised by Albert Einstein for its anti-war message. Aphrodite's Cup (1964) by the Canadian George Kuthan is an erotic book in the ancient Greek style. At the beginning of the 21st century, the Canadian George Walker created wordless woodcut novels, beginning with Book of Hours (2010), about the lives of the people in the World Trade Center shortly before the 9/11 attacks .

Loss of interest

Visual novels reached the height of their popularity between 1929 and 1931, after which the sound film began to replace the silent film. In the 1930s, the oppressed and arrested the Nazis in Germany, many printmakers and prohibited Masereel works as " degenerate art ". After World War II, US censorship suppressed books with socialist content, including the works of Lynd Ward, whose socialist beliefs were kept on file by the FBI. This censorship made early prints of visual novels in the United States rare collector's items.

By the 1940s, most artists had given up the genre. The most dedicated picture novelists, Masereel and Ward, moved on to other work for which they became better known. Masereel's obituary didn't even mention his visual novels. Many visual novels remained out of print until the success of graphic novels in the early 21st century piqued the interest of readers and publishers.

literature

  • Blank, J. On the sense and nonsense of the term graphic novel. In: http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/oai/container/index/docId/45865 .
  • Friedmann, J. & UVK Verlagsgesellschaft mbH Verlag, 2016. Transmedia storytelling: narrative design in literature, film, graphic novel and games , Konstanz Munich: UVK Verlagsgesellschaft.
  • Hochreiter, S., Klingenböck, U. & Röckenhaus, K., 2014. Image is text is image. Narration and Aesthetics in Graphic Novels , Bielefeld: transcript Verlag.
  • Keazor, H., Schmitt, D. & Solte-Gresser, C., 2014. Telling in pictures. Frans Masereel in an intermedia context , Bielefeld: transcript.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Perry Willett: The Cutting Edge of German Expressionism: The Woodcut Novel of Frans Masereel and Its Influences . In: Donahue, Neil H. (Ed.): A Companion to the Literature of German Expressionism . 2005, p. 112 .
  2. ^ Cohen, Martin S .: The Novel in Woodcuts: A Handbook . In: Journal of Modern Literature . tape 6 (2) . Indiana University Press, Apr. 1977, pp. 171-195 .
  3. ^ Peter Zusi: Review of A Companion to the Literature of German Expressionism. In: monthly books . tape 99 , no. 2 , p. 245-247 .
  4. ^ A b Perry Willett: The Cutting Edge of German Expressionism: The Woodcut Novel of Frans Masereel and Its Influences. In: Donahue, Neil H. (Ed.): A Companion to the Literature of German Expressionism . 2005, p. 131 .
  5. ^ Ernst Fischer, Stephan Füssel (ed.): History of the German book trade in the 19th and 20th centuries. Walter de Gruyter, 2012, ISBN 978-3-598-24808-5 .
  6. ↑ Willett 2005, pp. 128-129.
  7. ^ Walker, George: Graphic Witness: Four Wordless Graphic Novels . Firefly Books, 2007.
  8. ^ Ars moriendi - BSB catalog. Retrieved December 19, 2019 .
  9. ↑ a b Michel Vanhelleputte: Frans Masereels narrative graphics and their success in the German-speaking area . In: Wilhelm Amann, Gunter Grimm, Uwe Werlein (eds.): Approaches . Waxmann Verlag.
  10. ↑ Willett 2005, p. 126.
  11. ↑ Willett 2005, p. 111.
  12. ^ Carl Meffert (Clément Moreau). In: kuenste-im-exil.de. Retrieved December 19, 2019 .
  13. ^ Christoph surcharge: Wilhelm Fraenger and the Gotheins. (PDF) Retrieved December 17, 2019 .
  14. ↑ Beronä, David A .: Pictures Speak in Comics Without Words . In: Varnum, Robin; Gibbons, Christina T. (Ed.): The Language of Comics: Word and Image . University Press of Mississippi, 2001.
  15. ^ Smart, Tom .: A Suite of Engravings from The Mysterious Death of Tom Thomson . 2011.
  16. ^ "Degenerate Art" also came to Belgium. In: vrt.de. Retrieved December 17, 2019 .
  17. ↑ Walker 2007, p. 17.
  18. ↑ Beronä 2008, p. 225.