Frans Masereel, Father of the Graphic Novel

In 1919, Belgian artist Frans Masereel published a wordless novel called Passionate Journey. The book’s a collection of 165 woodcut prints depicting an everyman character trying to survive in the big city. It’s considered to be the first graphic novel produced. Each page is an original carved pear woodcut print. Each single-cel image exists as a story in its own right. Taken together, the prints tell an inspired and tragic tale of a young man beaten into submission by modern city living.

Passionate Journey was released in 1919 just after the end of World War I. Masereel was 30 when he completed the book. He made no secret of his socialist political ideology. The work was celebrated in left-wing circles and anarchist bookstores.

Masereel had a difficult childhood. His father died when he was five. His mother moved the family to Ghent where she met a doctor with passionate socialist beliefs. Masereel accompanied his new stepfather to public protests against the ghastly working conditions at Belgium textile plants. The experience kindled a lifelong commitment in Masereel to speak out against exploitation of workers.

Masereel went to art school in Ghent and studied under the Flemish painter Jean Delvin. He made his first etchings and woodcuts at 20. He became a pacifist and refused to serve with the Belgian army in World War I. He escaped to Paris to avoid imprisonment for war evasion.

Passionate Journey was originally called Mon Livre d’heures (My Book of Hours). The book contains 165 caption-less prints. The story follows a common man striving to survive in the big city. He’s earnest and fresh-faced, eager to embrace urban experience. He walks the streets, buys produce at an outdoor market, chases birds in a public park, watches boats in the canals and reads under a tree.

The man falls in love with a prostitute who promptly rejects him. Heartbroken, the man joins a political activist group where he befriends a young woman who becomes ill. With no access to hospital care, the woman dies. The man’s overcome with grief. He becomes outraged by the social injustice around him and escapes to a forest outside the city. He embraces the natural world, raises his arms in praise of nature and promptly dies. His spirit leaves his body and his soul journeys on a tour of the cosmos.

Public reaction to the book was immediate and buoyant. It sold over 100,000 copies in Europe and launched a new genre of wordless novels. German author Thomas Mann became a zealous advocate of Masereel’s work. He wrote an introduction to a 1926 reprint of the book.

“Darken the room! Sit down with this book next to your reading lamp and concentrate on its pictures as you turn page after page. Don’t deliberate too long! It is no tragedy if you fail to grasp every picture at once, just as it does not matter if you miss one or two shots in a movie. Look at these powerful black-and-white figures, their features etched in light and shadow. You will be captivated from beginning to end: from the first picture showing the train plunging through dense smoke and bearing the hero toward life, to the very last picture showing the skeleton-faced figure wandering among the stars.”

Thanks in part to Passionate Journey, woodcuts gained a notoriety not seen since the 17th century. German Expressionists like Otto Dix and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner embraced his technique. Masereel moved to Berlin and befriended George Grosz, another woodcut artist. They helped influence the rise in European Expressionism, an art form committed to a subjective worldview eliciting emotional (not analytical) responses. The images often expressed feelings of anguish and torment.

Woodcuts were attractive to artists due to their inexpensive cost. All that was needed was a block of wood, a blade, black ink and print paper. The prints were stark and beautiful with clean lines and powerful imagery. Masereel avoided crosshatch patterns later popular with woodcuts artists like Lynd Ward and Paul Landacre. This yielded a primitive style that emphasized each line and allowed for ample negative space.

In the 1920s, Masereel incorporated watercolor, oil and ink with his woodcuts. These works became known as the Montmartre paintings. They were largely street scenes with depictions of French life such as people eating dinner, walking the streets or entering the metro.

The popularity of wordless novels coincided with silent movies. Once “talkies” were introduced around 1930, wordless novels fell out of favor. Hitler banned Masereel’s work as degenerate art in 1937. After World War II, his work was also banned in the United States for its socialist content.

By 1940, Masereel focused primarily on painting. He continued carving woodcuts but abandoned wordless novels. He settled down as a teacher in Saarbrücken Germany after the war. He ultimately moved to France and designed props and costumes for theater productions.

Masereel died in Avignon in 1972. He was a major influence on future cartoonists like Will Eisner (The Spirit) and Art Spiegelman (Maus). Passionate Journey remains Masereel’s greatest work.