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This week, we assembled a list of 100 pages that shaped the course of American comic books.
We caught up with Spiegelman to talk about who Ward was and whyGods Manstill matters.
The following is an edited version of our conversation with him.
I first encountered Wards work, I think, as a teenager.
There were some reissues that came out in the 60s and I found it.
I immediately saw it as an extension of the things I was interested in, which is lowbrow pulp.
This was somehow part of my slob-snob culture, but a pretty classy aspect of it.
In other words, it was somehow related to comics.
Gods Manwas the first one I discovered.
I was very impressed specifically with the technique.
Each of the pictures were so built, and understanding that they were chopped into wood was interesting.
I already had a tilt toward Expressionist-looking images and this was definitely in that zone.
I think the idea of a magic brush I still want one.
I already was also into silent movies, and it was obviously akin in its inspirations to that.
There were comic books that were done with great dedication, but they were few and far between.
Most comic stuff seemed like it was notconsidered.
Here was clearly a deeply built thing.
He was just surprised I was by far the youngest person in that room.
I think the next youngest person was in their 60s, and then up from there.
It was late in his life.
That was a day of worship.
He grew up with Gustave Dores Bible illustrations as his pulp narratives.
And he grew up with them in a very isolated situation.
He had contracted it because his father had been working in the slums with poverty-stricken workers.
And when I said, Are there any comics you looked at since?
the only comics he thought of that he actually admired and liked wasPrince Valiant.
They were intense, exciting, and certainly excited the young Lynd Ward.
He got a publisher interested andGods Manwas done in some kind of ungodly quick time.
It caught on like wildfire, even though it came out on literally Black Tuesday, or Black Friday.
The result was a book that became a kind of best seller, cause celebre when it came out.
So he was riding high and did more of these books.
His subjective world was done in brownish-red sets of paints.
The story would flash between the two points of view.
His last woodcut novel was in 1937.
Hes trying to grapple directly with the rise of Nazism.
A number of illustrators and cartoonists admired Ward.
I did a comic strip about my mothers suicide called Prisoner on the Hell Planet.
Artists like Bernie Wrightson come to mind.
People working in mainstream comics saw this and realized that it had remarkable qualities.
These things, they burn their way into ones eyeballs.
