by Lynd Ward
REVIEW BY TOM SPURGEON:
More technically accomplished than the highly-successful God's Man, which preceded it in publication by a year, Madman's Drum is woodcut artist Lynd Ward's strongest and most representative book. Ward's picture novels, along with those by Belgium Frans Masereel, humorist Milt Gross, and a number of lesser known but often remarkable artists, are some of the comics mediums most lauded works. Because such artists worked towards the expectations of an arts audience rather than the customers of a commercial printing concern, their themes, aims and subject matter often closely resemble those in art comics from decades later.
Ward once wrote, in an introduction to a collection of his work, "Of all the graphic media available to artists today, the simplest is wood. Images cut on wood and inked and impressed on paper are not only the least technically complicated to produce, but are also the most ancient." One of the strengths of Madman's Drum is how perfectly Ward's use of woodcuts imparts a sort of timeless air to a story with historical and generational weight. Madman's Drum tells the story of a curse transferred from a slave holding past, through the slave-holder's son and onto his children. Because of the heavy inks of the woodcut picture, the story becomes timeless and, in a dramatic sense, inevitable in its drastic conclusions, achieving a power of persuasion that does not exist in later, more overtly political works of the artist.
Ward was also never more effective in utilising the strengths of the woodcut in service of symbolism. The central image of the curse, a grinning, jester-like face, is chilling and well-used. But other symbols are more nuanced without losing the story's fable-like feel: the rejection of religion by the slave-holder's son is obviously depicted in his discarding crucifix, but what exactly is meant by that crucifix's role in the death of his mother? Like the great novels of the 19th Century, Ward's work gains strength through the ambiguity of his symbols and their obvious dramatic power, rather than a specific, strident interpretation. Madman's Drum is a work worthy of constant reconsideration.
REVIEW BY WILL EISNER:
Perhaps the most provocative graphic storyteller of the twentieth century.
REVIEW BY ART SPIEGELMAN:
In Madman’s Drum Ward tried to tell a story spread across generations that had themes that reverberated and had a layered narrative of how different people, connected by blood, work through their lives. In the course of trying to give a back story to every character - that was the most interesting thing he tried to do - he wanted each character to have their own narrative reality, something that one associates with a good novel. That’s easier for George Eliot than it is for an illustrator trying to tell a story. The result is that this book requires a lot of rereading, not to enter deeper into the story but to penetrate what the hell the story is. Although there are sequences that are done very, very deftly and intelligently, this book doesn’t have the streamlined quality of Gods’ Man. Ward got more ambitious visually in Madman’s Drum and tried to engrave more finely in the wood; sometimes this led to good results but sometimes to something a bit murkier. I don’t mean to put the achievement down. It’s an interesting work and there are things I like about it. But because of the aspect of kitschiness in Gods’ Man that led Susan Sontag to put it into her canon of works defining “camp” - and because Madman’s Drum strives but fails at its ambition - I consider both interesting more for the territory they open than for the territory they ultimately colonize.
FURTHER READING:
