" Introduction" to "Beyond Words 2: A Wordless Comic Anthology." Sunburn No. 15 (Winter, 2001): 2.

BEYOND WORDS 2

Introduction
By David A. Beronä

    In the early stages of learning, children are given picture books in order to encourage verbal and written skills.  What educators sometimes overlook are children’s narrative skills.  From their earliest years, children who cannot yet read can sit down and tell a story from a wordless picture book.
    This innate understanding of narrative is the basis of wordless comics that I have found intriguing over the years. Narrative comprehension not only assists in literacy education in children but wordless comics continue to offer a form of communications sometimes overlooked by adults.
   Throughout my life I have made friends and fostered strong friendships with a shared interest in wordless comics stretching from Japan, Europe, and North America.  One friendship involves a writer from London named Ann Baer.
   I wrote an article on Frans Masereel’s woodcut novels—what I prefer to call early wordless comics—for a magazine called Biblio: The Magazine for Collectors of Books, Manuscripts, and Ephemera.   The contents of articles for this particular issue were advertised in the London Times.   As a result, I received a note from the editor at Biblio forwarding a letter she received regarding my article.
    The writer said she had a book of woodcuts, Geschichte ohne Worte (Story Without Words in English) by Frans Masereel that was given to her as a girl and she was curious about the price.  As an author of articles about Masereel’s woodcut novels, she wanted my advice.  The letter was signed Ann Baer. I wrote back to Ann that this was a popular edition at the time and today was valued at 60-100 pounds depending on its condition.  I gave her the addresses of a few bookstores in London who might be interested in purchasing her book and a price that I was willing to pay if she could not find a better offer.  It was a few weeks later that I received another letter from Ann saying she would accept my offer.  I sent the money to her nephew who lived in New York.  She trustingly had sent the book before receiving my check.  The book was in good shape and since I did not have a copy, I was delighted to have it in my possession.  To my surprise Ann included a history of this particular book that she noted on a piece of paper inside the cover.  “This book was given to me at Schule Schlors Salem on Lake Constance by a fellow-pupil Maria Oberdiech 7 June 1933.  I never saw her again.  It is likely, from her appearance, that she was Jewish, in which case she was probably murdered.”    I wrote back immediately telling her my excitement having this unique book with its history and asked her for more clarification.   Ann responded writing that “it is very gratifying when things one has treasured finds, in one’s old age, new owners who will also appreciate them.”  She also clarified the circumstances behind the book.
    Ann Baer was the daughter of Frank Sidgwick who was the founder of the English publishing firm of Sidgwich and Jackson.  In 1932 she left England for a few weeks in a school exchange program her school had with a school in southern Germany.  It was during this time that she met a girl her age named Maria Oberdieck.  Since she was German and Ann was English and neither one spoke the other’s language, they were restricted from communicating in any large capacity.   However, they did share a picture language in the form of a book by Masereel-- Geschichte ohne Worte that Maria gave to Ann as a present when she left Germany.  When Ann moved back to England the threat of Nazism was growing.   She never heard from Maria again and suspected, since she was Jewish, that she was murdered in a concentration camp by the Nazis.   Ann’s husband Bernhard Baer, “who died in 1983, came from a liberal Jewish Berlin family.  He managed to escape to England in 1938, so did his sister.  His parents and most of the rest of his family were murdered.”
    This wordless novel was the beginning of my relationship with Ann whom I have corresponded with for the last five years and had the fortune to visit last summer.   She published her first novel, Down the Common, in 1996 at the age of eighty-two.
    I share this experience with readers of this issue because it is the basis of my relationship with all wordless comics and picture stories.  When I open a mute mini by young artists like Robyn Chapman or crack open another volume of the mute series Anywhere But Here by the Japanese artist Mickey Bird, or another silent French album on the survival of the Vagabond Cat by Fabio he began in L’oeil du Chat, I commemorate the moment when Maria gave Ann a wordless book by Masereel.  And in remembrance of that event I celebrate the power of pictures to entertain and communicate simple and complex ideas.  That is the power of wordless comics that children recognize immediately and adults often forget. 

David A. Beronä (david.berona@unh.edu) has written articles for various publications on the history of the wordless novel and is currently writing a book on Lynd Ward’s woodcut novels.