For all his reservations about the avidity of the word in seizing on the meaning of his visual novel, Ward had little problem with its temporal, narrative impulse. He was drawn to the linear, sequential and action-oriented strengths of verbal description as well as the novel form, though as I have said before, he found his most compelling model in the silent film and its kinetic force.⁵ If he derived the fundamental concept of a metaphysical pact from Murnau’s Faust (1926) and the earlier, The Student of Prague (1913),⁶ and absorbed Walter Ruttman’s obsession with the continuous flux of movement in Berlin, die Symphonie einer Großstadt (1927), he took the dizzying scale of the city, a number of sensational and melodramatic plot elements, and above all, the torrid pace of his visual novel from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927). Lang’s film offered sensational special effects and spectacular set designs as well as a specific plot trajectory lacking in Ruttman’s documentary. The last third of the film in particular traces the main characters’ reactions to a series of catastrophic events. It engages Freder, the CEO’s son, in nearly constant physical movement and shows extreme close-ups of him responding emotionally, in fact defining him in these terms. Toward the end of the film, for instance, he dashes through the streets alone, trying to find his love Maria and avoid the flooding machine works. Lang captures him as a small figure running between tall buildings, a mise en scéne repeated by Ward in his hero’s many encounters with the city’s looming skyscrapers and his tormented wanderings through its narrow streets. Indeed, a scene depicting the artist pursued by a posse of avengers that is set against a backdrop of monolithic buildings exactly mirrors a cityscape late in Metropolis that shows masses of people sprinting down a ramp (III, 30).⁷

In his predilection for conveying rapid motion, Ward was also influenced by the Belgian graphic artist, Frans Masereel, whose early woodcut novel, Passionate Journey (1919), he must have studied carefully. Although stylistically less finished than Gods’ Man, comprised of a series of what David A. Beronä calls “solid figures and forms” and “flat, legible images,” Passionate Journey nonetheless addresses similar themes as it pursues a young man seeking out passionate human experience in a gritty metropolis (Passionate Journey 2007 vi, vii). The organizing principle of this picaresque novel is not simply movement, but frenetic movement, as Masereel chases the hero’s passage from one new experience to the next in a kind of Whitmanic devouring of life. The modernist rapidity and continual newness of these images accounts for the novel’s interest as well as its aspiration to the medium of film. The very first woodcut shows the main character waving to us from a moving train, summoning one of the early film experiments of the Lumière brothers, and the book only accelerates from there, at one point representing the hero literally running into coitus. Among a host of other activities conducive to the new “motion picture,” we see the protagonist riding a bicycle, driving a car, climbing trees, doing handstands, leaping across brooks, urinating from the top of a building, playing with children, ice-skating, having sex with a prostitute, fighting in the street and dancing. There are multiple plots but no single narrative line as the hero moves through a kaleidoscope of volatile emotions. Even as he collapses and dies in a forest at the end, the author cannot suppress his hyperactivity. Shifting into a magical register, the final woodcut shows him resurrected as a clothed skeleton striding through the universe and nonchalantly waving to the audience. Ward likely noted the variety and novelty of the character’s experiences – some outrageous and obscene, others gallant and laudable – but he would have been particularly struck by the sheer variety and succession of incident, the exhilarating movement from one fresh and surprising image to the next.⁸

Both the silent films and Masereel’s wordless novels no doubt absorbed their kinetic spirit from the near-manic energy of the 1920s coming from across the Atlantic, what Cecilia Tichi describes as “the constantly accelerating cultural changes and rhythms in the nation … an industrialized age dominated by speed and motion, an age of instantaneity” (230–231). This “new high-velocity America” (233), which was quickly becoming a model for the rest of the world, resulted largely from the country’s experience in the Great War, which as Ann Douglas states, benefitted America. What began as an emergency – entering the war late and having to equip and mobilize troops as rapidly as possible – wound up generating “an ethos … of adrenaline and speed” that spilled over into nearly every aspect of culture, from steel production and automobile manufacture to the clothing, advertising and film industries (186). “The war,” as Douglas writes, “revved up the dizzying pace of change and reinforced acceleration itself, the trademark of American life” (183). Spurred by the war, nearly every industry and cultural institution adopted Ford’s mass-production techniques. Even Hollywood followed suit with Marcus Loew comparing chain store methods in the movies with those employed in the railroads, telephones, and automobiles, and later Warner Brothers overworking their actors and implementing “factory-like, super-quick production methods” (Douglas 189). Small wonder that in the transaction that seals his fate, the hero of Gods’ Man hastily signs the contract, snatches the brush and dashes off to the city. His impetuosity is perhaps less a sign of his youth than a by-product of “technological and cultural acceleration” and the result of “a speeded-up psyche” (Douglas 200).

Turning now to Ward’s novel, one is immediately struck by a “culture of momentum” in which the protagonist and other characters are frequently defined by the rapidity of their motion. In more than a third of the engravings the hero appears running or engaged in some type of energetic physical activity – sailing a boat, fleeing from his captors, striding out of church, leaping off a cliff into a river or hiking in the mountains. While painting a picture at the outset of the novel, ordinarily a stationary activity, he is shown on a small boat rocked by the surf (I, 4), a plein air stunt that however unlikely suggests the spontaneity of his creative process and the rapid movement of his pencil. Later, similarly, a family snapshot is realized not as a conventionally static portrait but as kinetic action, the hero racing with his wife through a landscape while recklessly carrying their small child.⁹ The expressionist style of the novel also lends movement to scenes that would ordinarily come across as still (III, 10) (bit.ly/3mdSDVQ). Ward tilts the picture plane, distorts a character’s body or face with passion or creates motion in the landscape with an extended fan of incised lines (III, 19–20). Stark white pyramids of light illuminating a scene from above or below furnish additional dramatic movement to the engravings (IV, 1), and in the case of the magic paintbrush, transform a potentially static moment of display into a mystical cosmic event (I, 21). This is no ordinary utilitarian object but a holy relic descending from heaven (bit.ly/3ILLnQj).

In many of the images, as I have suggested, Ward cuts the woodblock to suggest rapid movement in the characters and the background. It is instructive to consider several of the more striking examples. After a military officer has beaten the artist unconscious, for instance, we see him dragging the young man’s limp body down a dark sidewalk (III, 20). He and the prostitute goose-step into the foreground, one foot suspended in air, while the pavement flows around them like a glistening river and the figures’ projected shadows hasten them to the edge of the frame. A few pages later the artist escapes from jail only to be discovered by the art dealer who alerts the police. In one panel, we see the hero looking over his shoulder midstride as he sprints out of the city (III, 31). The monolithic skyscrapers in the background are set in motion by the plumes of smoke from the factory, and in the sky the dark clouds emulate the forms of his pursuers, closing in on him. These forms suggest the hero’s figure as well, a moving darkness in the landscape. The black shapes abstract and multiply his fleeting form, and project it like a sequence of film stills onto the white sky. By the next image the artist has eluded his captors, at least for the moment, and is making his way furtively along the edge of a mountain (Figure 1.1; III, 32). The claw-like form of his right hand is echoed in the landscape and the rock above magnifies his head like a giant Easter Island statue. The hunched form of his body flies forward in the shape of a white shadow that appears to melt the surface of the rocky slope, liquefying its form.

As we see in each of these three woodcuts, the speed of the hero’s flight sends shock waves through the surrounding environment. The motion of his body and agitation of his mind reverberate in the natural backdrop, which, like many of Edvard Munch’s paintings, assumes the psychic distress of t...