Comics have two ingredients: words and pictures. So what happens when you remove the first ingredient?
You get silent comics, a subgenre in the graphic literature field that has a certain artistic purity, along with plenty of humor and charm.
The term “silent comic” is a little misleading. In fact, silent comics can be quite noisy.
In graphic novels such as “One Beautiful Day,” Jim Woodring’s anthropomorphic cat Frank screams to the heavens. In “Orion #5,” by Walter Simonson, characters brawl “Wrestlemania”-style with plenty of punishing, pounding sounds. Yuichi Yokoyama’s book “Plaza” contains no narration or dialogue but displays a chaotic carnival of sound and motion like a Charles Ives symphony. So let’s call them wordless comics, another imperfect label but probably more accurate.
Wordless comics cut across every type of comic and graphic novel. Mad magazine has often featured silent comics, in particular the work of Sergio Aragones and the feature “Spy vs. Spy,” created by Antonio Prohías in 1961. In European comics, Moebius’s 1975 comic “Arzach” and Phillipe Druillet’s 1974 comic “Vuzz” are two of the most influential examples of wordless storytelling. Mainstream comics have a tradition of silent issues, begun by Larry Hama’s “GI Joe” #21 in 1984. Appropriately, that issue is about a mission of the ninja Snake Eyes.
In 2002, Marvel published a whole month’s worth of silent comics under the Nuff Said label, which memorably included an issue of The X-Men that took place within the mind and memories of telepath Professor Charles Xavier. In 2023, DC Comics published Brazilian creator Gustavo Duarte’s “Silent Tales,” featuring six slapstick stories, such as mischievous clown Harley Quinn going to a hardware store to buy her trademark giant mallet.
However, non-mainstream comics are far more likely to go wordless. In Lale Westvind’s “Grip,” the protagonist gains a superhuman, ultrakinetic ability to use her hands. In Rick Veitch’s “The Spotted Stone,” a woman is transported by a mysterious artifact. In Jesse Lonergan’s “Hedra,” an environmentally devastated planet holds a lottery to go on a species-saving space mission. In Geof Darrow’s “silent but deadly” edition of “Shaolin Cowboy: Cruel to Be Kin,” a character described in the non-wordless edition as a “John Wayne-y Buddha” battles giant monsters and Nazis.
Aside from wordlessness, these comics have little in common, but they make up a vibrant subgenre. In wordless comics, the artist’s command of body language and composition is key, with no expository language to fall back on. For a visual medium, comics can get a bit talky; silent comics are the antidote. When the Shaolin Cowboy encounters a Nazi mutant riding a giant jellyfish in the desert, there’s no narration to explain the situation or soften the blow. The reader is taking in the action directly. Things just are.
The results are as visceral as they are visual. Wordless comics are the ultimate show-don’t-tell genre.
Mark Peters is the author of “Bullshit: A Lexicon.”