SpringfieldNewsSun.com

SPRINGFIELD — Just as pre-owned car sounds more respectable than used car, graphic novel packs a certain highbrow oomph that comic book does not.

But until the recent popularization of graphic novels, David Berona was the used-car salesman of academia.

In grad school, the Enon native and lifelong comic book reader began researching wordless books — novels made with woodcut prints in sequential form that paved the way for today's more thought-provoking graphic novels.

It was a lonely existence.

"At that time," he recalled, "everybody laughed if you were still reading comics in your 20s."

It was even lonelier when Berona, an academic librarian, began championing wordless books at conferences.

"I was pretty dismissed," he explained, pausing. "Not pretty. I was dismissed."

With the publication of "Wordless Books: The Original Graphic Novels," Berona is getting his revenge.

The 1968 Catholic Central grad finally has been allowed to write the history of wordless books, or woodcut novels.

Comics fans should celebrate Berona like an anthropologist who finds the complete skeleton of an upright hominid in the African dust.

With his book, the proof is now black and white — graphic novels weren't created, they evolved.

"These were literally the first graphic novels," he said.

Berona will return home to do two area book signings.

He'll sign books from 4 to 6 p.m. today, July 24, at Dark Star Books in Yellow Springs.

From 7 to 9 p.m. Friday, he'll talk about wordless books and sign copies of his own book during a free reception at Ambience, 320 W. Main St.

Berona, the library director at Plymouth State University in New Hampshire, spent years trying to get a publisher interested in wordless books.

"If there's been a change of acceptance with woodcut novels," he said, "it's when people started accepting the word 'graphic novels' and you started seeing them on the shelves at Borders and Waldenbooks."

Even though wordless books were decades ahead of most comics in exploring mature subject matter, they somehow became guilty by association.

Berona often finds wordless books tossed in with children's books at used book stores.

"They'd open them up," he said, "and there's nothing but pictures."

Nevermind the fact that Laurence Hyde's 1951 "Southern Cross: A Novel of the South Seas" condemned U.S. atomic testing in the Bikini Atoll through a series of 118 wood engravings at a time when the cover to "Superman" No. 67 could only muster up enough strength to ask, "Can even Superman blast Lois Lane's super-crush on super-crooner Perry Como?"

To Berona, who wrote an introduction to a 2007 reprinting of "Southern Cross," wordless books actually hit their creative peak during the Depression.

Through a series of 231 engravings, Lynd Ward's 1937 book "Vertigo" told the story of the Depression itself from three viewpoints — the Boy, the Girl and the Old Man.

John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath" is most frequently cited as the great literary chronicle of that turbulent time, but it had one downside.

"It was limited to English-speaking people," Berona said. "But Lynd Ward's 'Vertigo,' which I put up there with 'Grapes of Wrath,' speaks to everyone in the world."

Berona has arguably become the leading authority on wordless books, an art form whose 20th century creators have simply fallen into obscurity.

Even the great Will Eisner, credited with the invention of the graphic novel as we know it with 1978's "A Contract With God," had to be reminded about them when he set out to write his how-to book, "Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative."

Berona did the reminding.

"I didn't bring them to his attention," Berona said, "I shook his attention up."

As a result, he scored a shout-out in the foreward of Eisner's book.

Wordless books, which were rooted in a centuries-old art form, held a powerful purpose for politically minded artists.

"For them to be part of that tradition, to work with woodcuts, disseminating information to the masses without regard to language or literacy," Berona said, "was major."

Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0352 or amcginn@coxohio.com.

How to go

David Berona will talk about wordless books and sign copies of "Wordless Books: The Original Graphic Novels" at 7 p.m. Friday, July 25, at Ambience, 320 W. Main St.

Admission is free.