Art Spiegelman on the Woodcuts of Lynd Ward

To make a wood engraving is to insist on the gravitas of an image. Every
line is fought for, patiently, sometimes bloodily. It slows the viewer
down. Knowing that the work is deeply inscribed gives an image weight
and depth. Two years after meeting Lynd Ward, when I was beginning to
seriously explore the limits and possibilities of comics, I drew a
four-page comics story about my mother’s suicide called “Prisoner on the
Hell Planet.” (It was eventually included in my long comic book for
grown-ups that needed a bookmark, Maus.) I was then twenty-four years old (the same age as Ward when he made Gods’ Man), and the scratchboard drawings I did were very influenced by Ward’s engravings and by German Expressionist woodcuts.