The Mumpsimus

It is with tremendous sadness that I share news I received this morning from my friend David Beronä's family: David passed away peacefully at home last night. He'd been fighting a brain tumor for about a year and a half, and so while the news is not quite a surprise, it is a blow. [ Update:   Here's David's official obituary .] I interviewed David for Colleen Lindsay's blog The Swivet in 2009, where we talked about his Wordless Books: The Original Graphic Novels , which had recently been published by Abrams. I knew very little about graphic narratives before meeting David, and he gave me an extraordinary education over the years, as his knowledge was vast and his passion was thrilling. Eric Schaller and I had the honor of publishing what David told us was the last piece of writing that he completed before getting sick, the essay "Franz Masereel's Picture Books Against War" , which appeared in last year's issue of our magazine The Revelat...

The latest issue of that venerable, mercurial, deeply occasional magazine THE REVELATOR is now available online for your perusal. It is filled with nothing but THE TRUTH AND ALL! The contents of this issue are so vast, variable, and vivacious that I can't even begin to summarize them here. There are excursions into history, into imagery, and into liquor. We attend the tale of a young man reading science fiction in Kenya. We discover the secret life of Elo­dia Har­win­ton, about whom I am sure you have heard much (but never this much!). For those of you who do not like words, there are not only some videos, but a wordless book(let) by the great Frans Masereel. And do not forget the Revelations , in which many secrets, some of them clearly obscene and pornographic, revealed! Resist not, o mortal! Surrender yourself to the siren call of The Revelator today!

I remember when I spoke with Lynd Ward’s two daughters that both Nanda and Robin told me that they constantly asked their father what his wordless books meant and Lynd always replied with the same answer: "It means exactly what you think it means." And that is really the attraction of these books -- we bring so much of our own personal experiences to reading pictures because the language of pictures has, what I like to call, a "private declension" that only each of us can understand -- a secret smirk or a haunting remembrance from our private association to an image. --David A. Beronä The release of The Library of America's gorgeous two-volume collection of Lynd Ward's wordless novels has led to some fascinating and thoughtful reviews. I just noticed that Scott Esposito did a quick roundup , and so I thought I'd add to what he'd collected, since I find Ward's work endlessly fascinating. William T. Vollmann, Bookforum: What makes a Ward pict...

David A. Beronä is Dean of Library and Academic Support Services at Plymouth State University, and author of Wordless Books: The Original Graphic Novels . He was instrumental in helping to organize last year's "Illustrating VanderMeer" exhibit, and so I thought he might enjoy joining our carnival . David posted this piece as a downloadable document on his website , and I asked him if he wouldn't mind my posting it here as well... Two Stories from Jeff VanderMeer’s The Third Bear by David A. Beronä As part of a reviewing process that my friend Matt Cheney developed, I was part of a group each reading two stories from The Third Bear by Jeff VanderMeer. I chose the time when I had time travelling on a plane to read these stories. I found that a different setting (I usually read on my porch looking out over the hills in New Hampshire with the sound of birds in the background) physically took me out of my ordinary world, bound by gravity, into a unaccustomed ...

Over at Colleen Lindsay's digs, The Swivet, I interview David Beronä , who wrote a marvelous book called Wordless Books: The Original Graphic Novels . One fun bit of trivia I forgot to mention in the intro to the interview -- before David and I had any knowledge of each other, we were both reviewers for Rain Taxi , and you should definitely check out his review there of one of the most recent wordless books to gain a lot of attention, Shaun Tan's The Arrival .