He Done Her Wrong: The Great American Novel—And Not a Word in It

AUTHOR: Gross, Milt

ARTIST: Milt Gross (illustrator)

PUBLISHER: Doubleday; Fantagraphics Books

FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION: 1930

Publication History

The title of the book He Done Her Wrong is taken from a line in the ballad “Frankie and Johnny,” which had been popular in various versions since the beginning of the 1900’s. In the song, which was loosely based on an actual murder case, Frankie kills her man, Johnny, because he “done her wrong.” The plot of Gross’s story, however, has little or nothing to do with the song, and Gross’s subtitle (The Great American Novel—And Not a Word in It) indicates his intention to produce a visual novel with no text. It was first published in 1930, and, as such, it is often regarded as the second American graphic novel. The more serious God’s Man: A Novel in Woodcuts (1929) by Lynd Ward is widely considered to be the first; indeed, He Done Her Wrong can be viewed as a reaction to the deeply serious tone of Ward’s novel.

He Done Her Wrong was reprinted in 1963 by Dell, with an introduction by the cartoonist Al Capp. It was then reprinted in 1971 by Dover Books, with what were seen as offensive racial stereotypes removed, and later in a 1983 edition from Abbeville Press retitled Hearts of Gold. A more faithful reprint was published in 2005 by Fantagraphics Books, with an introduction by Craig Yoe and an appreciation by Paul Karasik.

Plot

He Done Her Wrong is 260 pages, and though it does not have formal chapters, it is divided into eight sections, usually separated by a blank page followed by a small vignette. The opening section has no title, but using the subject matter of the vignettes, the following seven sections are effectively titled: “The Big City,” “The Bloodhound,” “The Rich Widow,” “No Help Wanted,” “The Pampered Dog,” “The Hospital,” and “The Mouse.”

In the introductory section, readers meet the hero and heroine. The female protagonist is a young, pretty singer in a rough bar, set in a snowy landscape that looks like the Yukon. Her singing is so beautiful that she can reduce hardened men to tears. The hero is a hulking hunter who, even within the conventions of broad cartooning, cannot be described as handsome. When the heroine is the object of unwanted attention in her dressing room, the hero comes to her rescue. A villainous businessman then persuades him to form a partnership hunting for furs. After a tearful farewell with the heroine, the hero earns a huge amount of money for his new partner. However, the villain persuades the heroine that the hero has died, then marries her and takes her to the big city.

As the hero begins to search for his lost love, the villain becomes obsessed with a vending machine and loses his entire fortune trying to get it to work. While the heroine and her two children are thrown into the street, the villain strikes up a relationship with a rich widow, much to the dismay of the widow’s pampered dog.

The hero makes his way to the big city, where, after a series of slapstick adventures, he narrowly misses the heroine when a sign advertising a play called Fate is lowered between them as they pass in the street. Finally, he tracks down the villain and, knife in hand, interrupts his marriage to the rich widow. The hero gives chase, and the villain, trying to escape with some of the widow’s belongings, falls into a coal chute. In the joke that was censored in the mid-twentieth-century editions, the hero, having followed the villain, finds that he is strangling a black character rather than the villain covered in coal dust.

Meanwhile, the heroine is desperately searching for work. In a long sequence, she is shown going through a series of meetings, pleading her case so she can finally get a job scrubbing floors. The villain has also fallen on hard times; the widow’s butler tracks him down in order to throw him into the street, much to the amusement of the widow’s dog. While robbing a barbershop, the villain is discovered by the hero, and a huge fight ensues.

The hero is rushed, unconscious, to the hospital where the heroine is now working. Unfortunately, in the fight, he acquired a photograph of the widow inscribed with “To my beloved intended husband,” which the heroine now finds. Distraught, she packs her bags and leaves. When the villain is brought to the same hospital, the hero literally drags him back to the wilderness in search of the heroine, but the villain has a gun and is able to turn the tables.

Just as the villain has the hero tied to a log in a sawmill, in a double parody of the conventions of melodrama, the heroine coincidentally happens to be walking past the mill with her two children. The hero, the heroine, and her children are all rescued when what appears to be a stuffed moose’s head hanging in the mill turns out to be a real moose sticking its head through a hole in the wall. The moose attacks the villain and saves the day.

In the final parody of the excesses of melodrama, a birthmark on the hero’s bottom reveals him to be the long-lost son of a timber magnate. The villain is condemned to shotgun marriages to a series of women, while, in the final frame, the hero and heroine share an embrace as a loving grandfather plays with their five children in the background.

Characters

Because they inhabit a wordless novel, the main characters do not have names, but they can be identified by their roles in the narrative.

•The heroine, as is typical of her origins in melodrama, is beautiful, virtuous, and virginal. Her looks change slightly when she moves to the big city and starts wearing fashionable clothes. However, by the end of the novel, she has reverted to her more traditionally feminine appearance.

•The hero is a large, simple-looking hunter with almost superhuman strength. He wears buckskins and a coonskin hat until the end of the story, when, newly rich, he is seen wearing natty plus fours.

•The villain, with his fur coat, top hat, and moustache, is based on the model from melodrama. He is totally ruthless, driven by lust for both money and the heroine, but he is not exceptionally clever, as demonstrated by the complete collapse of all his schemes.

•The heiress is a large, aging dowager with a hooked nose, pandered to by her butler and devoted dog.

Artistic Style

Even in an era of loose, fluid draftsmanship in American newspaper strips, Gross’s artwork in He Done Her Wrong stands out as particularly gestural. Every page, even the most detailed ones, seems to have been drawn at great speed, as if in a frenzy of creativity. To work in this way is not simply a matter of haste, as it requires a great surety of touch.

Gross’s skill in design also comes to the fore, with the layout of the pages varying dramatically, from intensely detailed double-page spreads through multiple-panel action sequences to small, simple single images surrounded by the white expanse of the page. There are often no panel borders, and the story flows at a varying pace, sometimes frenetic, sometimes leisurely. The lack of dialogue means that Gross has to be particularly inventive in some of his storytelling. He rarely falls back on the obvious, although at one point, the trapper who tells the hero of the villain’s evil scheme has a drawing of an eye and a saw above his head to indicate “I saw.” More typically, Gross’s solutions to the challenge of wordlessness are original and ingenious; when the villain tells of the “death” of the hero, the headstone has a likeness of the hero on it, and readers see the coffin underground with a dummy in it.

Gross uses heavily blacked pages for moments of high drama, as when the heroine is threatened in her dressing room. There, the leering face of her would-be assailant is surrounded by total blackness; later, after the hero has left, she is shown silhouetted three times in a doorway, each time looking a little sadder. When action scenes are required, Gross’s swift drawing style becomes even more frenetic. As the hero and villain fight in the barbershop, an entire page is taken up by a whirling mass of circular lines in which fragments of faces, hands, and feet can be seen, surrounded by equipment flying in all directions. Gross also uses action sequences to develop complex slapstick scenes. When the villain leaves the barbershop, he is kicked out while tied to a chair, the springs of which send him bouncing halfway across the city. He bounces to a window where the wealthy widow is taking a bath, and her attempts to attack him merely result in him bouncing back to her window, where he shrugs helplessly as she hits him again.

At other times, the slapstick can be less hectic, as when the villain confronts the vending machine. Across two pages, in twelve drawings without panel borders, he gradually descends from cool assurance to wild frustration. The effect is to create a slow buildup of humor similar to that of the 1920’s Punch cartoons by English social satirist H. M. Bateman.

The majority of Gross’s pages are sparse, yet elegantly designed; however, sometimes he fills panels with incidental humorous detail. When the hero drags the villain back into the wilderness, they pass through a city scene depicting first-floor stables; people hanging off the back of an elevated railway car; a holdup in an automobile; and a mother, with her children, balancing on her head on a seesaw.

Themes

Although the subtitle of He Done Her Wrong was meant as an ironic joke by Gross and although the characters and the events of the story are relentlessly humorous, it is still a novel that has to deliver its narrative without recourse to dialogue or even sound effects. The only text in the story is diegetically contained, and even then it is only sporadic, mostly delivered in the form of street signs or fragments of handwriting. Therefore, He Done Her Wrong is a formal experiment in the nature of visual storytelling.

The story is mainly a parody of the kind of melodramas that were well established in the nineteenth century and still popular in theaters and cinemas in the 1920’s. As such, it plays with the rigid stereotypical roles of melodrama: the beautiful, virginal heroine; her faithful, strong suitor; and the rich, evil villain who has designs on the (usually impoverished) heroine. Despite being a parody, however, underneath Gross’s comic treatment, He Done Her Wrong is a story of love, lust, and greed. For such a broad comedy, there are many serious undertones in the novel, including the contrast between the innocent wilderness and the evil city. The twenty-six-page-long sequence in which the heroine searches for work also struck a chord with contemporary audiences, who by 1930 were suffering the effects of the Great Depression.

Impact

When the reputation of American newspaper artists and writers began to be rehabilitated in the 1960’s and 1970’s, Gross was left behind. As Winsor McCay, George Herriman, E. C. Segar, and others reemerged as household names, Gross was comparatively neglected. Despite his memorable characters and his zany humor, which remained easily accessible to audiences in the latter part of the twentieth century, it was not until 2009 and 2010 that major texts specifically devoted to Gross began to appear.

Some of Gross’s most memorable work appeared in book form, and with titles like Nize Baby (1926) and Dunt Esk (1927), it may be that the use of Yiddish slang and phonetic spellings kept these works less accessible to later audiences. However, He Done Her Wrong’s wordless quality is what makes it both international and timeless in its appeal. Some critics maintain that it is still imbued with Jewish humor, but given the success of American Jewish humor across a wide range of media, if this is true, it should be construed as praise and not criticism.

The immediate and, indeed, short-term impact of Gross’s work on the development of the graphic novel was minimal. Perhaps unsurprisingly, no other artists tried to emulate him by creating a wordless novel. Even Gross’s subsequent works, such as Dear Dollink (1945), belong to the field of illustrated books rather than graphic novels. His more general influence on other cartoonists and comic artists has been vast, however. Figures as diverse as Matt Groening, Jules Feiffer, and Robert Crumb have acknowledged their admiration for Gross; in fact, Crumb used Gross’s famous catchphrase “Is dis a system?” in a panel from Despair comics in 1969. The various reprints of He Done Her Wrong have kept his work alive, and in the twenty-first century, it appears that the nature of his work and his contributions to the development of the putative graphic novel have finally been recognized.

Further Reading

Gross, Milt. Famous Fimmales: Witt Odder Ewents from Heestory (1928).

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. I Shoulda Ate the Eclair (1946).

Gross, Milt, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Hiawatta: Witt No Odder Poems (1926).

Bibliography

Gross, Milt, and Ari Y. Kelman. Is Dis a System? A Milt Gross Comic Reader. New York: New York University Press, 2009.

Gross, Milt, and Craig Yoe. The Complete Milt Gross Comic Books and Life Story. San Diego, Calif.: IDW, 2010.

Harvey, R. C. “Milt Gross: Banana Oil and the First Graphic Novel?” The Comics Journal, November 10, 2010. http://classic.tcj.com/top-stories/milt-gross-banana-oil-and-the-first-graphic-novel.

Heer, Jeet. “The Incomplete Milt Gross.” The Comics Journal, April 12, 2010. http://classic.tcj.com/history/the-incomplete-milt-gross.