"We can naturally read symbols," said Walker to the small group cluttered inside the Eastern Edge Gallery on Sunday afternoon.

"These artists were aware of comic books and the funnies in the newspaper. They were aware of sequence-based art, and how you can tell a story just in images. It's not a new thing. Even the Egyptians knew it. Cavemen knew it. It's in us."

Some of the earliest works of engraved literature have fallen to the wayside, says Walker, because their art was often leftist and therefore repressed.

But Walker believes we owe a great deal to these early, wordless storytellers. So he selected four stories from his personal collection, edited the original prints in Adobe Photoshop, and reproduced them for the world.

"I said to the publisher, 'You have to reproduce these artists or otherwise they'll fall into obscurity,'" he said.

"They had been the inspiration for other artists who had gone on to create the graphic novels in the 20th century we're so familiar with, like Will Eisnor's Contract With God and Maus by Art Spiegelman, which have made a great impact and brought the graphic novel out of the darkness of being just comic relief and funny paper entertainment, to serious literature," he said.

Labels: comics history, graphic novels, publishing, woodcuts