Works by successful comics writers are often collected and published in a book format. This doesn’t make them a novel and even when they lack words they are not wordless novels.

There is no consensus among theorists and historians on a definition of comics.

as per Wikipedia entry for Comics

There are numerous examples of these collections with the following being an arbitrary list by German, American, and Danish writers:

Vater und Sohn (Father and Son)

Erich Ohser, under the pen name e.o. plauen, created Vater und Sohn, a gag strip that ran for 157 weekly issues in Berliner lllustrirte starting in 1934. David Beronä in his book, Wordless Books, The Original Graphic Novels (2008) characterized the strip as part of the wordless novel genre. We disagree and list it under Dead-end. Each page is a stand-alone entry and as a whole they do not amount to a narrative.

The bulk of the strips were published in three booklets, that were released in numerous editions:

  • Erich Ohser: Vater und Sohn: 50 lustige Streiche und Abenteuer, Ullstein Verlag, Berlin 1935
  • Erich Ohser: Vater und Sohn: 50 neue lustige Streiche und Abenteuer, Ullstein Verlag, Berlin 1936
  • Erich Ohser: Vater und Sohn: Noch 50 lustige Streiche und Abenteuer, Ullstein Verlag, Berlin 1938


Little Lulu


Little Lulu was created in 1935 by American author, Marjorie Henderson Buell, and debuted in The Saturday Evening Post on February 23, 1935, in a single panel, appearing as a flower girl at a wedding and mischievously strewing the aisle with banana peels. The panel continued to run weekly until December 30, 1944. as per Wikipedia

1937 edition

Henry

Henry was a comic strip created in 1932 by Carl Thomas Anderson (1865 – 1948). The title character is a young bald boy who is mostly mute in the comics (and sometimes drawn minus a mouth). After 84 years of syndication, Henry was discontinued on October 28, 2018.

1932 Saturday Evening Post
image credit: Wikipedia

Ferd’nand

Ferd’nand is a Danish pantomime comic notable for its lack of word balloons and captions. It was created by Henning Dahl Mikkelsen and first published in 1937 and new strips continued until the third cartoonist to draw it left the strip in 2006. (as per Wikipedia). Since Ferd’nand is pantomime, translation is not a problem, so the strip has been published in 30 countries.