He Done Her Wrong by Milt Gross (1930)
A 300-page wordless romantic comedy that works as a sophisticated parody of the popular woodcut novels of the day, by the chief practitioner of the U.S. "Screwball" school of comic strips.
The critics: "Artistic innovation always outruns the vocabulary of critics. Artistic forms and genres are created long before there are words to describe them. Cervantes didn’t know he was working on a great novel when he wrote Don Quixote; he couldn’t have: the novel as a distinct form didn’t exist then, nor would it exist for centuries. If you had asked Cervantes what he was up to, he might have said he was writing a burlesque of courtly romances." --Jeet Heer, "The Proto-Graphic Novel: Notes on a Form," Comics Comics, 2009.
