He Done Her Wrong

Milt Gross's He Done Her Wrong (1930, Doubleday) is a single-issue comic masterpiece—a wordless, novel-length burlesque of silent film melodrama, told entirely through Gross's wildly expressive, cartoonish panels. Often cited as a landmark of the early graphic novel form, it showcases the cartoonist's virtuosic visual storytelling and deadpan humor, following a hapless hero's slapstick pursuit of a kidnapped damsel across a series of escalating, absurd set pieces.