Czech Artist Helena Bochorakova-Dittrichova was a contemporary of my featured printmakers, Jaroslav Vodrazka and Bohuslav Reynek, blazing her own trail on the modern art scene as "The First Woman Graphic Novelist." When she was studying art in Paris in the 1920s, she discovered wordless book-making, an art form dating back to the woodblock devotional tracts of the Middle Ages, revived after World War I by the Belgian-born printmaker, Frans Masereel and international disciples like American Illustrator Lynd Ward. Largely unknown outside her homeland, Bochorakova-Dittrichova created 15 illustrated narratives without texts, ranging from childhood memoirs to U.S. travelogues, and published an illustrated Life of Christ during the traumatic years of the Nazi occupation in World War II. The prints in the gallery of her new biosketch page from Christ: 32 woodcuts from the New Testament show her mastery of story-telling with an economy of visual means. You can also see a sampling of wordless narratives from the graphic book-makers, Masereel and Ward. (John Kohan)