In 1976, Steranko (who we've talked about before), created Chandler: Red Tide an "illustrated novel" as Fiction Illustrated #3 for Pyramid Books. Steranko used the term "graphic novel" in his introduction, though it was labeled "a visual novel" on the cover.
It had a unique structured layout that had two same-sized panels per page with text underneath each. There are no word balloons or captions.
In creating the book, Steranko used golden sectioning, "a mathematical formula to arrange elements in a unified structure, to create an image-to-text relationship that readers would be very comfortable with. The text on any given page related only to that page"
The book was sold at American newsstands alongside other paperback books. It did not sell well, especially with comicbook fans, who didn't embrace the lack of word balloons and captions.
Chandler was a fill-in book. That particular number of [the] Fiction Illustrated [series] was to have been Ralph Reese's Sherlock Holmes book [eventually published as Fiction Illustrated #4 — Son of Sherlock Holmes (1977)]. Ralph had worked on it for a year, and Byron realized ... that the book couldn't get out in time. He asked me if I would do a book to replace it. There are two men you never ask to fill in on a late deadline: Neal Adams and myself. We're both overcommitted. Byron's a good friend and I tried to do what I could for him, so I said I would do this book. It was produced in 2½ months where it should have taken at least six months to do. It was my first visual novel, and it was a major project.
There's a wonderful site dedicated to the Steranko book and it's art, which can be found here. At that site, James Romberger explains the importance of Chandler: Red Tide:
"Red Tide emerges for me as Steranko’s career masterpiece thus far. The break from the standard comic book format allows him one of his few opportunities to make a unified, long-form narrative. His growing dissatisfaction with the standard comics devices of word balloons and captions is resolved with deceptive simplicity; he limits his format to two vertical images per page, those occupying the upper two-thirds of the page over two type text boxes on the lower third. Occasionally dialogue is added unobtrusively to upper panels, but overall the text is written to a precise line-count measure which accentuates the progression of time that is integral to the storyline. What may seem on the surface like a Big Little Book colliding with Prince Valiant actually works amazingly well; the space between word and image falls away as both are apprehended simultaneously, absorbing the reader completely into Steranko’s dive to the nocturnal depths of Manhattan in the 1940s. ... If all that wasn’t enough, Red Tide is one of the first, if not the first graphic novel published in America."
Clearly it made an impact on Moore.
You can find the book online here or you can often find a copy to buy on eBay or Amazon.
