Will Eisner (1917–2005)

There is a tiny irony in the fact that when Will Eisner coined the phrase "graphic novel" in 1978 to describe his work A Contract with God, the book in question did not have the single plot of a unified novel. It was instead a set of four shorter narratives joined by a common setting at No. 55 Dropsie Avenue in the Bronx. The first of these is the properly-titled "A Contract with God," and it concerns the moral vicissitudes of a Jewish immigrant in New York. The other three stories center on show more a Depression-era "street singer," the building superintendent at No. 55, and a summer vacation season.

The Contract with God Trilogy collects the original book with its two sequels, both of which fully merit the "graphic novel" label. The Life Force is a complex story centered on the carpenter Jacob Starkah, and taking place mostly in 1934. Dropsie Avenue spans more than a century of transformations of the Dropsie neighborhood, pulling the events together into a single tale of striving, corruption, and transformation. The Trilogy volume is supplied with a preface and some new interstitial art from Eisner.

When he composed these pages, Eisner had already developed his techniques of visual storytelling to a high pitch, and throughout the work the characters and plots are presented with startling efficiency, while the compositions are striking and effective. The illustration is all in monochrome inks, presented in this handsome hardcover with uniform dark brown line art on ivory paper.

All of these stories raise powerful moral and emotional concerns, leavening them with occasional humor. They also clearly incorporate a level of memoir that powerfully documents 20th-century cultural history for the Bronx. I read a copy borrowed from the local public library, and I strongly believe it deserves a place in such collections. show less

Published quietly in 1978, Will Eisner's revolutionary literary work A Contract With God marked the invention of the modern graphic novel, took on a life of its own, and inspired a generation of "sequential artists."

Will Eisner (1917–2005) saw himself as "a graphic witness reporting on life, death, heartbreak, and the never-ending struggle to prevail." The publication of A Contract With God when Eisner was sixty-one proved to be a watershed moment both for him and for comic literature. It show more marked the birth of the modern graphic novel and the beginning of an era when serious cartoonists could be liberated from their stultifying comic-book format.
More than a quarter-century after the initial publication of A Contract With God, and in the last few months of his life, Eisner chose to combine the three fictional works he had set on Dropsie Avenue, the mythical street of his youth in Depression-era New York City.

As the dramas unfold in A Contract With God, the first book in this new trilogy, it is at 55 Dropsie Avenue where Frimme Hersh, the pious Jew, first loses his beloved daughter, then breaks his contract with his maker, and ends up as a slumlord; it is on Dropsie Avenue where a street singer, befriended by an aging diva, is so beholden to the bottle that he fails to grasp his chance for stardom; and it is there that a scheming little girl named Rosie poisons a depraved super’s dog before doing in the super as well.

In the second book, A Life Force, declared by R. Crumb to be "a masterpiece," Eisner re-creates himself in his protagonist, Jacob Shtarkah, whose existential search reflected Eisner’s own lifelong struggle. Chronicling not only the Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression but also the rise of Nazism and the spread of left-wing politics, Eisner combined the miniaturist sensibility of Henry Roth with the grand social themes of novelists such as Dos Passos and Steinbeck.

Finally, in Dropsie Avenue: The Neighborhood, Eisner graphically traces the social trajectory of this mythic avenue over four centuries, creating a sweeping panorama of the city and its waves of new residents―the Dutch, English, Irish, Jews, African Americans, and Puerto Ricans―whose faces changed yet whose lives presented an unending "story of life, death, and resurrection."

The Contract With God Trilogy is a mesmerizing, fictional chronicle of a universal American experience and Eisner’' most poignant and enduring literary legacy. show less

In his December 2004 introduction to the 2005 reprint of A Contract with God, Will Eisner wrote of the work’s genesis, “In 1978, encouraged by the work of the experimental graphic artists Otto Nückel, Franz Masareel and Lynd Ward, who in the 1930s published serious novels told in art without text, I attempted a major work in a similar form” (pgs. xxiii-xxiv). He described his narrative as “an exercise in personal agony,” his way of dealing with the death of his daughter, Alice, show more from leukemia in 1970. Eisner wrote, “I exorcised my rage at a deity that I believed violated my faith and deprived my lovely 16-year-old child of her life at the very flowering of it” (pg. xxvi).

The titular story begins with Frimme Hersch returning to the tenement at No. 55 Dropsie Avenue, after burying his daughter Rachele. Eisner depicts the scene with long lines of rain striking through Frimme and the background, leaving only the puddles as solid shapes. The reader can feel the rain soaking into Frimme while the lines darken the image to match Eisner’s narration. He writes, “Only the tears of ten thousand weeping angels could cause such a deluge!” (pg. 6). Eisner adds the same lines of rain to the bottom of his letters, giving the appearance of the ink bleeding down the page from the rain. He continues, “Not so unusual, a father brings up a child with care and love only to lose her… plucked, as it were, from his arms by an unseen hand – the hand of God” (pg. 8). This atmospheric narration overlays the open door of the tenement, appearing in the rain seen through the doorway while puddles on the floor show Frimme’s sodden path into the building. One of his neighbors offers him food, but Frimme, appearing to melt as Eisner depicts the water dropping off of him, passes on the offer. Later, as Frimme vents his anger at his god, Eisner uses the medium of comics to capture his anguish and rage in a way realistic illustration would not allow: his eyes bulge, his mouth gapes, and Eisner’s linework captures his fury (pg. 25). Frimme abandons the contract he made with God as a young boy, becoming a real-estate investor. When he acquires sufficient wealth, he asks the synagogue elders to write him a new contract. Reading it, he pledges to rededicate himself to good works and charity, only to die of a heart attack. Eisner’s first short story in this anthology perfectly captures a sense of loss and dramatic irony while evoking the people he knew as a young man growing up in the Bronx. In a way, the work foreshadows elements of Michael Chabon’s novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, itself about city life, the comics industry, and the collision of old world and new.

The other stories similarly have a folklorish tone, full of dramatic irony. “The Street Singer” tells of a man singing in alleys to make money. He attracts the attention of a former opera singer, who thinks she can teach him to be a star. After spending her cash advance on alcohol, he realizes he never wrote down her address and so sees his chance of a big break disappear before his eyes. In “The Super,” Eisner examines the antagonistic relationship between the residents and the building supervisor, Mr. Scuggs, while also showcasing the seedy underside of life in the tenements. Eisner portrays the anti-Semitic super fantasizing about an underage girl in a manic panel capturing his frenzied thoughts as he drinks beer and looks at lewd advertisements (pg. 107). The girl arrives, flashes him for a nickel, then poisons his dog and grabs his cashbox while his back is turned. He chases her, only for the building residents to see him about to hit her and call the police. Returning to his basement room, he cradles his dead dog and shoots himself. The story itself and Eisner’s graphic depiction of the super’s fantasizing recall the underground comix of the 1960s and 1970s, though he never shows more than the story requires and remains focused on the complexity of life in the slums rather than indulging his inner Id, as R. Crumb would do. Eisner begins with the narration, “After all, he was the landlord’s man – the enemy” (pg. 100). He gives the super the unflattering name of Scuggs, portrays him as balding and overweight, and portrays his disturbing fantasies. Eisner wants the reader to align with the tenants against this bully, only for him to evoke their sympathy when the littler girl poisons his dog. After Scuggs returns to his basement room, he cradles the dog in a series of textless panels in which Eisner depicts his anguish. Though Eisner never portrays Scuggs as a good man, he does show him as capable of genuine affection for one living creature, thereby depicting a far more complicated morality than appeared in most comics in 1978. The final story, “Cookalein,” examines the class structure of vacations, with the wealthy leaving the city in the summer for fancy Catskills resorts and those in the tenements going to farms with cottages, where a family might share a single room while also doing their own cooking and bringing their own linens. Even in vacation, however, people bring their problems and the traumas of the tenement with them. show less

Eisner leads you through the history of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a hate filled document whose echoes are still felt by Jewish people throughout the world. It says a lot about creating smoke so that people believe a fire is behind it and about how it's hard to unsay something.

The Protocols cannot be underestimated and they come up regularly. Their persistence is scary but it teaches us a lot about how sometimes things can be accepted unthinkingly by people and how we really need show more to teach critical thinking in a better manner for our children.

It also made me wonder what other "facts" we have unthinkingly accepted show less