This past March, 6 marked the 94th birthday of Will Eisner, who was one of the founding fathers of the comic book industry. Eisner’s career spanned some eight decades; from the earliest days of the comic book industry, to the introduction of digital comics. According to many in the industry, Eisner has been described father of the Graphic Novel. While others were just “drawing comics” Eisner broke new ground in the development of the visual narrative and the actual “language” of comics. During his career, Eisner created numerous characters, including The Spirit, John Law, Lady Luck, Mr. Mystic, Uncle Sam, Blackhawk, and Sheena.
The First Graphic Novel
To celebrate his life, In March, the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (MoCCA) staged a special exhibit of Eisner’s art and influence he had over the comicbook industry. Wone of Eisner’s most well-known works — what some point to as the first modern-day graphic novel — is A Contract with God, and Other Tenement Stories . In October of ’78, Baronet Books published what is considered by many to be — if not the first graphic novel, at least the first modern incarnation of this particular form of the Comicbook medium; A Contract with God. At the time of its publication, the book’s author, Will Eisner (who was both writer and illustrator of the tome), was already considered by many to be one of the founding fathers of the comicbook industry. With A Contract with God he was — once again — venturing off into new grounds which, although the format didn’t immediately set the world on fire, would eventually fundamentally alter the way comics were perceived.
Not so much a “novel” in the true sense of the word (in that it contained a single, long-form, story with a definitive beginning, middle, and end), the book actually deliver a quartet of stories that were inter-related tales all linked together by a single theme. All four stories (A Contract with God, The Super, The Street Singer, and Cookalein) occur around a specific (if fictional) tenement building in the Bronx (55 Dropsie Avenue). The fourth Cookalein, actually begins and ends there, but mostly occurring in the Borscht Belt of the Catskill Mountains were many New York City Jews spent the summers.
Even though no mainstream publisher was interested in the book, Baronet Books picked it up and published it in both hardcover and trade paperback editions. The book remained in print for 22 years until, in 2000, DC Comics acquired the rights to the book and, for the first time was published by a mainstream publisher. It has been translated into six languages (including Yiddish) and is considered by many to be a one of the cornerstones on which the comicbook industry rests.
A Contract with God
The stories in the book are all semi-autobiographical, with Eisner heavily drawing upon his own childhood experiences as well as those of his contemporaries growing up in the Bronx during the early 1900s. Drawing upon his talents for not only intricate design, but expressive lettering, and cartoonish figures, Eisner links the four narratives through their common setting as well as the common theme of immigrant and first-generation experiences, in New York.
The first thing that readers will notice about the book is that, instead of several panels per page as in modern graphic novels and comics, many pages are either a single illustration or several illustrations or panels not so much bordered or “contained” by various panels, but cast about the page in an almost but not quite haphazard fashion, so as to direct the reader’s eye in a specific path so that each story flows from page to page.
Celebrating Eisner
Upon enveloping oneself in the book readers will come away with a wonderful look back into the beginnings of this, wholly unique, and thoroughly American form of entertainment. The writing and illustrations display the very building blocks of this industry (much of which seems to have been lost if one were to look at most of what passes for comics these days). Still, beyond the beauty of the illustrations and the poetry of the words themselves, each of the stories harkens back to a time of both neighborhood, and a piece of Americana that doesn’t seem to exist anymore.
The simplicity found in each of the four stories in the graphic novel is not only pure Eisner, but truly delightful to read. If you have not read this book, or if you have read it and it is somewhere on a shelf in your den, you truly owe it to yourself to buy it today (or pull it off the shelf), and immerse yourself in the wonderful world of Will Eisner’s beloved New York City.
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