A Contract with God

:"This article is about A Contract with God, the graphic novel. There is also an article on the form of covenant a Contract With God."

Infobox Book
name = A Contract with God
title_orig =
translator =


image_caption = "A Contract With God" 2001 DC Comics edition
author = Will Eisner
illustrator = Will Eisner
cover_artist = Will Eisner
country = United States
language = English
series = Dropsie Avenue Trilogy
subject =
genre = Graphic Novel, Historical Fiction
publisher = Baronet Books
release_date = October 1978
english_release_date =
media_type = Print (simultaneous hardcover and paperback)
pages = 196
isbn = ISBN 0-89437-035-9
preceded_by =
followed_by = A Life Force

"A Contract with God, and Other Tenement Stories" is a graphic novel by Will Eisner that takes the form of several stories on a theme. Published by Baronet Books (ISBN 0-89437-035-9) in October 1978 [http://www.willeisner.com/bio/graphicnovels.html] in simultaneous hardcover and trade paperback editions — the former limited to a signed-and-numbered print-run of 1,500 — it is often erroneously called the first graphic novel, or the first work to describe itself as such. It is nonetheless an early landmark of the form, and critically lauded in its own right.

Now published by DC Comics, the book was reissued in 2001 (ISBN 1-56389-674-5). It runs 196 pages.

Plot

The work consists of four short stories — "A Contract With God", "The Super", "The Street Singer", and "Cookalein" — all set in a Bronx tenement in the 1930s, with the last story ("Cookalein") also taking place at a summer getaway for Jews. The stories are semi-autobiographical, with Eisner drawing heavily on his own childhood experiences as well as those of his contemporaries. Utilizing his talents for expressive lettering and cartoonish figures, he links the narratives by the common setting and the common theme of immigrant and first-generation experiences, across cultures.

Impact

While "A Contract with God" is not the first graphic novel, nor is it the first to use the term, it is regarded by some comic book industry professionals and literary critics as the standard bearer. It created in its wake a deeper understanding of the medium's worth and wide storytelling potential. It also served as an inspiration to younger creators, who in turn further developed the format. This has led to the acceptance of the graphic novel as a viable literary and commercial format for artistic expression. Eisner's initial attempt at a contained work of sequential art, while not inventing the form — and possibly by dint of being the right book at the right time, with another groundbreaking work, "Sabre" coincidentally published the same month — helped to popularize it and bring critical attention to a ghettoized medium.

Inspirations

In the introduction, Eisner cited as inspiration the 1930s books of Lynd Ward, who produced complete novels in woodcuts. "One of these books, "Frankenstein", fell into my hands in 1938," two years before Eisner's acclaimed newspaper-supplement comic book "The Spirit" debuted, "and it had an influence on my thinking thereafter. I consider my efforts in this area attempts at expansion or extension of Ward's original premise."

The book's genesis was twofold. The first inspiration, Eisner said, came after he'd attended his first comic-book convention in the mid-1970s, and met that generation's fans and creators. "I reasoned that the 13-year-old kids that I'd been writing to back in the 1940s were no longer 13-year-old kids, they were now 30, 40 years old. They would want something more than two heroes, two supermen, crashing against each other. I began working on a book that dealt with a subject that I felt had never been tried by comics before, and that was man's relationship with God." [http://www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/archives/volume1/issue1/eisner/ Transcript, Eisner's keynote address at the 2002 University of Florida Conference on Comics and Graphic Novels' Will Eisner Symposium] ]

In his introduction to the book's 2001 reissue, Eisner further revealed that the tragic inspiration for that choice of subject, as well as the inciting incident in the book's title story, grew out of the 1970 death of his leukemia-stricken teenaged daughter, Alice. Until then, only Eisner's closest friends had even been aware that he'd had a daughter.

The term "graphic novel"

His calling the book a "graphic novel", Eisner said in that same address, came about on the spur of the moment:

cquote|I called the president of Bantam Books in New York, who I knew had seen my work with "The Spirit". Now, this was a very busy guy who didn't have much time to speak to you. So I called him and said, 'There's something I want to show you, something I think is very interesting.'

He said, 'Yeah, well, what is it?'

A little man in my head popped up and said, 'For Christ's sake, stupid, don't tell him it's a comic. He'll hang up on you.' So, I said, 'It's a graphic novel.'

He said, 'Wow! That sounds interesting. Come on up.'

"Well, I did bring it up and he looked at it and looked at me through his reading glasses and said, 'This is a comic book, bring it to a smaller publisher,' which I did. . . . At the time, I thought I had invented the term, but I discovered later that some guy thought about it a few years before I used the term.

Critical assessment

David Wade, "Sojourners Magazine", July 2004: [ [http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa4010/is_200407/ai_n9459043 Holy Warrior Nuns, Batman! | Sojourners Magazine | Find Articles at BNET.com ] ] "Eisner explores the lives of the people he remembered from his youth among an impoverished but colorful immigrant community in the Bronx. His stories explore issues of life, death, faith, and failure with all the warmth and complexity one would find in fine fiction. ... [B] oth the heroic and the villainous lived in tension within his characters."

Peter Schjeldahl, "The New Yorker", Oct. 17, 2005: [ [http://www.newyorker.com/critics/books/articles/051017crbo_books1 Words and Pictures: The New Yorker ] ] " [N] ever leaving well enough alone is apparently a principle for Eisner. Over-the-topness is endemic to the comics, of course — an industry standard for popular action and horror titles, as well as for manga, and the default setting for [Robert] Crumb's work. But it is ill suited to serious subjects, especially those that incorporate authentic social history."

David L. Ulin, "Los Angeles Times" review of "The Contract With God Trilogy: Life on Dropsie Avenue", Nov. 20, 2005: [ [http://www.calendarlive.com/books/bookreview/cl-bk-ulin20nov20,0,7011304.htmlstory?coll=cl-books-features] Dead link|date=March 2008] "...elaborate sagas of immigrant life, of the struggle with God and meaning — stories that attempt to tease out the complex issues of existence, issues that cannot be resolved. ... "Who knows," Eisner writes above a full-page drawing of swarming cockroaches, "why all the creatures of earth struggle so to live." It's a plaintive motif, and it resonates across these pages, as Eisner's characters strive not just to survive but to understand — a desire that, as often as not, eludes them in the end. ... Eisner's iconic status makes it hard to approach him critically; how do you take on a legend, after all? Yet to read these three novels back-to-back-to-back is to be reminded not only of his considerable innovations but also of his limitations. His visual style, developed in the 1930s, never progressed beyond a broad-strokes realism, more appropriate for the funny pages than for the nuanced work he would aspire to create. His narrative abilities, too, are uneven, occasionally gimmicky and contrived. ... Still, there remains something momentous ... a magisterial quality, as if we're witnessing the birth of a movement, a kind of aesthetic big bang."

References

External links

* [http://www.willeisner.com/ Official website]
* [http://www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/archives/volume1/issue1/eisner/ Transcript, Eisner's keynote address at the 2002 University of Florida Conference on Comics and Graphic Novels' Will Eisner Symposium]