A Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories by Will Eisner

The Story ‘Cookalein’ might even be the most autobiographical of the lot, with Eisner himself portrayed as a character.īut befitting of someone who kept pushing the conventions of the field, pages in the book are not cordoned off by the typical margin squares or speech bubbles, one has come to associate with the genre. For when writing them, Eisner had tapped into his own childhood memories and experiences. In this sense, the series of four tales told in this anthology, could be seen as those which have varying elements of reality. In the poor, constrained series of tenements which he and thousand other migrants called home, and where they struggled to eke out a meager existence, amidst dispossession and discrimination. Stories about people, neither good nor evil, some scared, anxious, miserable, hopeful, ambitious and looking towards a better tomorrow, A Contract with God could be considered as a cultural anthology of the migrant Jewish community of New York in which Eisner himself grew up. Which caters well for this work, which doesn’t follow the usual good vs evil narrative, or not even the standard of what one would consider as a comic format. In wanting to use comics/ graphic novels as a medium to tell series, more human stories, Eisner could be seen as almost Miyazaki-esque in perspective.

But his most critically appreciated works have to be the ‘Comics and Sequential Art’ series as well as ‘A Contract with God’ published in 1978. Instead, there are lonely, frightened and ambitious people, immigrants seeking relief from poverty, despair and dread, that, unhappy as the present is, the future might be worseĬonsidered one of the pioneer stalwarts in the Graphic novel field, Will Eisner’s most well known works would have to be the Spirit series he had penned during the 40s. The good guys don’t win and the bad guys don’t lose, because there are no good guys and bad guys. They are simple and they are harsh there are no easy morals to be gotten from them. What he (Eisner) has given us are those memories, as tales, and realized in a fusion of image and copy. A Contract With God and Other Tenement Stories by Will Eisner

A Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories by Will Eisner