The first "graphic novel"

Writer and Artist: Will Eisner
Original Graphic Novel
Published by DC 2000
$12.95

Reviewed by Pindaros

Will Eisner is a key figure in the development of the American comic book. When the industry first exploded as a phenomenon in the late 1930's, Eisner formed a workshop with Jerry Iger to produce material for publishers who did not have artists comfortable with the new medium. Eisner sensed the freedoms that the new medium offered over the format of the comic strip, and his work was characterized by tremendous experimentation with panel arrangement, point-of-view and lighting. This early fluency, in combination with his seemingly natural management skill, made the Eisner a teacher to a number of major artists who worked in his shops, including Jack Kirby, Jules Feiffer and Joe Kubert.

While this alone would make him an important figure in the history of comic books, he also made a reputation by writing THE SPIRIT in the years before and after WW2. This "costumed hero" series was remarkable both in its art, which offered the most original and developed vision of any comic except perhaps PLASTIC MAN, and its writing, which often veered away from the clichés of the other adventure books into the territory of the literary short story. In another unusual move, Eisner retained the rights to THE SPIRIT, escaping the legal and financial headaches that afflicted so many other creators of his generation.

In addition to these innovations, Eisner also proved himself in the world of bureaucratic and corporate communications, finding applications for comics as educational tools in the military during the war and in large corporations during the '50's and '60's. This work not only guaranteed a good life for him, but assured that his artistic style would be one of the most influential styles of American comic art.

The late '60's and early '70's were a time of tremendous change in the world of comics, as the world of the underground comics and the more ambitious segment of comic fandom developed into the culture of alternative comics. Because of his creativity, his influence and his independence, Eisner became an inspiration for this generation, and this opened the door to a third phase of his career.

Eisner, like many of the artists of his generation, had little interest in the sort of stories generally published in comic books of the Golden Age. In contrast to many of his peers, he felt that the medium was capable of producing a much wider range of narratives; he himself aspired to writing stories like those of acclaimed authors such as O. Henry and Ambrose Bierce. While THE SPIRIT offered some opportunity for such stories, Eisner still felt limited by the constraints a series imposed on his creative freedom. The developing American alternative comic culture offered a world entirely without such constraints, and since the mid-seventies, Eisner has aimed at producing a body of work that fully expresses his ambitions for the comic book (or as he has referred to it, "sequential art") medium.

The first installment in this project was the book, A CONTRACT WITH GOD, which Eisner described as a new form for comics, the "graphic novel." While the work has never been an overwhelming popular success, in its form and ambition it heralded such works of the '80's as MAUS and WATCHMEN, which have been read more often as single, self-contained works than in the serial form in which they were published. Eisner's book has remained in print nearly continuously since it was first published in 1978, largely through the efforts of Denis Kitchen, and is now being reissued as the first installment of DC's Will Eisner Library.

The merits of the book are obvious and require little rehearsing. Eisner's artistic style, previously produced in assembly-line situations for particular commercial or educational purposes, is here subjected only to the artist's will. The results would be minimalist were not every line of his drawing so emotionally expressive. The results are thus reminiscent of the late pencil sketches of such artists as Rembrandt and Picasso, where one feels closer to the artist for the lack of embellishment.

The story is equally remarkable. In a medium where the past is most often depicted in terms of either nostalgia or historical accuracy, Eisner rebuilds a Depression-era New York as a stage for forgotten dramas, where adherence to the remembered dynamics of a lost society replaces both obsessive reconstructions and idealized memories. The book is also filled with the sort of working-class, urban, ethnic characters that have rarely been depicted in the comics. The events of the various narratives all turn around recognizably human forms of emotion and desire.

The book is therefore required reading for anyone interested in the history of comics or the career of this comics pioneer, as well as anyone intrigued by life in Depression-era New York. Nevertheless, in using the label "graphic novel," and considering the book an instance of how comics can become a form of literature, Eisner proposes a (perhaps unnecessary) standard of criticism for his work. In the remainder of this review, I want to point out a few of the difficulties Eisner has in meeting this standard.

Although described as a novel, the book more closely resembles a collection of short stories, as it consists of four discreet narratives linked loosely by a unity of place (all occur around the tenements of New York, in particular one at "55 Dropsie Avenue") and a number of interlocking concerns. Eisner explicitly states one of these concerns when he describes how the tenements were the site of numerous battles to overcome the limitations of poverty.

Of the four stories, the first and last describe people who are more or less successful in making their fortune, while the other two portray people who lose their way in their lives. In the first story, an orthodox Russian Jew revokes a contract he had made with God, becomes rich, then on making a new contract with the help of some rabbis, is struck dead. In the second, a man who sings in alleyways wins, and promptly loses, the opportunity for a singing career. The third story tells of a German building superintendent whose life is destroyed by a greedy little girl, and the final story depicts young workers going to holiday camps in hopes of meeting and marrying wealthy mates.

Eisner seems to have had specific thematic concerns in mind, given that all but the last story verge on the schematic in their depiction of events. This is most obvious in the first story, 'A Contract with God,' which wrestles with the divine itself. Eisner ties act and consequence so closely together that the story becomes positively didactic. By making the lesson paradoxical, that destruction follows the forced reconciliation rather than the end of the first contract with God, Eisner reaches for depth and insight. Certainly taking hold of a truly theological perspective would justify his literary ambitions.

To a large degree, his instincts as a cartoonist work against him in this goal. Comics make use of many of the same mechanisms to engage the readers attention as do narratives in other media, but have a special affinity for physical exaggeration and caricature. This is not in itself a problem, but Eisner's desire to use these to have an impact as a story-teller at points creates what are virtually counter-narratives that obscure whatever points he may be trying to make. In 'Contract' his depictions of the religiously observant as slouching, hairy old men, and of the apostate real estate baron as a jowled figure with a stupid blonde girlfriend, suggest that this God fellow attracts a fairly degenerate crowd, and that we might be better off keeping our distance.

In the middle two stories, ‘The Streetsinger’ and ‘The Super,’ Eisner lets a similar attraction to sex and violence overwhelm the story's potential for irony and plot twists. We never get very far without encountering some fairly vile form of sex or violence: one character throws a baby across a room, another pays a little girl to undress for him. In both cases, the pulp sensationalism of the events undercuts the potential for more significant observation of how poverty and the rigidity of social hierarchies destroy the dignity and meaning of a number of human lives.

That Eisner was capable of much more becomes clear in the fourth story, ‘Cookalein.’ While half the story concerns the ironic courtship of two gold-diggers, Eisner interweaves a second narrative about a teen-age boy named Will, and the complex ways that sex affects his life. Eisner depicts Will (who is almost certainly the author himself) without the obvious recourse to caricature (or ideal beauty, for some of the women) that he employs in drawing other characters. In some places this results in the most moving depictions of emotion in the book. At other points the drawing descends into a confused shapelessness that implies that Eisner was struggling against the securities of caricature in his empathetic portrayal of the character. Both in success and failure, Eisner's struggle with Will suggests stories far more evocative than the ones he tells in the rest of A CONTRACT WITH GOD.

The garishness of the American comic style that undermines this first "graphic novel" has generally been a problem for comic creators with literary aspirations. This is almost certainly the reason that Art Spiegelman, who is perhaps the most visually sensitive comic artist in the US, developed such a uniquely understated version of the anthropomorphic animal style for his masterwork MAUS. Despite some far more obvious opportunities for violence than Eisner has in CONTRACT, Spiegelman draws a placid, yet still fearful, account of the Holocaust.

Of those artists who have taken advantage of the aggressive properties of the American style, the most successful in accomplishing "literary" goals have been those who have moved outside the aspirations of the modernist novel. Frank Miller has long shown an obsessive devotion to the power of the classic pulp crime story, while Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman have regularly appealed to the logic of the allegory.

Of course to those familiar with the literary history of the last few centuries, it should come as no surprise that it is profoundly difficult to create comics with the power and depth of the classic novel. A number of writers and critics have noted that the novel itself has, over the course of the twentieth century, lost the power it had in the nineteenth century to serve as both Panopticon and conscience for the modern world. If comics do aspire to take up this role, certainly the highest any artform could aim at, it seems particularly quixotic to try to get them to do so by subjecting them to the form and obsessions of a predecessor whose moment has passed.

Recommended.

Pindaros is a staff writer for PopImage.

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