A Contract with God: Review and musings

A few days ago, I picked up a copy of Will Eisner's A Contract with God, one of a mountain of books I promised myself I'd read now that I'm between jobs/ school/ chapters of life. I've never read any of Eisner's work, although, having snuggled pretty well into comics scholarship and fandom, I know who I'm reading and what it means. Well, I have an inkling anyway. So I blew through the book last night and man, I knew it was going to rock, but it really got me in the gut.

The book is divided into four stories which revolve around four characters/ families in a Bronx tenement building in the 1930s, and it contains stories of which "some are true. Some could be true." I love this: I've been looking at historical comics for the past year or so for my Masters thesis and I'm still enthralled by the simple fact that truth is fluid, and that representations of truth put fact and imagination into conversation in seemingly infinite ways. The truths of the past, in particular, seem so loaded because now, in the ever-obsoleting present, we've had time to invest them with personal, familial, national, and mythic meanings. And not all of that meaning comes from the truth itself. But that doesn't necessarily make the meaning any less real, especially in retrospection. O the search for meaning, that core crux of any life. At the very least, any English major's...

So, back to A Contract with God. In one of several prefaces, Eisner wrote that he used this book to experiment with the comic form, with the integration of words and image to create a seamless language for his story-telling. The first story, same name as the title of the collection, really hit this home for me. While speech bubbles remain, Eisner disposes of text boxes and defined panels, so that everything happens on one plane; the story unfolds in a one space- the page. Sure, with the exception of some avant-garde stuff, all comics technically take place on the page. But the division of text versus image space blurs a lot more here than in, say, most super hero comics you might pick up. I'm not the first to say this, of course. But it's still neat. And that's why we're here!

The themes that emerge in these stories probably won't surprise, given their setting: doing what you gotta do versus doing the right thing, sacrifice versus happiness, delusion versus facing reality, the struggle for physical, emotional, financial survival running underneath it all. For the most part, no character is completely innocent or guilty, and more to the point, innocence-guilt isn't quite the dynamic Eisner's stories are operating by. Again, these are stories of survival and self-delusion, and while good-evil conflict certainly comes up, I don't think that's the characters' or the author's central concern. As I was reading, my feminist sensibilities almost immediately began tugging at my brain 'ya know, the ladies are not represented too favorably here,' but as became clear by the end of the book, neither are the fellas. I'd have to spend more time on this to really untangle the gender dynamics here, because I still have this feeling that the girls end up with the uglier portrayals. Maybe that'll be another post; I don't want to get hung up here on the problems I may or may not have with this book. At the end of the day (or book, as it were), in the 30s as now, in Eisner's stories as in the real world (although even that term is up to debate), good guys and bad guys are more states of being that most people cycle through, rather than static identity.

A Contract with God also appears in a trilogy of the same name, containing related stories of the tenement building on Dropsie Avenue in the Bronx. The other two sections, I believe, were written after the first, and I'd be interested to see them and trace themes and patterns mentioned above. And, taking off my grad student hat, to read some stirring, masterfully constructed slice-of-life comics.