Will Eisner's Tenement Tales

The Contract with God Trilogy by Will Eisner

                If you wish to get a sense of life in 1930s New York, Will Eisner’s The Contract with God Trilogy is not a bad place to start. Written in the 1970s and 1980s, the three stories (A Contract with God, A Life Force and Dropsie Avenue) follow the lives of tenement-dwellers in the depression era Bronx as they struggle to get by in the face diminishing opportunities. Eisner himself grew up in similar circumstances and many of the characters are based on people he knew or saw on the streets (or heard through the paper-thin walls). 

                Though mainly preoccupied with the Jewish inhabitants of Dropsie Avenue, these stories also explore the similar struggles of the Italians, the Irish, the Spanish and the African Americans. And Eisner doesn’t flinch in his pursuit of realism. In A Life Force, Jacob Shtarkah becomes a tool of vicious mobsters when he has to ask favours to get a carpentry business up and running, in A Contract with God, Frimme Hersh, the good-natured pillar of the community, is left devastated by the premature death of his daughter. There is any amount of bullying, prejudice and thuggery but this is partially relieved by some evidence of neighbourly solidarity.

                 While the stories themselves have engaging but unremarkable plotlines, Eisner’s art and lay-out is never anything less than brilliant. His street scenes, filled with overturned garbage cans, washing hanging out to dry between buildings, scrapping children, cockroaches and heads poking out of windows are richly evocative of the era and his almost supernatural depictions of rainfall, sunshine, smoke and steam add layers of atmosphere and raise these stories to somewhere close to the sublime. In one scene, where Willie is deciding whether to leave his family’s flat to attend a meeting of the communists his father abhors, it’s the snaky flow of steam from his mother’s soup moving from the kitchen and out onto the landing that appears to lasso him at the door.

               Perhaps his greatest achievement is in managing to inject such emotion into the cartoonish faces and bodies of his characters that they are probably the most ‘human’ characters ever to appear in a comic book.
                 Convinced that comics deserved greater recognition, Eisner chose the term 'graphic novel' to describe A Contract with God at a time when most comics creators were treated with indifference outside of the small band of 'fans'. This is a work of enduring grace and power that merits a place in the pantheon of great works of fiction.