shaxper
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Post by shaxper on Mar 2, 2016 7:36:24 GMT -5
The Graphic Novels of Will Eisner (1978-2005)
 In celebration of Will Eisner's birthday and Read a Graphic Novel Week, I will be reading and briefly reviewing every Eisner graphic novel ever published. Feel free to jump in with any of your own thoughts on Will Eisner's works. If you'd like to read along, many public libraries carry them. That's how I'm reading most of these myself! |
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Post by Deleted on Mar 2, 2016 8:04:10 GMT -5
I reread A Contract with God and other Tenement Stories last night for the first time in about a decade. I remembered it fondly, but I forgot just how good it was. I had planned on reading Dropsie Avenue for RAGNW (and still do) but wanted to revisit Contract first, but had to get a library copy as Contract was one of the GNs I had lent out over the year but had not gotten back.  There are 4 stories collected in Contract & other Tenement Stories -the title story A Contract with God -Street Singer -The Super -Cookalein plus the prologue a Tenement in Brooklyn inroducing the building at 55 Dropsie Ave and the origin of the term tenement. each is filled with drama and heartbreak, and populated with characters who have their full humanity (all of its goods and ills) on display, and well worth reading on their own, but as a collection they form a powerful tapestry of the human experience. And no one draws rain to such an emotional effect as Eisner...  -M |
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Post by shaxper on Mar 2, 2016 9:45:22 GMT -5
A Contract with God (1978) never fails to take my breath away. Eisner made a bold enough move in attempting to tell a story through comics that was about real people and not the traditional genres, but telling a story about the culture of Jewish immigrants was bolder still. The unspoken code of Russian-Jewish immigrants in New York was to lay low and blend in, so placing a spotlight firmly on them takes guts and, as a second generation American descended from that group, it still makes me a little uncomfortable to read, though it also excites me.
But, whereas any other author would have taken the opportunity to be didactic -- to compel the largely non-Jewish audience reading to pity and root for these characters, Eisner instead delivers uncompromising balanced truths in which no one character is the hero or the true villain. With two notable exceptions in the final story, every character is equipped in equal parts to be a devil or a saint. It's a powerful, brutally honest depiction that feels entirely authentic. In fact, even the dialogue feels lifted directly from the older family members I knew in my childhood. Eisner truly resurrected an era and peoples gone by.
While the story from which the anthology takes its name is not the most powerful of the bunch, it sets the tone for all the others that follow. It shows how the Jewish faith failed its people and, in equal parts, how the Jewish people failed their faith. Curiously though, Eisner's work does seem to believe in an overseeing God, but he either has an exquisite sense of irony or is not what the Jewish people understand him to be. That ambivalence captures the religious upbringing of my own youth quite well. But the larger point being, if a holy man can fall as far as the rabbi of the first story does, then the characters we meet throughout the rest of Contract are all the more understandable and tragic as a result.
A++
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Post by shaxper on Mar 2, 2016 11:50:50 GMT -5
New York: The Big City (1981-1983)
A far more stream of consciousness experiment in which Eisner compiles a series of incredibly short vignettes around certain basic elements found in cities. Some vignettes are tight and purposeful, some almost cliche and forced, and others still are completely absent of narrative imposition and just are. My favorite pieces in this collection are the ones that resist the urge to conform to a plot structure, theme, or sense of morality -- they just depict life as it is with no filter imposed. "Blackout," for example, depicts the small and temporary discomfort experienced by a group of strangers when the power goes out while riding a subway. The power then returns, and life is back to normal. "Windows" is another powerful piece, simply depicting in tremendous detail all the windows on the side of one high rise building. They are all nearly identical, and yet Eisner took great pains to draw them all and give each one an authentic and distinct accuracy.
There were pieces that bored me, pieces that made me sneer, pieces that amused me, and pieces that absolutely transformed me. It's a hodge-podge, and that's pretty much what it was intended to be.
A+
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Post by shaxper on Mar 2, 2016 14:10:39 GMT -5
A Life Force (1983)
Whereas A Contract with God was unique in its choice to tell the story of a group of people as opposed to one or two, and whereas New York: The Big City played with loosening that focus even further to discuss all people living in all cities in any given time period, A Life Force returns to the thematic focus of A Contract with God with a much tighter lens, explicitly following a small fixed cast of interconnected characters all residing in the same building (contrary to popular assumption, less than half the protagonists of Contract lived at 55 Dropsie Avenue) in their specific quest to endure the events of the Great Depression and the specific events and issues in the United States that followed it. We're even explicitly told where each neighbor lives (floor and side of building).
On a thematic level, it's a very satisfying read at first, as it probes far more deeply into the philosophical and existential issues of survival in a tenement when times are tough, and also compels us to ask ourselves what the point of our own existence is, but a tight focus ultimately proves to be its enemy as the story becomes far too caught up in its own plot by the close, losing much of the philosophical reflectiveness and universality Eisner captured so well in New York and in the first half of this work.
notes:
1. This may well be the first comic book / graphic novel to accurately and sympathetically represent mental illness, as we meet one tenant who appears to have dimentia, and another who is schizophrenic. The latter's story is told with particular brilliance, even if it feels quite incidental to the plot and theme of the larger work.
2. Young Will Eisner gets to play a role in his own work once again (last seen in Contract) though his father and mother look and act like completely different people here. However, his father is still a furrier, so perhaps Eisner is just artistically exaggerating other sides of their personalities?
3. No other character from Contract is depicted or alluded to.
A-
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Post by Deleted on Mar 3, 2016 2:55:25 GMT -5
I read Dropsie Avenue: A Neighborhood this evening.  first released in 1995, I have the 2000 DC Will Eisner Library edition This is the biography of a neighborhood really, form it's origins as a Dutch community that was a vestige of New Amsterdam until the urban blight of the 70s killed it, and it was reborn again as part of the urban renewal of the Bronx in the late 80s and 90s. It follows a generational ensemble cast who come and go from the main stage, bit players in one part return as major protagonists later and vice versa, we see ethnic change, life, death, war peace, crime, hope, love, loss and all aspects of the human condition encapsulated as only Eisner can in the life story of this neighborhood and the people who are it's heart and soul. -M |
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Post by shaxper on Mar 3, 2016 20:40:43 GMT -5
The Signal/Life on Another Planet (1978-1980)
I really struggled with whether to include this one and, if I did, when to include it, as it initially saw publication as a serial that preceded A Contract with God (what Eisner considered to be his first graphic novel), and then didn't get reprinted in graphic novel format until 1983. Even then, it generally escaped notice until DC reprinted it again in 1995.
Not being intended as a graphic novel, it does not strive for the philosophy nor emotional depths we see in Eisner's other GNs, and yet it does share some common elements with the works I've read thus far. It tells the story of how an interconnected cast of characters responds to an event of historical importance (in this case, a radio signal from space), much as in A Life Force, and also like that work, it expends great energy in exposing the incompetence and self-interest that keeps a bureaucracy from responding quickly and appropriately to matters of tremendous import. And, not attempting to also wrestle matters of existentialism, it succeeds far more than A Life Force did in telling a compelling story with clear and incisive commentary about the society within which we reside. Heck, two works followed this one that both bear uncanny resemblances, suggesting influence:
Carl Sagan's Contact (1985)
And Alan Moore's Watchmen (1986). Yes, really.
Don't get me wrong -- Moore does a lot with Watchmen that isn't done here, but the resemblances are hard to ignore.
A+
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Post by shaxper on Mar 4, 2016 5:37:35 GMT -5
Will Eisner Reader (1985-1986)
A series of one shots, left-overs, and after-thoughts. "Sunset in Sunshine City" is the true treat of this volume, bearing much of the existential weight and emotional consequence we've come to expect from an Eisner GN, only it comes in at 28 pages and clearly wasn't going to be a GN by itself. "The Long Hit" shares some thematic elements with it regarding old age, seeking purpose after retirement, and Florida as a location. Perhaps Eisner was originally planning a volume concerning those elements, but "The Telephone" is clearly a reject from (or follow-up to) New York: The Big City as it's done in exactly the same style but carries little entertainment value or meaning, "Detective Story" returns to Dropsie Avenue and the time period of A Life Force but carries no thematic connection to that work, and the final three stories are completely unrelated to anything Eisner had done previously.
Of them all, I find only "Sunset in Sunshine City" particularly memorable, though "The Telephone" and "Detective Story" were the only two I didn't find worthwhile.
B+
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Post by shaxper on Mar 5, 2016 17:34:55 GMT -5
The Dreamer (1986)
A very surface autobiography about the early years of Eisner's career that, for some reason, feels compelled to change all the names. I know very little about the Golden Age and about Eisner, and yet I feel I learned almost nothing from this, nor did it offer any philosophical or emotional impact either. Seems like anyone else could have told Eisner's story with more passion and interest than Eisner did.
C-
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Post by shaxper on Mar 5, 2016 18:01:35 GMT -5
The Building (1987)
Four portraits of sad, incomplete people seeking "something more" with their lives, all intertwined with a building that gets knocked down and replaced. It's almost brilliant stuff, but the ending tries too hard to force a neat resolution to their lives that doesn't fit the stark realism Eisner has become so adept at portraying in his graphic novels. It's also more apparent here than ever that Eisner really struggles with writing women as protagonists.
B+
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Post by shaxper on Mar 6, 2016 2:01:23 GMT -5
City People Notebook (1989)
The concept is an impressive one -- Eisner attempts to document what he observes by watching people on the city streets, but the outcome is generally unimpressive. Rather than taking the opportunity to convey anything meaningful about city life, he offers surface observations and, more often than not, stories that exist just to set up one bad gag at the close, akin to Mad Magazine's "The Lighter Side of" feature. Really, the only part that I found at all interesting was the framing sequence at the beginning -- Eisner essentially observing himself observing, and the odd unarticulated bond he develops with a passerby who finds his work interesting.
C+
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Post by shaxper on Mar 6, 2016 9:36:29 GMT -5
To the Heart of the Storm (1991)
If The Dreamer was a surface autobiography that held back on the emotional backdrop and told us very little, To the Heart of the Storm is practically a Take 2, deciding that what's more important than what Eisner accomplished, nor even how Eisner became Eisner, is to understand where the people and world that shaped Eisner came from, themselves. Thus we not only watch his entire upbringing pass by through the windows of a rolling train, but we also learn where his parents came from, where their parents came from, and even witness the sources of the entire ethno-political quandary surrounding World Wars I and II broiling around them.
Most fascinating for me is that, while Eisner gave us a cold and detached look at his parents in Contract with God, he now back-peddles to give us the full story, enabling us to view both characters as sympathetic and (perhaps) heroic while still absolutely seeing how they could also be the tragic, fallen characters we saw in that earlier work. In fact, the story of his mother is truly the first time I've seen Eisner write a female protagonist well. It might just be the best section of the work.
If anything, the biggest shift I've noted in Eisner's works since A Life Force is a more concerted optimism. Gone is that cold, tragic but detached observation of human nature. In this work, Young Will Eisner carries with him an illogical sense of hope and goodness that author Will Eisner seems like he's been struggling to recapture since The Will Eisner Reader. There are still dark moments and dark deeds, but neither his words nor his pencils feel the need to draw especial emphasis to these moments. Heck, he even resists the urge to invoke any reminders of Dropsie Avenue as depicted previously (even the name) while telling a story that inevitably spends a great deal of its time there. The intended audience this time isn't a viewership that is new to the life Eisner endured; the intended readership is Eisner himself, and he doesn't need to be shown just how bad the bad things were; he's done obsessing over the bad. He just wants to understand all that has made him who he is and that has placed him on the path he is on.
So this isn't as dark, heavy, or philosophical a work as Contract with God or Life Force, but it's still darn powerful and tremendously compelling.
A+
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Post by shaxper on Mar 6, 2016 11:49:02 GMT -5
Invisible People (1992) is a story Eisner has been trying to tell for a long while now, first with A Life Force (as there were several "invisible people" hightlighted here), then with New York: The Big City, The Building, and most recently with City People Notebook. Clearly, the most interesting aspect of cities for Eisner is the people living within them, and yet, even after sitting on stoops with a notebook and trying endlessly to understand the people with whom he shares a city, he keeps coming up short. The stories of Invisible People lack both the sense of authenticity that so thoroughly permeate Eisner's early works and the emotional depth. They're decent, engaging stories, but they don't live up to the promise of the volume's intended scope. Perhaps it's Eisner's more positive recent outlook that inhibits his ability to tell sad stories about sad people here, because really, we get neither.
It's only the final piece, Requiem, a single page, four paragraph text story, that stands out and achieves Eisner's intended vision; unsure whether it earns a place as one of the feature stories, as a coda, or as a dedication, it tells (I assume) the real and horrifically tragic story of a woman completely neglected by the system and justifies this volume's existence entirely on its own but, in the same light, somehow condemns the pieces that came before it in contrast for not being as real and evocative.
A significantly unbalanced collection in that respect. Still glad I read it.
B-
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Post by coke & comics on Mar 6, 2016 17:08:34 GMT -5
Will Eisner Reader (1985-1986)A series of one shots, left-overs, and after-thoughts. "Sunset in Sunshine City" is the true treat of this volume, bearing much of the existential weight and emotional consequence we've come to expect from an Eisner GN, only it comes in at 28 pages and clearly wasn't going to be a GN by itself. "The Long Hit" shares some thematic elements with it regarding old age, seeking purpose after retirement, and Florida as a location. Perhaps Eisner was originally planning a volume concerning those elements, but "The Telephone" is clearly a reject from (or follow-up to) New York: The Big City as it's done in exactly the same style but carries little entertainment value or meaning, "Detective Story" returns to Dropsie Avenue and the time period of A Life Force but carries no thematic connection to that work, and the final three stories are completely unrelated to anything Eisner had done previously. Of them all, I find only "Sunset in Sunshine City" particularly memorable, though "The Telephone" and "Detective Story" were the only two I didn't find worthwhile. B+ "Humans" is one of my favorite Will Eisner stories. |
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Post by shaxper on Mar 6, 2016 18:23:00 GMT -5
"Humans" is one of my favorite Will Eisner stories. Haunting message, to be sure. |
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