Author(s): Will Eisner

Graphic Novels

Booklist (Tuesday , November 15, 2005): Comics veteran Eisner launched a second career with " A Contract with God" (1978), one that eclipsed his pioneering 1940s work featuring the masked crimefighter the Spirit and led the way for the contemporary graphic novel. Two further Depression-era books set on the same fictitious street in the Bronx followed. In the wake of Eisner's recent death, the three are here gathered into a single volume. " Contract " consists of four vignettes, each focusing on a resident of 55 Dropsie Avenue. More ambitious," A Life Force" (1983) details the intertwining lives of a handful of the tenement's inhabitants. " Dropsie Avenue" (1995) portrays the neighborhood's history from 1870, when British immigrants displaced Dutch--descended farmers, to its improbable rebirth from the ruins of the Bronx at the close of the twentieth century. By this point, Eisner's drawing style, always slightly cartoonish, had become even looser and more exaggerated, while his storytelling remained masterful. Along with his other late-life graphic novels, also slated for collection, the trilogy compellingly if melodramatically portrays New York Jewish life. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2005, American Library Association.) Review Quotes: "An inspiration to several generations of cartoonists." Publisher Marketing: The legendary graphic novel and the sequels that launched an art form. With graphic narrative that "was closer to the writing of Bernard Malamud or Isaac Bashevis Singer than any comic art which had preceded it" ("The Economist"), "A Contract with God," originally published in 1978, was the first graphic novel: the prototype--along with "A Life Force" and "Dropsie Avenue"--for such seminal works as "Maus" and "Persepolis." Set during the Great Depression, this literary trilogy, assembled in one volume for the first time, presents a treasure house of now near-mythic stories that fictionally illustrate the bittersweet tenement life of Eisner's youth. With nearly one dozen new illustrations and a revealing brand-new foreword, this book ultimately tells the epic story of life, death, and resurrection while exploring man's fractious relationship with an all-too-vengeful God. This mesmerizing, fictional chronicle of the universal American immigrant experience is Eisner's most poignant and enduring legacy. First published 2006.