Will Eisner is a revered figure in the comics world -- a major award is named after him. The first novel in this collection of three was the first graphic novel: that is, according to his introduction, Eisner had been working in comics for decades, extending himself in many directions, but in the 1970s, in his early 60s, he wanted to create a substantial literary work using sequential art, that is to say a long narrative in the comic medium, for which he coined the term 'graphic novel'. No major publisher would touch it. It's a knockout. It does have adult themes, as befits the medium, but happily on this context 'adult' doesn't refer only to sex, but also to God, responsibility, bereavement, betrayal, compromise, intercultural violence, the weight of history, the meaning of existence, the life of Jewish and other immigrants in a New York tenement, all in beautiful pen-and-ink with clear, strong lines. The artists who created Maus and Our Cancer Year must have read and loved these books -- or at least the first two: the third was published well after both those classics, when Will Eisner was in his 90s. We should all be so productive, and so lucid.

http://homepage.mac.com/shawjonathan/... ( )

The Contract with God Trilogy brings together three of Eisner's works: A Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories (considered to be the first graphic novel), A Life Force, and Dropsie Avenue.

A Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories consists of four vignettes taking place in the 1930s in a Bronx tenement: Cookalein, The Super, The Street Singer, and A Contract With God. This tenement is also the setting for A Life Force and is the main component of Dropsie Avenue which follows the births, deaths, and rebirths of the neighborhood itself.

The stories are semi-autobiographical and charged with emotion. Eisner is a masterful story-teller and uses the graphic novel medium extraordinarily well, especially when considering that this literary style was only beginning to be established when he was writing. He brought his talent and artistic skill to this new medium, paving the way for others to follow. The Contract with God Trilogy provides a marvelous example of his important and ground-breaking work.

Experiments in Reading ( )

Power illustrated novel about life in the Bronx. "Dropsie Avenue", the last volume in the trilogy, was especially powerful as a history of a Bronx neighborhood that could have been written about the old neighborhood. ( )