I have problems with graphic novels. Oh, I don’t object to them at all. I have problems with some of colors and overlapping words. Visually, I just can’t always see the words. But, we’re doing a genre study of graphic novels this month at the library. So, I went back to the beginning, to black-and-white sketches and words I could see. And, of course, to Will Eisner, who drew one of the original graphic novels with his anthology, A Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories. The comic industry’s top awards, the Eisner Awards, are named in his honor. So why not try the work of the man who started it all?

In 2017, Glen Weldon and Petra Mayer wrote a piece for NPR, “100 Best Comics and Graphic Novels”, https://tinyurl.com/29tj5eft. Here’s what they had to say about Eisner’s collection. It made the list based on votes from readers, and a final panel of critics and creators. “Comics nerds are a nitpicky, combative lot, so whenever Will Eisner’s collection of comics short stories gets called “the first graphic novel,” the “um, actually”s descend like so many neck-bearded locusts to remind everyone about Rodolphe Topffer and Lynd Ward and to point out that it’s not a novel, it’s a collection of stories. So let’s put it this way: Eisner’s 1978 A Contract With God is widely regarded as the first modern graphic novel. But it’s not on this list because it was first, it’s on this list because it remains one of the most beloved. Eisner sets his stories in and around a Lower East Side tenement building very like the one he grew up in, and it shows. He imbues each story with an elegiac quality reminiscent of the fables of Sholom Alecheim, replete with a fabulist’s gift for distilling the world’s morass into tidy morality plays. Moody, moving and darkly beautiful, this work helped the wider world accept the notion that comics can tell stories of any kind, the only limit being the vision of their creators.”

“A Contract with God” is based on Eisner’s own anguish and anger after the death of his sixteen-year-old daughter. He explains that in the book, which was reprinted on the centennial of Eisner’s birth. That story tells of Frimme Hersh, a Russian Jew who had a contract with God. When God took Hersh’s adopted daughter, Frimme raged at him, vowing that God broke the contract, so Hersh was no longer bound to it. He purchased the tenement at 55 Dropsie Avenue in the Bronx, a single street based on Eisner’s own childhood. The other three stories are called “The Street Singer”, about the singers who came to the tenements during the Great Depression; “The Super”, about the most hated man in the tenements, and “Cookalein” about the summer camps farmers built so Jews could escape their lives in the tenements, living in the country for several months.

But, it’s “A Contract with God” that lingers with me. There’s so much pain drawn in the illustrations themselves, but Eisner’s words accompany the illustrations beautifully. Page after page show a man trudging through a downpour, finally saying it was the day Frimme Hersh buried Rachele, his daughter. “Only the tears of ten thousand angels could cause such a deluge.” It’s a personal, unforgiving story.

I’ve never disliked graphic novels. I just have to find the ones I can visually see and read. Why not one of the earliest, Will Eisner’s A Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories?

A Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories by Will Eisner. W.W. Norton & Company, 2006. ISBN 9780393609189 (hardcover), 181p.

FTC Full Disclosure – Library book