WITH COMICS HAVING EXPANDED OUT of the funnies section of the newspaper and into a genre that has become known as the graphic novel, the assumption that comic books are for kids has been discarded.
Art Spiegelman's Maus, his cartoon story of the Holocaust, and In the Shadow of No Towers, his depiction of 9/11 (Jewish Star review, Sept. 10, 2004), and Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, her comic-character memoir of growing up in Iran, are all within the mainstream of contemporary publishing.
Well before them, however, there was Will Eisner.
In 1978, when comic-strip and comic book author Eisner created what he called a "graphic novel", no major publisher was interested in it. Eisner did have it published, and it became one of those "alternative" works that stayed in print outside the mainstream publishing world, until it eventually gained acceptance.
Eisner, who died last year at the age of 87, lived to write a preface and to create 12 new illustrations for The Contract with God Trilogy (W.W. Norton, 2006, 498 pp., $29.95). The three re-issued works that comprise the trilogy are A Contract With God, his first graphic novel, A Life Force and Dropsie Avenue.
Before he died, Eisner also tackled anti-Semitism in The Plot (Jewish Star review, July 15, 2005), the story of the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
THE CREATOR IN THE 1940s of the comic strip "The Spirit", Eisner wanted to break out of the confines of the newspaper comic strip, and to have his art form taken seriously. He also had more to say than the standard comic strip would permit.
He used his own background as a child of Jewish immigrants growing up in New York to create a world peopled by families like his, who struggled, laughed and loved, experienced pain and heartache, had successes and failures, all played out in a crowded neighborhood in New York.
Some were honest; some were not. Some were kind; some were cruel. Most were poor. All were striving for at least a small measure of economic and social advancement, and they reached to grab hold of the American dream.
The Depression and war got in the way, as did daily life, but still they tried.
Much as Isaac Bashevis Singer told tales of shtetl life in Europe, Will Eisner told his own type of shtetl stories, these ones of immigrant life in New York.
His equivalent of the shtetl was the Bronx, specifically, his mythical Dropsie Avenue and the tenement building at number 55. He calls himself "a graphic witness" to life there.
In "A Contract With God" he tells the story of Frimme Hersh, a religious Jew who makes himself a contract with God. He studies, does good works and lives a pious life, thereby keeping his part of the contract.
Then Hersh's daughter dies -- God has violated the contract. There is now no reason for Hersh to continue to adhere to it.
He leaves the religious life, purchases tenement buildings and becomes rich as a slum landlord, but remains tormented by his loss.
Like his character Frimme Hersh, Eisner, too, lost a daughter, and he used his creation in this first part of his novella to write about his pain. It was, Eisner wrote in his Preface, "an exercise in personal agony". Hersh's "anguish was mine. His argument with God was also mine."
"The Street Singer", the second part of A Contract With God, is set during the Depression, when singers would go into the alley-ways of the tenements, hoping to earn a few pennies for their songs.
A former opera singer, hearing one of them, offers him the chance at a career. The street singer, however, mired in the poverty, drink and hopelessness of his life, squanders the opportunity.
In A Life Force, Eisner introduces his character, Jacob Shtarkah -- "me in disguise", he acknowledges.
(In Yiddish, the word shtarker denotes strength, or alternatively, a non-hero.)
It is just after the Depression and Jacob, a carpenter, finishes the synagogue study hall he has been building and is told his work there is over.
It is, for him, a crisis that causes him to question the meaning of life.
Through Jacob and his family, Eisner grapples with this existential struggle, and presents historical and social themes that include anti-Semitism, inter-marriage, war, left-wing politics, along with personal ones of family life and responsibilities.
Jacob is a truly marvellous creation, as he yearns for meaning in his life, a measure of happiness and, unlike a cockroach, more than mere existence.
"What do I want?" he asks rhetorically. "I want back my dream. ... I don't want to be a cockroach!"
As he articulates his search for meaning in one heart-rending scene, "Since the beginning, priests, rabbis, gurus or gonifs, everyone makes a business out of trying to figure it out!
"They write books and bibles, make up prayers hoping, maybe, to get one small answer from which they can get a clear understanding.
"And in the meantime -- man and cockroach just live from day to day! When I find the answer, I'll let you know."
In Dropsie Avenue, which he characterizes as "the biography of the street itself", Eisner gives us the history of the area, from the first Dutch settlers of the farmland that was the Bronx, through its development, as wave after wave of immigrants came to the area -- English, Irish, Germans, Italians and, of course, Jews.
One group displaced another, with each one influencing the area's development, character and way of life, and the neighborhood, in turn, exerting its own influence on its residents.
In this trilogy, Eisner has offered a visual and literary recreation of time and place that resonates with the pain and struggles that comprised daily life.
It all plays out on Dropsie Avenue, Eisner's "fictitious stage where my past and my imagination collided", but which "has a history similar to real streets in the Bronx."
"Like its inhabitants, [Dropsie Avenue] has a turbulent existence but an unquenchable instinct for survival."
THERE ARE NO COMIC-BOOK superheroes here; there are hardly even heroes.
Eisner instead writes of the downtrodden, for whom daily life was often about survival, people who were buffeted by the times and the places in which they found themselves, moved this way and that by the ideas that swirled around them and by circumstances they could not control.
With line drawings that wonderfully and brilliantly capture his characters and his street, Eisner has composed a poignant and touching portrait, not altogether gloomy, but often heart-wrenching.
As Eisner himself said of his stories, "Some are true. Some could be true." And all offer truths.
Article copyright Star Media Group, Inc.
