What's new in the world of funny papers? Well, in my world, not much. But I have been indulging in something that I probably should have been studying far more of in my lifetime, considering where I came from and how I got to be: The works of Will Eisner.
I grew up reading my father's comic books, notably John
Albano and Tony De
Zuniga's Jonah Hex, Roy Thomas and Barry Windsor-Smith's
Conan the Barbarian from the 1970's, and the late Will Eisner's
The Spirit collections from the 1950's. The subtle nuances of Eisner's urban
noir crimefighter series often flew above my curly little mop-topped 12-year-old head, but I always remembered the style, the pacing, and most of all the anatomy, which at the time I was still trying to
emulate in my own drawings. An animal sketcher until my
pre-teens, I had had a serious artistic epiphany (as one could only have in their early teens) and from then on the human form was the very thing I longed to master. I later moved on to a newer, more all-consuming comic obsession, and Eisner sort of fell by the wayside.
So it's funny how now, so many seasoned years later, I am finally following up on Eisner's
Contract With God trilogy, something that most aspiring comic book illustrators and graphic novelists have graduated from since "Stan Lee 101" but for me, at this moment in time of my life, they are really striking a particular chord within myself that has connected more with me in a way I really haven't experienced in a traditional novel in so many years.
And for those who haven't already been there and back, here's a brief
synopsis of my current obsession:
A Contract With God is often considered the first graphic novel as we know it today, as in the first illustrated novel in comic book format without it being a compilation of several serials. It was written as a one-off comic in
lengthy book format, and although he's not exactly the first to have probably done so, he's the first to be credited with it the achievement. But what really matters is the subject matter, a fictional Bronx neighborhood circa 1930's named
Dropsie Avenue, based largely on Eisner's own Jewish immigrant upbringing from the same time period. Both uplifting and heart-rending, these series of short
vignettes of the
desperate lives of European immigrants struggling for a better life are
separate from and
integrate with each other. A bitter Germanic "super" whom everyone in the tenement loathes turns out to be a pitiable lonely man, his walls lined from floor to ceiling with porn a testament to his lack of tender human contact. When a little girl seduces him long enough to steal his money and poison his only friend in the world, his beloved dog, one can't help but feel a mixture of both disgust and sympathy for the man, and shock at a child of such a young age being so sexually aware, so brutally heartless, and so conniving, and yet it's just another day in the world of the haves and the have
not's in the Depression Era ghettos of New York. In another story a gentle, spiritual rabbi loses his child-like innocent faith in God when his daughter dies of a tragic illness and renounces his religion to become a twisted, bitter slum lord, who through a series of ever worsening events inadvertently inspires another Jewish lad to pick up his own personal contract with God. Moments of hope tie in the melodrama, making it a pleasure
to follow, in hopes that certain lives will turn out alright in the end. Some do. And some, well, they just keep going on, as lives do. And speaking of which...
A Life Force focuses on a single linear storytelling of lives on the same
Dropsie Avenue denizens, this time focusing on the life and family of one German-Jewish immigrant Jacob
Shtarkah who grows existential after seeing his own desperate existence in that of a cockroach struggling to survive in the alleys behind his apartment buildings. Much of this slice of life novel reflects vividly the time and the place, of 1930's Bronx, of war in the winds over in Europe and more Jewish immigrants struggle to make it over to the New World to escape the increasing hostilities in Jacob's home country, one of which is a former flame who rekindles old feelings of not just affection but of another time and place long gone, his nation, his youth, and his once-driving optimism. Jacob's wife is sickly and bitter, a woman whom I wish we could have learned more about. Jacob's young son flirts with the then in-fashion Communist youth movement of the times but lacks the commitment to sustain his own youthful idealism, while a young Gentile stockbroker, ruined by The Crash, is inadvertently saved from suicide by Jacob's lovely daughter when she asks him to please come down off the window sill and perhaps help turning on their family's electricity during the Sabbath, and they fall in love. Compounding incidents with the Mob, murder, an oncoming war unlike anything our world had ever seen, and the overall daily grind of that cockroach-like
perseverance, Jacob and his family are succumbed to the life force that keeps us all going, keeps us all striving, and reminds us what sometimes sets us apart from the lowly cockroach who simply lives to live, is that we live to experience.
I'm currently in the middle of the third book,
Dropsie Avenue, which goes back to the beginning to tell not just the story of the rise of one Bronx neighborhood street, but the history of New York City as a microcosm of people's lives and that unspoken, underlying dream they all have of coming to America to makes their dreams come true. Starting back to 1870 when the Bronx was just a rural farmland as part of what was known as New
Amsterdam, we see how a once beautiful, upscale street made up on successful Dutch, German, English and Irish farmers falls to commerce and shady business deals as tram stations make way for cheap tenement buildings, followed by bootleggers, street gangs, prostitution, and the sudden culture shock of when different religions and
ethnicities which barely got along back in the Old Country are forced to get along and even
integrate. One humorous moment when a Jewish boy and a Roman Catholic girl marry, and her father embraces the boy's weeping mother with open arms, explaining how Jews and Catholics aren't so different after all. But once the topic comes up about how his daughter will raise their grandchildren and he insisted that they would naturally be Catholic, they instantly erupt into verbal shouts and more tears. I'm still not even halfway done but I've spent the better part of the afternoon with my nose deeply embedded so I should probably hoof it back to the bedroom and plop back down for more
storytime, but this one is promising to be just as monumentally engaging as the last two. I so look forward to literature like this.
And yes, I do mean literature. You got your Phillip Roth and your Saul Bellow. And you got your Will Eisner. Or that is, I've got my Will Eisner. And you should get yours, too.
