A Contract With God
By Will Eisner
Eisner, Will. A Contract with God and Other Tenement
Stories. Princeton: Kitchen Sink Press, 1978. Print. ISBN13: 9780878160181,
Paperback, US $11.37
Overview
In a Contact with God, Eisner draws from his own life
experiences and memories, some painful, some humorous, which take place in a
small tenement in New York City at 55 Dropsie Ave during the 1930-s or “Dirty Thirties”
as Eisner calls them.
This Graphic novel is made up of four stories. All four
stories are short and sweet and each delivers a powerful message on life
constructed around the visual comic book style of graphic novels. Man’s
relationship with God, sex, scandal, and coming of age are all expressed along
these visual terms. You are able to see the settings and the characters for
each story, you follow them as the story progresses through to the unexpected
yet always rather fitting ending. These stories pull you in visually, where you
find a sense of identity with each scene depicted. As with most graphic novels;
very though-provoking.
In the first story; Frimme Hersh, considered an
exceptionally good man by everyone around him, generous, caring, always ready
to help his fellow man, wrote a "contract
with God” on a stone as a young immigrant coming over from Europe to America to
escape the oppression there (he is a Jew). He lived his life in God with the
belief that God would honor the contract. The story opens with him as an older
man burying his only child, an adapted daughter who became fatally ill. Frimme
is heartbroken and believes that God broke the “contract” he had written as a
youth. His faith in God is destroyed, he throws the stone out the tenement window and he becomes a ruthless real estate
baron, one with little regard for the tenants he himself once was, a completely
different man. The ending finds him having a sudden heart attack and dying just
as he decides to renew his faith in God again, but the contract he wrote on a
stone which he tossed out the window long ago, finds its way to a new follower.
A Contact with God written in 1978 by Will Eisner is
considered the very first graphic novel. Eisner wrote comics during the birth
of the comic book industry in the 1930’s. He created The Spirit in 1940, for
twelve years it was a sixteen -page Sunday newspaper insert in many large city
newspapers, with a weekly circulation of 5 million copies. During WW II Eisner
worked as a Pentagon-based warrant officer, where he pioneered the
instructional use of comics, continuing to produce them for the U.S. Army under
civilian contract into the 1970s, along with educational comics for clients
such as General Motors and elementary school children.
Since A Contact with God, Eisner wrote nearly twenty
celebrated graphic novels affirming his position as the grand old man of
comics. Since 1988 the comic industry’s top awards for excellence have been
called “The Eisners.”