A Contract with God
Encyclopedia
A Contract with God, and Other Tenement Stories is a graphic novel
Graphic novel
A graphic novel is a narrative work in which the story is conveyed to the reader using sequential art in either an experimental design or in a traditional comics format...

 by Will Eisner
Will Eisner
William Erwin "Will" Eisner was an American comics writer, artist and entrepreneur. He is considered one of the most important contributors to the development of the medium and is known for the cartooning studio he founded; for his highly influential series The Spirit; for his use of comics as an...

 that takes the form of several stories on a theme. Published by Baronet Books (ISBN 978-0-89437-035-9) in October 1978 in simultaneous hardcover and trade paperback editions — the former limited to a signed-and-numbered print-run of 1,500 — it is often erroneously called the first graphic novel, or the first work to describe itself as such. It is nonetheless an early landmark of the form, and critically lauded in its own right.

DC Comics
DC Comics
DC Comics, Inc. is one of the largest and most successful companies operating in the market for American comic books and related media. It is the publishing unit of DC Entertainment a company of Warner Bros. Entertainment, which itself is owned by Time Warner...

 later acquired the rights to the book, which it reissued in 2001 (ISBN 978-1-56389-674-3). It runs 196 pages.

Premise

The work consists of four short stories
Short Stories
Short Stories may refer to:*A plural for Short story*Short Stories , an American pulp magazine published from 1890-1959*Short Stories, a 1954 collection by O. E...

 — "A Contract With God", "The Super", "The Street Singer", and "Cookalein" — all set in a Bronx tenement
Tenement
A tenement is, in most English-speaking areas, a substandard multi-family dwelling, usually old, occupied by the poor.-History:Originally the term tenement referred to tenancy and therefore to any rented accommodation...

 in the 1930s, with the last story ("Cookalein") also taking place at a summer getaway for Jews
Borscht Belt
Borscht Belt, or Jewish Alps, is a colloquial term for the mostly defunct summer resorts of the Catskill Mountains in parts of Sullivan, Orange and Ulster counties in upstate New York that were a popular vacation spot for New York City Jews from the 1920s through the 1960s.-Name:The name comes from...

. The stories are semi-autobiographical, with Eisner drawing heavily on his own childhood experiences as well as those of his contemporaries. Utilizing his talents for expressive lettering and cartoonish figures, he links the narratives by the common setting and the common theme of immigrant and first-generation experiences, across cultures.

Inspirations

In the introduction, Eisner cited as inspiration the 1930s books of Lynd Ward
Lynd Ward
Lynd Kendall Ward was an American artist and storyteller, and son of Methodist minister and prominent political organizer Harry F. Ward. He illustrated some 200 juvenile and adult books...

, who produced complete novels in woodcut
Woodcut
Woodcut—occasionally known as xylography—is a relief printing artistic technique in printmaking in which an image is carved into the surface of a block of wood, with the printing parts remaining level with the surface while the non-printing parts are removed, typically with gouges...

s. "One of these books, Frankenstein
Frankenstein
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is a novel about a failed experiment that produced a monster, written by Mary Shelley, with inserts of poems by Percy Bysshe Shelley. Shelley started writing the story when she was eighteen, and the novel was published when she was twenty-one. The first...

, fell into my hands in 1938," two years before Eisner's acclaimed newspaper
Newspaper
A newspaper is a scheduled publication containing news of current events, informative articles, diverse features and advertising. It usually is printed on relatively inexpensive, low-grade paper such as newsprint. By 2007, there were 6580 daily newspapers in the world selling 395 million copies a...

-supplement comic book
Comic book
A comic book or comicbook is a magazine made up of comics, narrative artwork in the form of separate panels that represent individual scenes, often accompanied by dialog as well as including...

 The Spirit
The Spirit
The Spirit is a crime-fighting fictional character created by writer-artist Will Eisner. He first appeared June 2, 1940 in "The Spirit Section", the colloquial name given to a 16-page Sunday supplement, distributed to 20 newspapers by the Register and Tribune Syndicate and reaching five million...

debuted, "and it had an influence on my thinking thereafter. I consider my efforts in this area attempts at expansion or extension of Ward's original premise."

The book's genesis was twofold. The first inspiration, Eisner said, came after he'd attended his first comic-book convention in the mid-1970s, and met that generation's fans and creators. "I reasoned that the 13-year-old kids that I'd been writing to back in the 1940s were no longer 13-year-old kids, they were now 30, 40 years old. They would want something more than two heroes, two supermen, crashing against each other. I began working on a book that dealt with a subject that I felt had never been tried by comics before, and that was man's relationship with God."

In his introduction to the book's 2001 reissue, Eisner further revealed that the tragic inspiration for that choice of subject, as well as the inciting incident in the book's title story, grew out of the 1970 death of his leukemia
Leukemia
Leukemia or leukaemia is a type of cancer of the blood or bone marrow characterized by an abnormal increase of immature white blood cells called "blasts". Leukemia is a broad term covering a spectrum of diseases...

-stricken teenaged daughter, Alice. Until then, only Eisner's closest friends had even been aware that he'd had a daughter.

Plot synopsis

1) A Contract with God
The story of a Hasidic Jew whose adopted daughter dies, partially autobiographical about Will Eisner's daughter.

2) The Street Singer
The story of a wino who sings in the alleys behind tenements.

3) The Super
The story of the superintendent of a tenement who is constantly at war with the tenants.

4) Cookalein
The story of people from the tenements vacationing in the country.

The term "graphic novel"

His calling the book a "graphic novel", Eisner said in that same address, came about on the spur of the moment:

Reception

David Wade, Sojourners, July 2004: "Eisner explores the lives of the people he remembered from his youth among an impoverished but colorful immigrant community in the Bronx. His stories explore issues of life, death, faith, and failure with all the warmth and complexity one would find in fine fiction. ...[B]oth the heroic and the villainous lived in tension within his characters."

Peter Schjeldahl
Peter Schjeldahl
Peter Schjeldahl, , is an American art critic, poet, and educator.Schjeldahl was born in Fargo, North Dakota. He grew up in small towns throughout Minnesota, and attended Carleton College and The New School...

, The New Yorker
The New Yorker
The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...

, October 17, 2005: "[N]ever leaving well enough alone is apparently a principle for Eisner. Over-the-topness is endemic to the comics, of course — an industry standard for popular action and horror titles, as well as for manga, and the default setting for [Robert] Crumb's work. But it is ill suited to serious subjects, especially those that incorporate authentic social history."

David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times
Los Angeles Times
The Los Angeles Times is a daily newspaper published in Los Angeles, California, since 1881. It was the second-largest metropolitan newspaper in circulation in the United States in 2008 and the fourth most widely distributed newspaper in the country....

review of The Contract With God Trilogy: Life on Dropsie Avenue, November 20, 2005: "...elaborate sagas of immigrant life, of the struggle with God and meaning — stories that attempt to tease out the complex issues of existence, issues that cannot be resolved. ... "Who knows," Eisner writes above a full-page drawing of swarming cockroaches, "why all the creatures of earth struggle so to live." It's a plaintive motif, and it resonates across these pages, as Eisner's characters strive not just to survive but to understand — a desire that, as often as not, eludes them in the end. ... Eisner's iconic status makes it hard to approach him critically; how do you take on a legend, after all? Yet to read these three novels back-to-back-to-back is to be reminded not only of his considerable innovations but also of his limitations. His visual style, developed in the 1930s, never progressed beyond a broad-strokes realism, more appropriate for the funny pages than for the nuanced work he would aspire to create. His narrative abilities, too, are uneven, occasionally gimmicky and contrived. ... Still, there remains something momentous ... a magisterial quality, as if we're witnessing the birth of a movement, a kind of aesthetic big bang."

Film

On July 24th 2010 at Comic-Con
Comic-Con
Comic-Con, Comic Con or ComiCon may refer to any of the following Comic book conventions, none of them affiliated to any other:*San Diego Comic-Con International, annual fan convention in San Diego held since 1970, also known as Comic-Con or San Diego Comic-Con*Dallas Comic Con, annual fan...

, the producers (Darren Dean, Tommy Oliver, Bob Schreck
Bob Schreck
-Career:One of Shreck's earliest jobs in comics was art director at Comico. For much of the 1990s Schreck was an editor at Dark Horse Comics, and went on to found Oni Press in 1997. Then he went over to work as an editor at DC Comics, where he worked on the Batman comics and the All Star titles,...

, Mike Ruggerio & Mark Rabinowitz) announced that the graphic novel is being adapted into a film. It will be written by Darren Dean and each of the four parts will have a different director. Alex Rivera, Tze Chun
Tze Chun
Tze Chun is an award-winning American film director and writer. He was born in Chicago and raised outside of Boston, and graduated from Milton Academy in 1997...

, Barry Jenkins and Sean S. Baker
Sean S. Baker
Sean Baker is an American film/TV director and co-creator of Greg the Bunny.- Biography :A New York based filmmaker, Baker received his BA in Film Studies in 1992 from New York University....

.
Sean Baker has since had to withdraw from the project due to scheduling conflicts.

External links

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