A Contract with God
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
- This article is about A Contract with God, the graphic novel. There is also an article on the form of covenant a Contract With God.
A Contract with God is a graphic novel by Will Eisner. Its full title is A Contract with God, and Other Tenement Stories, and it takes the form of several stories on a theme. It was originally published by Baronet in 1978 [[1] (http://www.willeisner.com/bio/graphicnovels.html)] in simultaneous hardcover and trade-paper editions, the former limited to a print-run of 1,500. The current printing runs to 196 pages. Although the trade-paper edition had been credited as being the first work to describe itself as a graphic novel, scholars have since discovered this is not the case.
Plot
The work consists of four short stories, all set in a tenement in the Bronx in the 1930s. Eisner utilises his talents for expressive lettering and cartoonish figures to relate the separate narratives, linked by the common setting and the common theme of the immigrant experience.
Impact
While A Contract with God is arguably not the first graphic novel, and nor is it the first to use the term, it is certainly the book that the comic book industry and literary critics eventually recognised as the standard bearer. It created in its wake a deeper understanding of the medium's worth. It has also served as an inspiration to younger creators, who in turn further developed the format. This has led to the acceptance of the graphic novel as a viable format for artistic expression, certainly to publishers, but more importantly to the creators, and to the librarians and bookstore buyers who previously ignored the comic book format. Eisner's first stab at creating a contained work of sequential art, while not inventing the form, and possibly by dint of being the right book at the right time, helped to bring positive critical attention to a ghettoized medium, and to the benefit of popular culture.
Eisner himself saw the book as important in moving on the comics form. "In hindsight," Eisner wrote in the first edition's introduction, "I realize I was really only working around one core concept — that the medium, the arrangement of words and pictures in sequence, was an art form in itself. Unique, with a structure and gestalt of its own, this medium could deal with meaningful themes."
Inspirations
In the introduction, Eisner cited as inspiration the 1930s books of Lynd Ward, who produced complete novels in woodcuts. "One of these books, Frankenstein, fell into my hands in 1938," two years before "The Spirit" 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 stories related within are also semi-autobiographical, and Eisner drawing heavily on his own childhood experiences as well as that of his contemporaries.
