Will Eisner (31 page)

Page from the title story in
A Contract with God
. (Courtesy of Will Eisner Studios, Inc.)

“In the telling of these stories, I tried to adhere to a rule of realism, which requires that caricature or exaggeration accept the limitations of actuality,” he wrote in the preface to the original volume of
A Contract with God
.

To accomplish a sense of dimension, I set aside two basic working constrictions that so often inhibit the medium—space and format. Accordingly, each story was written without regard to space and each was allowed to develop in format from itself; that is, to evolve from the narration. The normal frames (or panels) associated with sequential (comic book) art are allowed to take on their integrity. For example, in many cases an entire page is set out as a panel. The text and the balloons are interlocked with the art. I see all these as threads of a simple fabric, and exploit them as a language. If I have been successful at this, there will be no interruption in the flow of narrative because the picture and the text are so totally dependent on each other as to be inseparable for even a moment.

Arriving at these decisions was largely a matter of trial and error, of writing and rewriting, drawing and redrawing. The entire process, from first draft to the finished book, took two years, and every step was a process of discovery. In his initial rough draft, he used his daughter’s name rather than Rachele, as it appeared in the finished book, for the name of Hersh’s daughter. He tried drawing the story in color, with overlays and washes, before deciding that sepia tones—the tones of dreams and memories—served his narrative better. Panels were enlarged and shrunk until he was satisfied with the way they looked on the page. He debated about how explicit he could be with some of the book’s sex scenes, deciding, at least in the case of “The Street Singer,” to combine a couple of scenes into one. Since he had no deadlines, he was free to experiment and piece together the stories to his liking.

Three stories followed “A Contract with God” in the book, all set in the same tenement building, all adhering to Eisner’s theme of survival in the big city. “The Street Singer” is the account of a man who sings in alleyways and backyards for loose change, only to be seduced by an aging diva hoping to use him to reclaim some of her own lost youth. “The Super,” a grim and ultimately violent tale of the apartment building’s superintendent and the power struggles he faces every day, includes a shocking look at the way he mishandles a pubescent girl who offers him “favors” in exchange for money, only to blackmail him later. “Cookalein” (the title coming from the Yiddish for “cook alone”) is a coming-of-age story about a teenage boy’s initial brushes with sex and its powers at a summer retreat in the Catskills. In his past work, Eisner had hidden behind his characters, with any hints of autobiography so thoroughly buried in the story that a reader would never have noticed them. The four interlocking pieces that make up
A Contract with God
were so gritty and realistic that a reader couldn’t help but wonder about their origins. In “Cookalein,” the main character was even named “Willie,” Eisner’s boyhood nickname, and his parents and brother were named Sam, Fannie, and Petey, making “Cookalein” his most openly autobiographical work to date.

With the exception of “A Contract with God,” which found Eisner silent for decades about the personal origins of the story, Eisner never attempted to conceal the autobiographical nature of these new graphic vignettes. These were fragments of his experiences of growing up in the tenements, where people settled for moments of contentment in a place where happiness was dreamt, not lived.

“Every one of the people in those stories is either me or someone I knew, or parts of them and me,” he told Cat Yronwode in an interview for the
Comics Journal
. “How can you not be autobiographical if you’re writing about something that you’ve seen?”

He was more specific in his preface to
The Contract with God Trilogy
.

“Cookalein,” he wrote, was “a combination of invention and recall … an honest account of my coming of age.” “The Super” was “a story built around the mysterious but threatening custodian of the Bronx apartment house where I lived as a young boy.” “The Street Singer” existed vividly in Eisner’s memory, as an out-of-work scrounge who survived by singing, “in a wine-soaked voice, popular songs or off-key operatic arias,” with the hope that someone listening might toss down a penny, a nickel, or, if the singer was extremely lucky, a dime. Eisner remembered throwing down a few coins himself. “With this book about tenement life,” he wrote, “I was able to immortalize his story.”

Eisner wrote and illustrated the stories in
A Contract with God
with the understanding that when the time came, he was going to have great difficulty in finding a publisher for his book. Denis Kitchen was willing to publish it as part of the Kitchen Sink Press list, but Eisner turned down the offer. These were serious stories, and Eisner wanted them to be issued by what he called “a Park Avenue publisher.”

“No offense, Denis, but I don’t want this work to be from a publisher on 2 Swamp Road,” he told Kitchen, referring to the Wisconsin address of Kitchen Sink Press.

Problem was, no one in New York was interested. This type of book was new, and publishers found it difficult to get excited about something they couldn’t fit into a convenient slot. They certainly weren’t at all enthusiastic about putting out another comic book, regardless of its merits, as Eisner discovered when he called Oscar Dystel, president of Bantam Books, and told him about his book. Eisner knew Dystel and knew that Dystel admired his work on
The Spirit
. Eisner also knew that he’d be rejected outright if he told him that he had a comic book for sale.

“I looked at it and realized that if I said, ‘A comic book,’ he would hang up,” Eisner recalled. “He was a very busy guy, and this was a top-level publishing house.”

“It’s a graphic novel,” he told Dystel.

“Oh, that’s very interesting,” Dystel replied. “Bring it up here.”

Eisner ran it up to the Bantam offices, but Dystel took one look at the manuscript and shook his head.

“You know, this is still a comic,” he declared, peering over the top of his glasses at Eisner. “We don’t publish this kind of stuff. Go find a smaller publisher.”

Eisner tried unsuccessfully to find a major publishing house for the book he was calling
The Tenement
. No one shared his enthusiasm for the potential of this new type of work. Eisner finally found a small New York press, Baronet Books, willing to put out the book, but even then the going was rough. Baronet was in dire financial straits, and Eisner wound up loaning the publisher money to stay afloat.

The book’s title became a marketing decision. Believing that no one outside of New York City would know what a tenement was, Eisner’s editor suggested that the book be given the title of its longest story—or, more fully,
A Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories
—and the book was marketed as “a graphic novel” even though it was a collection of stories and not a novel.

Eisner is often credited with inventing the term
graphic novel
, but in reality, he was neither the inventor of the term nor the first to publish one.

“I thought I had invented the term,” Eisner admitted, “but I discovered later that some guy thought about it a few years before I used the term. He had never used it successfully and had never intended it the way I did, which was to develop what I believe was viable literature in this medium.”

In years to come, when book-length works of sequential art expanded in scope to include biography, memoir, history, and other types of nonfiction, the term
graphic novel
would be dismissed by comics artists and writers, who complained that it limited the understanding of their work to a convenient label. Eisner himself, who experimented with the form over the next three decades, called it a “limited term,” although his preferred “graphic literature” or “graphic story” came across sounding a little too academic for bookstore owners and readers alike, just as the term
sequential art
would rub some readers the wrong way. Eisner would never like it, but Oscar Dystel probably spoke for a majority of editors and readers when he told Eisner that the graphic novel, regardless of the new terminology, was ultimately a comic book.

Comics scholars, like their counterparts in prose fiction, will always haggle over the definitions, composition, inner workings, and merits of the works spilling off bookstore and library shelves. If nothing else, it gives them something to do—topics for lectures, panel discussions at conventions, books and magazine articles, and late night barroom debates. Literature has rigid schools of criticism that go in and out of vogue, as well as intellectuals and self-appointed arbiters of taste who are all too pleased to announce, with great fanfare, the writers and books one simply
has
to read. When
A Contract with God
came along, comics were too young for such a history, but they were working on it. The graphic novel gave critics, historians, and social observers a virgin field to explore, chart, and plow.

First came the issue of definition. The term
graphic novel
was unheard of when Eisner published
A Contract with God
in 1978, so defining it was open to debate. Was it held to a prose novel’s standards? Was it, as Art Spiegelman once said, a big comic book that needed a bookmark? Storytelling and sequential art went back a long way, at least to the days of ancient Egypt, when stories were told in hieroglyphics. For all anyone knew, sequential art dated back to the cave drawings. No one argued that these early literary permutations should be considered novels, graphic or otherwise. Eisner had tossed out the term without giving it a lot of thought and attached it to a collection of longish stories as a means of announcing that this was serious work (as opposed to the superhero stuff on the comics market), but the immediate effect was confusion.

Robert C. Harvey, a comics scholar with a doctorate in English and a sideline career as a freelance cartoonist, joined a number of historians when he traced the modern graphic novel back to as early as 1827, when Swiss artist Rodolphe Töpffer combined words and pictures in his satirical tales. In his 1996 book,
The Art of the Comic Book: An Aesthetic History
, Harvey repeated one of Töpffer’s statements about his work, which seemed to offer one definition of the graphic novel:

The drawings without their text would have only a vague meaning; the text, without the drawings, would have no meaning at all. The combination of the two makes a kind of novel.

Harvey accepted this only to a point. Since Töpffer pre-dated the comic strip, he had nothing to which he could compare his work. Later comic strip artists such as C. W. Kahles (
Hairbreadth Harry
) and Alex Raymond (
Flash Gordon
,
Prince Valiant
) used a similar style of illustration with text running at the bottom of the panel, but to Harvey, these works weren’t terribly dissimilar to illustrated children’s stories, and they weren’t necessarily comics, at least in the familiar sense. Comics, Harvey argued, gained their distinctive look and style by using dialogue balloons and in the way they broke down narrative into panels that gave the story action and pacing.

Whatever the graphic novel is to be [or is], it seems to me that it must incorporate these two essential aspects of comics art if it is to be of the same species. The graphic novel may have other characteristics as well, but speech balloons and narrative breakdown seem to be vital ingredients: concurrence and action, and timing. Without these traits, the graphic novel will simply be something else—another kind of graphic story, surely, but not of the same order as the comics.

This explained some of the technical aspects of the art, but it still did not address the elements of story. What distinguished the graphic novel from a comic-book-length story? Or even a comic strip story that continued from day to day, week to week, until a story had been told?

Stephen Weiner, author of
Faster Than a Speeding Bullet: The Rise of the Graphic Novel
and coauthor of
The Will Eisner Companion
, conceded the difficulty of defining the graphic novel, especially as it evolved over the years, with the appearance of graphic memoirs, graphic nonfiction, graphic adaptations, graphic novellas, and graphic story collections. For the sake of simplicity, he defined the graphic novel in a way that covered all of these books under a single umbrella.

Graphic novels, as I define them, are book-length comic books that are meant to be read as one story. This broad term includes collections of stories in genres such as mystery, superhero, or supernatural that are meant to be read apart from their corresponding ongoing comic book storyline.

Michael T. Gilbert, a comics writer and historian, took exception to the belief that Eisner was the creator of first graphic novel, a distinction he was willing to give Arnold Drake, coauthor of
It Rhymes with Lust
, which appeared in 1950. Gilbert agreed, however, that the issue was one of definition.

“Eisner is credited with the modern graphic novel,” Gilbert said, “but it depends on how you define
modern
. It it postwar? Is it eighties? I could make the argument that any of the
Classics Illustrated
comics were graphic novels, by any reasonable definition.
A Contract with God
is all related short stories, with similar themes, but that doesn’t make it a graphic novel, and it certainly doesn’t make it the first graphic novel.”

The essays, books, articles, arguments, and discussions at comics conventions invariably focused on the contents of the graphic novel when trying to define it, trace its history, and assign Eisner a place in contributing to its existence. N. C. Christopher Couch, a former editor in chief at Kitchen Sink Press, dealt with Eisner on a practical level, but his back round as a professor at the University of Massachusetts and his work as coauthor of
The Will Eisner Companion
placed him in the position of seeing both sides of Eisner, the artist and businessman, in relation to his work as a graphic novelist. Couch was not prone to quibbling over who came first—even though his editor at DC Comics insisted that the subtitle to his
Will Eisner Companion
include the phrase “Father of the Graphic Novel”—and he, as much as any of his colleagues, understood the difficulties of defining the form attributed to Eisner. In Couch’s opinion, Eisner’s familiarity with the mechanics of publishing, and his belief in the necessity of changing the physical look of his graphic novel, was a major contribution to the form.