Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [113]
Emotionally hardened, Hersh abandons his faith and pursues monetary wealth. He begins his quest by purchasing a tenement building with money he’s embezzled from his synagogue, and he eventually amasses a small fortune in real estate, making him a powerful and respected man. But he cannot escape the man he once was—a moral man capable of good deeds. He needs another chance, another contract, and to obtain it he makes amends, returning the stolen money and vowing to lead a good life. Hersh’s story ends cynically when, after setting his life back in order and planning a future that might even include another daughter, he suffers a fatal heart attack.
Eisner wisely chose to set his story in Depression-era Bronx, giving it a feeling of life preserved in amber. The art is drastically different from Eisner’s earlier comic book work, with open, borderless panels, strong lines that give an edgy feeling to the characters, and no washes to soften the backgrounds. The world of Dropsie Avenue is stark and relentless.
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,