Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [114]
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