Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [117]
Using this knowledge of publishing, Eisner created a book that didn’t look like a comic book. It was the size of a trade paperback, had lettering on its spine, boasted a cover design that didn’t scream “children’s book” to bookstore owners and librarians, and provided an interior that eschewed the panel-by-panel artistry typical of comic books. Eisner had always been a voracious reader, and besides his knowledge of what constituted serious literature, he knew what a book should look like. “When Eisner turned to creating a novel in comics,” Couch concluded, “he had both a publishing professional’s understanding and inveterate reader’s physical, tactile grasp of what a novel should be.”
Newspapers and general interest magazines didn’t review comic books of any type—not in 1978—so Eisner had his hands full trying to reach potential readers. The book received extensive advertising in The Spirit Magazine, which was to be expected, and comics journals and fanzines noted its publication. (In a lengthy review in the Comics Journal, reprinted as an introduction to later printings of A Contract with God, comics writer and editor Dennis O’Neil, evoking the literature of Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, and Isaac Bashevis Singer, called A Contract with God “a near masterpiece.”) Beyond that, publicity for the book was all word of mouth.
Bookstores had no idea how to display or stock A Contract with God, as Eisner determined shortly after its publication, when he took a call from Norman Goldfine, Baronet’s publisher, who informed him that the Fifth Avenue Brentano’s in Manhattan was stocking his book. Eisner was elated. Having a store like Brentano’s carry A Contract with God seemed to underscore his claim that adults would be receptive to serious graphic novels. To avoid looking like an overeager author checking in on his book, Eisner waited two weeks before venturing to the store. After looking for the book and not finding it anywhere, he approached the store manager, identified himself as the author of A Contract with God, and asked how it was selling. The manager replied that the book had been prominently displayed for a couple of weeks, had sold well, but had to be relocated when the new James Michener novel arrived in the store.
“What did you do with mine?” Eisner wanted to know.
“Well,” the store manager said, “I brought it inside and I put it in with religious books since it’s about God, and this little lady came up to me and said, ‘What’s that book doing there? That’s a cartoon book. It shouldn’t be in with religious books.’ So I took it out and I put it into the humor section where they have people like Stan Lee and so forth. And someone came to me and said, ‘Hey, this isn’t a funny book; there’s nothing funny in this book. Why do you have it here?’ I took it out of there, and I didn’t know where to put it.”
Eisner had anticipated this sort of problem. Bookstores, like publishers, liked the convenience and comfort of labels. Genre fiction was ideal, with such categories as science fiction and fantasy, romance, westerns, humor, and horror making books easy to classify; everything else could be stocked under the category of general fiction. A Contract with God defied categorization. It wasn’t a collection of comic strips, which usually found a place near the back of the store, but it wasn’t prose fiction, either.
“Where do you have it now?” Eisner asked the store manager.
“In a cardboard box in the cellar,” the manager responded.