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By Root 564 0

admired Spiegelman’s accomplishment, but he also harbored a resentment that after all his years of contributing to comics, he had never received such recognition. After hearing of Spiegelman’s Pulitzer, Eisner called Denis Kitchen and inquired about the award, and he was surprised to learn that these awards didn’t just materialize out of nowhere, out of a literary community’s purist affection for great literature; one had to submit the work for the formal nomination process. This bothered Eisner more than he let on in his gracious public statements praising Spiegelman and his accomplishments in comics. For all his outward modesty, Eisner possessed a competitive streak that demanded the kind of attention his peers received. Chabon, a prose writer, posed no threat. Spiegelman was another matter. Eisner could honestly state that he felt the Pulitzer for Maus was good for comics in general, but he could never overcome his ambivalent feelings about the fact that it was Spiegelman who won it and not him.

According to those who knew him, Spiegelman had a similar ambivalence about Eisner. He could appear with Eisner at comics functions, sing Eisner’s praises, and talk about his contributions to the medium, but out of the public view there was always an uneasiness between them, a feeling that neither could—or perhaps even cared to—overcome.

Jules Feiffer, another Pulitzer Prize–winning friend of Eisner’s, could understand how Eisner felt. “Everybody needs validation,” he pointed out. “Will was the transition between the comic books and their truly lowbrow approach to everything, and the comics he was doing, which were becoming an art form. By his own will he had turned comics into something else. When others ran off with the prizes and attention, Will was confused, befuddled, and irritated: ‘Wait a minute! I began this.’”

Florida had never taken the city out of Will Eisner. The September 11, 2001, destruction by terrorists of the World Trade Center had given him pause to consider, first, the boundless possibilities for inhumanity in a human world and, second, the temporary nature of cities themselves. So much of his identity was still connected to New York City, but the city, like his own life, was no longer youthful. Eisner had set graphic novels in the Bronx, in the tenement buildings on fictitious Dropsie Avenue, and by the end of 2002, he had decided to compose a graphic novel dedicated to the history of the neighborhood.

Dropsie Avenue: The Neighborhood stretches out over a century, starting with a rural stretch of land that over the decades grew into the South Bronx. By Eisner’s own admission, a project of this nature posed daunting challenges.

“Writing with images so inherent to this form means dealing with reality within the limitations of the graphic narrative,” he stated in his introduction to the book. “On the other hand, portraying internal emotions and real human experiences is abetted by the impressionism of cartoon art. The demands of the task were enough to make the undertaking worthwhile.”

The book was ultimately visually stunning but dizzying from a narrative standpoint, as Eisner pulled his readers through tales of nepotism and corruption, greed, racism, and anti-Semitism, wealth and poverty, joy and despair, framed by four wars, the Depression, immigration, crime and violence, and a constantly changing society. Eisner had observed much of it when he was growing up in the Bronx; intense research provided the rest. The neighborhood provided a huge roster of characters, but precisely because of their number, only a few were fully developed. The rest pass through in a matter of a page or two, adding texture to an overarching story told through brief vignettes.

Eisner was in over his head, and—if one can judge by his remarks in the book’s introduction and interviews he gave after its publication—he knew it. Three decades earlier, in The Spirit, he’d struggled to tell a fully realized story within the limitations of seven or eight pages; now he was attempting to depict, in 170 pages, the rise and fall of a neighborhood.