In Pictures

I've made it a habit in recent years, since discovering the joys of graphic novels/comic books, to buy at least one handsome volume thereof to enjoy in holiday periods (hence the fact that most of my collection is in KL.) This June was no exception. I duly shelled out the ringgit for a hardback copy of Will Eisner's A Contract With God Trilogy which I'd noticed in Borders at Parkway but resisted on the grounds that such extravagance was only fit for a man with oodles of time on his hands. The oodles being available I found I had to resist the temptation to overdose and read all three books in a day and managed to spread them over a reasonable two-and-a-half - but I also reread a fair amount of the final book, Dropsie Avenue and two of the four stories making up the first book A Contract With God.

I knew that Eisner had a stellar reputation and hoped I would find myself impressed in the way that so many others have been. (I was a bit concerned I might find the material dated, having little sense of when it was actually written.) I needn't have worried. Though the title story of A Contract With God was not quite what I expected (not busy enough for my liking with generally just one illustration per page) after that things took off spectacularly. I got the sense that the first book was sort of feeling the way to a new way of telling stories - the tales subsequent to A Contract With God felt much freer in conception and style and the subsequent full books A Life Force and Dropsie Avenue move almost into a new way of rendering stories - linking themes through recurrent characters who wind in and out of a sort of meta-story centering on the development over time of a whole location. This sounds rather grand, though I'm trying to put it as simply as I can, but the books themselves make for an effortless read, seemingly perfectly natural as, simply, good stories.

Occasionally the dialogue and linking narration can be a bit clunky, but the artwork itself is never less than wonderful. I don't know anyone else who can do rain quite as well as Eisner. One thing though - the characters do have a distinctly 1940s - 50s feel to them, even though the action of Dropsie Avenue brings us to later decades. They also sometimes remind me of Disney characters, I mean the human figures in Disney cartoons - especially the middle-aged ladies and the sort of generic handsome male in his twenties. I wonder which way the influence went; as far as I know Eisner was never employed by Disney studios. Maybe it was just something in the air?