Will Eisner (1917-2005) saw himself as "a graphic witness reporting on life death heartbreak
and the never-ending struggle to prevail." The publication of A Contract With God when Eisner
was sixty-one proved to be a watershed moment both for him and for comic literature. It marked
the birth of the modern graphic novel and the beginning of an era when serious cartoonists
could be liberated from their stultifying comic-book format. More than a quarter-century after
the initial publication of A Contract With God and in the last few months of his life Eisner
chose to combine the three fictional works he had set on Dropsie Avenue the mythical street of
his youth in Depression-era New York City. As the dramas unfold in A Contract With God the
first book in this new trilogy it is at 55 Dropsie Avenue where Frimme Hersh the pious Jew
first loses his beloved daughter then breaks his contract with his maker and ends up as a
slumlord it is on Dropsie Avenue where a street singer befriended by an aging diva is so
beholden to the bottle that he fails to grasp his chance for stardom and it is there that a
scheming little girl named Rosie poisons a depraved super's dog before doing in the super as
well. In the second book A Life Force declared by R. Crumb to be "a masterpiece " Eisner
re-creates himself in his protagonist Jacob Shtarkah whose existential search reflected
Eisner's own lifelong struggle. Chronicling not only the Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression
but also the rise of Nazism and the spread of left-wing politics Eisner combined the
miniaturist sensibility of Henry Roth with the grand social themes of novelists such as Dos
Passos and Steinbeck. Finally in Dropsie Avenue: The Neighborhood Eisner graphically
traces the social trajectory of this mythic avenue over four centuries creating a sweeping
panorama of the city and its waves of new residents-the Dutch English Irish Jews African
Americans and Puerto Ricans-whose faces changed yet whose lives presented an unending "story
of life death and resurrection." The Contract With God Trilogy is a mesmerizing fictional
chronicle of a universal American experience and Eisner'' most poignant and enduring literary
legacy.
