|
|
Adult Books - Fiction - Graphic Novels
|  |  | 
The Contract with God Trilogy: Life on Dropsie Avenue.
Eisner, Will (author).
Nov. 2005. 544p. Norton, hardcover, $35 (0-393-06105-1). 741.5.
REVIEW.
First published November 15, 2005 (Booklist).
Comics veteran Eisner launched a second career with A Contract with God (1978), one that eclipsed his pioneering 1940s work featuring the masked crimefighter the Spirit and led the way for the contemporary graphic novel. Two further Depression-era books set on the same fictitious street in the Bronx followed. In the wake of Eisner’s recent death, the three are here gathered into a single volume. Contract consists of four vignettes, each focusing on a resident of 55 Dropsie Avenue. More ambitious, A Life Force (1983) details the intertwining lives of a handful of the tenement’s inhabitants. Dropsie Avenue (1995) portrays the neighborhood’s history from 1870, when British immigrants displaced Dutch--descended farmers, to its improbable rebirth from the ruins of the Bronx at the close of the twentieth century. By this point, Eisner’s drawing style, always slightly cartoonish, had become even looser and more exaggerated, while his storytelling remained masterful. Along with his other late-life graphic novels, also slated for collection, the trilogy compellingly if melodramatically portrays New York Jewish life. — Gordon Flagg
| |
|
| Click here to find more books by this author |
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|