As our Final Project donned upon us, I began to reminisce about this past semester studying comics, graphic novels, comic art, and all of visual literature. Being my first class involving this information I have to say the first couple weeks were very challenging. Will Eisner’s A Contract with God threw me out of sorts for sure. It’s complex narrative… Read more →
Tag: A Contract With God
Willie’s Manhood
Will Eisner’s “Cookalein” demonstrates the graphic novel’s ability to discuss controversial adult topics. Eisner creates a graphic narrative which shares little in common with contemporary comics by presenting fundamentally flawed and therefore realistic characters. Let’s focus on Willie, 15, the oldest son of a lower class family spending the summer at a mountain house. He and his family spend an evening… Read more →
Graphic Novels and The Jewish Disapora
In junior year of high school, I took an english elective course on diaspora. My original course had been cancelled so I had been randomly placed into an elective I knew nothing about. I learned that, in short, diaspora meant displacement and a lot of the stories we’d be exploring involved cultural or religious diasporas. It was then that I… Read more →
Rosie’s Demonization
In Will Eisner’s “The Super,” the titular character is fairly well fleshed out for a story that takes up all of about twenty-six pages in Eisner’s Contract with God. He’s not a particularly good or even nice landlord, and is often shown insulting his own tenants, and failing to complete his duties as landlord, drawn then as a rather gross,… Read more →
A Contract With Relgion
This past week, our class has been dealing with Will Eisner’s A Contract with God and how its role as the first “graphic novel” by name changed literature. We dealt with character development, whether good or evil can be seen in certain characters, and the artistic direction and effort made by Eisner to showcase his thoughts and visualization of the Bronx and… Read more →
Bad Reasons, Used Well: Assigning Blame in Will Eisner’s “The Super”
So this week we’ve been talking about Will Eisner’s “A Contract With God” in class, and most recently we discussed “The Super”. It is clear that Eisner is a master of his craft, not just as a visual artist, but as a storyteller. While the plot of this particular chapter isn’t especially complex, Eisner manages to really make us think,… Read more →
Reflections on the Willingness to Forgive Characters
For me, and I think most people taking this course, Rosie is the character that stuck out most to me and caused me to think about the readings more than anything else. But it is not just the morality of her story but how I and everyone else reacted to her. Someone in our class pointed out that we are… Read more →
Affecting the Mind one Color at a Time
To have color or not to have color, that is the question. Most comic writers choose the former in this day and age and there are even more companies that think it is their job to color the once uncolored. Is this really an improvement? What does color add? Some readers believe that having color distracts from the artistry and… Read more →
Snapshots of a broken city
During class this week we have been discussing Will Eisner’s Contract with God, which some would say is the first true graphic novel. Through illustration we were taking through four stories that take place in an American city during the Great Depression. I also is a commentary about how people with different characters react to the things thrown their way… Read more →
Reflection: The Innocence of Willie
In the last chapter of A Contract with God, the pages that I keep going back to as pages 179 and 180. In pages 179, Willie’s mom tells him that he is the ‘man of the house’ now and all Willie is doing is looking down at the street. On page 180, however, you see him staring off into the… Read more →