In his December 2004 introduction to the 2005 reprint of “A Contract with God,” Will Eisner wrote of the work’s genesis, “In 1978, encouraged by the work of the experimental graphic artists Otto Nückel, Franz Masareel and Lynd Ward, who in the 1930s published serious novels told in art without text, I attempted a major work in a similar form” (pgs. xxiii-xxiv). He described his narrative as “an exercise in personal agony,” his way of dealing with the death of his daughter, Alice, from leukemia in 1970. Eisner wrote, “I exorcised my rage at a deity that I believed violated my faith and deprived my lovely 16-year-old child of her life at the very flowering of it” (pg. xxvi).
The titular story begins with Frimme Hersch returning to the tenement at No. 55 Dropsie Avenue, after burying his daughter Rachele. Eisner depicts the scene with long lines of rain striking through Frimme and the background, leaving only the puddles as solid shapes. The reader can feel the rain soaking into Frimme while the lines darken the image to match Eisner’s narration. He writes, “Only the tears of ten thousand weeping angels could cause such a deluge!” (pg. 6). Eisner adds the same lines of rain to the bottom of his letters, giving the appearance of the ink bleeding down the page from the rain. He continues, “Not so unusual, a father brings up a child with care and love only to lose her… plucked, as it were, from his arms by an unseen hand – the hand of God” (pg. 8). This atmospheric narration overlays the open door of the tenement, appearing in the rain seen through the doorway while puddles on the floor show Frimme’s sodden path into the building. One of his neighbors offers him food, but Frimme, appearing to melt as Eisner depicts the water dropping off of him, passes on the offer. Later, as Frimme vents his anger at his god, Eisner uses the medium of comics to capture his anguish and rage in a way realistic illustration would not allow: his eyes bulge, his mouth gapes, and Eisner’s linework captures his fury (pg. 25). Frimme abandons the contract he made with God as a young boy, becoming a real-estate investor. When he acquires sufficient wealth, he asks the synagogue elders to write him a new contract. Reading it, he pledges to rededicate himself to good works and charity, only to die of a heart attack. Eisner’s first short story in this anthology perfectly captures a sense of loss and dramatic irony while evoking the people he knew as a young man growing up in the Bronx. In a way, the work foreshadows elements of Michael Chabon’s novel, “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,” itself about city life, the comics industry, and the collision of old world and new.
The other stories similarly have a folklorish tone, full of dramatic irony. “The Street Singer” tells of a man singing in alleys to make money. He attracts the attention of a former opera singer, who thinks she can teach him to be a star. After spending her cash advance on alcohol, he realizes he never wrote down her address and so sees his chance of a big break disappear before his eyes. In “The Super,” Eisner examines the antagonistic relationship between the residents and the building supervisor, Mr. Scuggs, while also showcasing the seedy underside of life in the tenements. Eisner portrays the anti-Semitic super fantasizing about an underage girl in a manic panel capturing his frenzied thoughts as he drinks beer and looks at lewd advertisements (pg. 107). The girl arrives, flashes him for a nickel, then poisons his dog and grabs his cashbox while his back is turned. He chases her, only for the building residents to see him about to hit her and call the police. Returning to his basement room, he cradles his dead dog and shoots himself. The story itself and Eisner’s graphic depiction of the super’s fantasizing recall the underground comix of the 1960s and 1970s, though he never shows more than the story requires and remains focused on the complexity of life in the slums rather than indulging his inner Id, as R. Crumb would do. Eisner begins with the narration, “After all, he was the landlord’s man – the enemy” (pg. 100). He gives the super the unflattering name of Scuggs, portrays him as balding and overweight, and portrays his disturbing fantasies. Eisner wants the reader to align with the tenants against this bully, only for him to evoke their sympathy when the littler girl poisons his dog. After Scuggs returns to his basement room, he cradles the dog in a series of textless panels in which Eisner depicts his anguish. Though Eisner never portrays Scuggs as a good man, he does show him as capable of genuine affection for one living creature, thereby depicting a far more complicated morality than appeared in most comics in 1978. The final story, “Cookalein,” examines the class structure of vacations, with the wealthy leaving the city in the summer for fancy Catskills resorts and those in the tenements going to farms with cottages, where a family might share a single room while also doing their own cooking and bringing their own linens. Even in vacation, however, people bring their problems and the traumas of the tenement with them.
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