If you’re more than three feet away from a housefly, it can’t see you. — L. M. Boyd, The San Francisco Chronicle
01/15/17
Books That Belong On Paper first appeared on the web as Wink Books and was edited by Carla Sinclair. Sign up here to get the issues a week early in your inbox.
A Contract with God: And Other Tenement Stories
by Will Eisner, Scott McCloud
W.W. Norton & Company
2017, 224 pages, 7.3 x 0.9 x 10.3 inches, Hardcover
Originally published in 1978, Will Eisner’s A Contract With God “existed in its own continuum, patiently waiting for the rest of its kind to quietly arrive…” says Scott McCloud in his introduction to the hardcover edition, released in celebration of what would have been Eisner’s centennial year. McCloud’s intro, the publisher’s following “Brief History,” and Eisner’s own preface firmly contextualize the work and its creator within its time and the larger comics scene to which Eisner was so integral. With or without the history, it is nearly impossible to imagine a reader not being blown away by this collection.
A Contract With God explores the everyday extremes of human experience through the tenement building at 55 Dropsie Avenue. Residents strive, struggle, and schlep through the graphic short stories. Eisner explores the themes therein on multiple levels, with text and illustration that are cuttingly resonant. His characters fall in and out of faith in God, man, and love. Some are blindly optimistic and others rawly matter-of-fact in their realism. Some are both.
The stories are a fictional fleshing-out of Eisner’s life. The title story stems from his own experience of losing a child, The Street Singer and The Super from imagined realities of the characters in and around his own tenement, and my favorite, Cookalein, in some ways the most complex story in its interconnected and contrasting experiences of class, romance, and sex across its cast of characters, is what Eisner calls “a combination of invention and recall.” All the stories, in all the ways they are told, are violent, sad, intense, and beautiful.
– Mk Smith Despres
How to Survive in the North
by Luke Healy
Nobrow Press
2016, 192 pages, 6.6 x 1.1 x 9.0 inches, Hardcover
Ever read one of those books that has you running to Google immediately after finishing it, to find out as much as possible about the subject matter? This is one of those books. The two real-life stories it tells are so compelling that I had to learn more about these people.
“These people” are Robert Bartlett, who captained an Arctic expedition in 1913; and Ada Blackjack, an Inuit seamstress who joined an ill-equipped journey to Siberia in 1921. These journeys were dramatic, with deception, danger, isolation, and illness. The survival stories Healy retells are astonishing. Readers will witness the slow encroachment of scurvy, the desolation of Arctic landscapes, and the different forms that heroism can take.
By comparison, the third storyline — a fictional account of a disgraced professor in the modern day, who becomes fixated with Bartlett’s and Blackjack’s stories — just can’t hold as much interest.
The artwork is deceptively simple, with unfussy lines and a restricted, distinctive color palette of pale yellows, pinks, and greens. These colors create, with surprising subtlety, a mood of mounting desperation.
Fascinating history, check. Unusual characters, check. Natural settings and a color scheme ripe for cinematography, check and check. Someone turn this book into a movie already!
– Christine Ro
© 2022
