A Contract With God

It is very evident looking at A Contract with God that it is a new sort of art form in and of itself. Before this book the graphic novel was not really a known thing, nor in fact a term that even existed. Eisner coined the phrase, or at least claims to have, for the purposes of marketing the book to publishers. The work appears fledgling in its attempts to fully explore a medium as the medium itself has only just been invented and the ideas of the limits to which it could be stretched have not even begun to be fathomed.

As the first of the stories of Dropsie Avenue begins Eisner plays with the idea of open paneling and exclusively uses caption narration to tell the first several pages of Frimme Hersh's tale. Instead of solid black borders around each panel he uses an implied border created by the gradually fading raindrops of the emotional storm surrounding Hersh. In later tales the panel borders become the more generic black lines as well as the fading implications of borders and the arrangement of panels varies throughout from basic square set ups to experimental flowing arrangements to better depict the emotional content of the page.

The choice of a short story format as oppose to a continuous narrative gives character more to the setting than the tenants, allowing Dropsie Avenue to become an entity in and of itself. Each tale shows a different angle of the tenement, various aspects of its intricate personality made up of all of its inhabitants. The stories are all about money, trying to move up in the world and perhaps failing, or succeeding in ways that you had not initially intended. The whole shows that life does not always turn the way you expect it to and not all things turn out for the best, or what you would've hoped for the best to be.

A Contract with God is a revolutionary work for its time, creating a new art form in the graphic novel that continues to be explored to this day.