The Contract with God Trilogy: Life on Dropsie Avenue (Will Eisner)

I've been wanting to read Will Eisner's seminal works (A Contract With God, A Life Force, and Dropsie Avenue) for some time.

So I was excited to stumble across the The Contract with God Trilogy: Life on Dropsie Avenue hardcover, which collects all three.

This is raw, heady, sentimental, and sobering stuff.

Collecting a series of stories set almost exclusively in a single Bronx tenement (and largely during the Depression era), the book is nearly 500 pages of brilliantly interwoven slice-of-life.

Themes and topics are diverse and gutsy, from race relations, the rise of unions, infidelity, the Stock Market crash, Prohibition-era runners, classicism, and the like.

Eisner's own summary of three books puts A Contract With God as an exploration of the relationship between God and man; A Life Force as an exploration of aging and the ephemeral nature of life; and "Dropsie Avenue is a story of life, death, and resurrection."

All three works are a stunning mix of history, biography, and autobiography (actual and creatively licensed).

A Contract With God was published in 1978, based on a lifetime of work and living. All stories are written in graphical format, and Eisner is arguably the father of the modern graphic novel. And because of the heady content and importance of his work, I've tagged this post as "literature", in addition to "comic books" -- if for no other reason than connotation. And this is adult fair -- not family-bound "funny pages".

For me, this was a solid, important read, and well worth the investment.

As an aside, Montilla Pictures's documentary film, "Will Eisner, The Spirit of an Artistic Pioneer," was accepted into this year's Tribeca Film Festival.