A Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories by Will Eisner

Now, this was a very busy guy who didn't have much time to speak to you. I called the president of Bantam Books in New York, who I knew had seen my work with The Spirit. His calling the book a 'graphic novel', Eisner said in that same address, came about on the spur of the moment: Until then, only Eisner's closest friends had even been aware that he'd had a daughter. In his introduction to the book's 2001 reissue, Eisner further revealed that the tragic inspiration for that choice of subject, as well as the inciting incident in the book's title story, grew out of the 1970 death of his leukemia-stricken teenaged daughter, Alice.

I began working on a book that dealt with a subject that I felt had never been tried by comics before, and that was man's relationship with God.' They would want something more than two heroes, two supermen, crashing against each other.

'I reasoned that the 13-year-old kids that I'd been writing to back in the 1940s were no longer 13-year-old kids, they were now 30, 40 years old. The first inspiration, Eisner said, came after he'd attended his first comic-book convention in the mid-1970s, and met that generation's fans and creators. I consider my efforts in this area attempts at expansion or extension of Ward's original premise.' 'One of these books, Frankenstein, fell into my hands in 1938,' two years before Eisner's acclaimed newspaper-supplement comic book The Spirit debuted, 'and it had an influence on my thinking thereafter. In the introduction, Eisner cited as inspiration the 1930s books of Lynd Ward, who produced complete novels in woodcuts. Utilizing his talents for expressive lettering and cartoonish figures, he links the narratives by the common setting and the common theme of immigrant and first-generation experiences, across cultures. The stories are semi-autobiographical, with Eisner drawing heavily on his own childhood experiences as well as those of his contemporaries. The work consists of four short stories - 'A Contract With God', 'The Super', 'The Street Singer', and 'Cookalein' - all set in a Bronx tenement in the 1930s, with the last story ('Cookalein') also taking place at a summer getaway for Jews.

A Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories by Will Eisner