After reading A Contract With God I feel like I can appreciate Will Eisner's work even further. Before I can't say I knew much about Eisner's work although I had seen and probably read some of his comics when I was younger. He truly is a comic legend and his approach to making comics is incredible. In much of his work Eisner employs a large amount of body gesturing in the characters he draws in his comics. He does it so well, I believe, that while reading his work you can understand the character and their intentions, emotions, or direction by simply reading the body language.
Gestures are very ingrained in culture whether you realize this or not. By understanding what gesture applies to what you can use this to your advantage to give your art more life and this is exactly what Eisner did. His drawing style also helps since it's beautifully drawn out ink sketches that are stylistic but still close to realism so you can easily understand what you're looking at.
In A Contract With God the pages are set up differently from the usual comic paneling. The pages are left open with various text or illustrations and most of what you see is taken up by the characters on the page and what they're doing. Most pages in Eisner's novel contained a large amount of characters so using successful body language in the way they were drawn paid off to help carry the story easily along to whoever was reading. While speech bubbles were used for dialogue I feel most of the story was carried through the characters and their movements or emotions shown on each page.
As for the actual story now, I can't say it moved me too much but I did feel a sort of connection through what the main character in Eisner's novel was dealing with. Everybody has lost a loved one and it hurts, and sometimes we turn to finding something to blame to take away the pain. The focus Eisner's story, Frimme, takes out his pain from dealing with a close family death by pouring his anger out on god. Through the novel we see Frimme's anger and pain through Eisner's line-work and well drawn gestures. That I feel was a part of the novel which was really well done.
Gestures are very ingrained in culture whether you realize this or not. By understanding what gesture applies to what you can use this to your advantage to give your art more life and this is exactly what Eisner did. His drawing style also helps since it's beautifully drawn out ink sketches that are stylistic but still close to realism so you can easily understand what you're looking at.
In A Contract With God the pages are set up differently from the usual comic paneling. The pages are left open with various text or illustrations and most of what you see is taken up by the characters on the page and what they're doing. Most pages in Eisner's novel contained a large amount of characters so using successful body language in the way they were drawn paid off to help carry the story easily along to whoever was reading. While speech bubbles were used for dialogue I feel most of the story was carried through the characters and their movements or emotions shown on each page.
As for the actual story now, I can't say it moved me too much but I did feel a sort of connection through what the main character in Eisner's novel was dealing with. Everybody has lost a loved one and it hurts, and sometimes we turn to finding something to blame to take away the pain. The focus Eisner's story, Frimme, takes out his pain from dealing with a close family death by pouring his anger out on god. Through the novel we see Frimme's anger and pain through Eisner's line-work and well drawn gestures. That I feel was a part of the novel which was really well done.
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