GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW: Will Eisner’s New York
Will Eisner is one of the giants of 20th century comics; a figure whom reviewers always say “needs no introduction,” but then gets an extended explanation anyway. I’ll be brief: Eisner founded what became a major packaging studio in 1936, at the very beginning of the comic-book business, then launched the unique Spirit newspaper insert section in 1940. Starting in the ‘50s, he ran his own company, American Visuals Corporation, which created instructional materials in comics form, mostly for the government. In the late ‘70s – in his sixties, when most men are retiring – he started writing and drawing long-form stories that are now often called the first graphic novels, starting with A Contract With God in 1978. He died in 2005 in Florida, where he’d lived for the previous twenty years.
Will Eisner’s New York is the second omnibus volume of Eisner’s stories from W.W. Norton, a highly respected publisher of mostly non-fiction, after 2006’s The Contract With God Trilogy, collecting that original graphic novel and two related works. New York itself collects four separate books – New York, The Building, City People Notebook, and Invisible People – which are loosely related to each other and also vaguely set in the same city as the Contract With God stories. The “Contract With God” stories were set in a fictional Bronx neighborhood, but the stories in New York range more widely – a lot of them feel like the Bronx, but some are more Manhattanesque. (There’s not a whole lot of Brooklyn or Queens in here, though, and no detectible Staten Island. Eisner’s New York, like everybody’s, is specific and parochial.)
What strikes a new reader first is the question of dates; the stories in New York were originally published from 1981 through 1992, but the New York they depict is mostly that of the 1930s, with occasional bits from later decades. The “Dropsie Avenue” stories, like A Contract With God, are deliberately set in Eisner’s youth, but the tales in New York appear to be aimed at contemporaniety, but don’t feel any more modern than about 1966. It’s possibly too much to ask that a man in his sixties and seventies, living in Florida, be completely up-to-date with a city he already knows very well, but Eisner’s New York wasn’t a contemporary city even in 1981. This was the city he remembered, and recreated in ink from those memories.
It’s about time I got around to Tartan – specifically Tartan Asia Extreme, since they’ve been inundating the DVD market with every Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Thai “horror” movie they can get their well-manicured hands on. I put horror in quotes, because, in reality, many of their releases are actually episodes of The Twilight Zone and Tales from the Crypt with delusions of cinematic grandeur – essentially familiar ghost revenge sagas pumped and/or padded to feature length. I also say “well-manicured,” because, whatever the overall quality of the film they’re presenting, Tartan’s packaging is uniformly classy.
Not quite nine years of age, and already the author of a Banned Book. Over Mrs. Jenkins’ shrieks of outrage, Principal Howard Amick prevailed with somewhat a saner voice: He found the pages worth a chuckle but, even so, pronounced them a Waste of Talent. Damnation by faint praise, in other words, within a public-school system whose elementary art curriculum consisted of finger-painting and construction-paper cut-outs.
Over the weekend, I read the entire trade paperback collection of The Amazing Transformations of Jimmy Olsen. I had anticipated a rollicking journey through my childhood, since I’d read most of these stories as a kid. 
