I know the name of Will Eisner well, because he lent it to an award, the Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards, or simply the Eisners. There are many of these, for a whole slew of categories, and they're often seen as the comic book world's equivalent to the Oscars, the most prestigious of them all, a replacement for the Kirby Awards that were discontinued in 1987. Many of the graphic novels that I've reviewed at the Nameless Zine have won Eisners.

Yet I've never read anything by the man himself, even though Eisner's 1978  book, 'A Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories', popularised the very term "graphic novel", even though it does predate his work, having been first used in 1964, and the format dating back to at least 1828. While he built his reputation working in more traditional cartoons and comic books, dating to before the Second World War, he started turning out more serious book length work in the seventies and this is the first example to fall into my lap, so I was eager to dive in.

It's simple to see from the outset why "graphic novel" was so quickly applied to this era of his work, as it doesn't quite feel like a comic book. Eisner himself used the term "sequential art" and that's another perfect term to apply. This is a book made up of artwork that's presented in sequence. For quite a while, that artwork shows up as one image per page, even in a large format paperback, as Eisner's introducing us not to people but to the building of the title, which is proud and upright on the first page but gone, an empty hole in a city, on the second. On the third, it's been replaced by something very different, its old fashioned stones replaced by an edifice of glass. At this point, it's the only character that matters.

On the fourth page, he introduces us to four characters, appearing as ghosts, who had connections to the building in its past and are now haunting it in a fashion, not as stagy ghosts but as memory. Eisner's conceit here is that old buildings have souls, grown in them by everything that happens in and to them over a long period of time. This particular building occupied its place for over eighty years and it saw a lot in that time. Eisner quickly focuses us in on some of that, through how these four ghosts interacted with it.

Apparently he used to be a cartoonist before he was a comic book writer and that's clear from the simplicity of his work. He's quite obviously a master of telling a whole story in only a single image, not by cramming it full of detail but by distilling it down to its essence. The first such page has one of the ghosts, Monroe Mensch, about to walk into the building when a drive-by shooting happens, presumably placing us in the gangster-ridden twenties, and the bottom third of it is nothing but a ricocheted bullet whizzing past Mensch and into the body of a child.

It's a harrowing image but it's impeccably simple and utterly masterful, because it's not just about a sad accident, it's about how he didn't do anything to stop it, to shield the child, and that changes his life. I'm not going to talk about where that life takes him over a long period of time, but Eisner distils it down to its primary moments just as he does any one of its individual images. It carries a serious emotional punch, all the more powerful for being told in so few pages, and it sets us up for the other stories to come.

There's Gilda Greene, who marries a dentist but carries on an affair with a poet for her entire life, meeting in front of the building every Wednesday. She gets more pages but her story isn't quite as brutal, pervaded more with a sense of sad inevitability. Antonio Tonatti is a musician who's better than most of us would ever be but not quite enough to turn professional. After a work accident, he starts playing for fun outside the building and changes a lot of lives around him in the process, not least the characters we've already met. P. J. Hammond is a realtor who becomes obsessed with the building, the one in the block that he doesn't own but the one he played around as a kid.

They're all good stories and they put us through quite the ringer, but there's still one story to come and it trumps the rest for impact, not least because all four of our characters play their part, even though they were all dead before it happened. It's fair to say that there's a level of inevitability to each of them, albeit maybe not quite as much as in Gilda's story, so you're not going to find much in the way of surprise here. Some might even call the crucial moments corny. However, it would seem to take a hard heart indeed to not be moved by them and I mean seriously moved. That's down to Eisner's ability as a storyteller and especially his ability as an artist.

This entire book plays out very simply .There aren't many panels. There's sometimes a lot more in the way of narration than dialogue from characters, because we're watching from a distance, with the building always fully in mind and that dwarfs any of the individual people in and around it. It's all told in black and white, though it comes across as a sort of sepia tone, maybe because of how it looks inherently backwards. After all, the building the entire book is about is demolished on page two. However, there's a lot of humanity in these pages, the best of it and the worst of it and some of what sits in between, and it's impeccably touching. I clearly need to read more by Will Eisner. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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