Empire state of mind
Having read many of Will Eisner's works before, including the Contract with God trilogy, To The Heart of the Storm, Minor Miracles, and Fagin the Jew, I continue the trend with this collection:
This is a somewhat eclectic collection of stories and vignettes, each of which have a varying length of narrative, and yet a narrative nonetheless. This is my first time reviewing a non-Scott Pilgrim graphic novel - and one which is considered to be a classic.
Although the tones, plots, and characters have different characteristics, they all take place in New York during various eras. Some are surprisingly modern - the 70s and 80s - but the bulk of the fleshed-out stories take places during the bitter and unforgiving 30s. Then again, perhaps it is unfair to call any decade unforgiving, but that is certainly how the characters treat it. In every story is expressed a kind of loss: love, scenery, meaning, life, essentials, pride, reputation, sense of self. It is Eisner himself who is unforgiving, showing his readers how his characters respond to the pain and indifference around them, sometimes with tragic consequences. One even gets the feeling that he feels tragedy (and how people cope with it) is the defining characteristic of life. It is, after all, unavoidable.
Many of his shorter chapters don't deal with tragedy on such a large scope, but rather the simple ironies that plague city folk. A confident man swaggers on a busy street in broad daylight; but that same man avoids the same sidewalk at night. Another man complains that a cop is wrong in ticketing a parked car; after earning two more tickets, the man reveals to a friend that the car doesn't belong to him. A man and woman see each other on the subway, each inspiring the other's daydream: the woman desires a happy marriage and a high-profile job, while the man thinks about different sexual positions. He is occasionally funny, in his own wry way, such as in "In Concert," which shows a music band of vagabonds who happily adapt their stylings to whichever neighborhood they play. The most positive story shows Eisner at his most complex: he tells what is essencially a ghost story by using four interweaving storylines, each provoking and - yes - unforgiving to its characters, and adds an element of redemption. He is most interested in how people screw up their lives and go about trying to right things; the unexpected always seems to become the inevitable. In the end, sometimes those people lose possibly the most important thing - the ability to survive.
Rating: 4.5 apartment keys out of 5.