A Contract With God by Will Eisner

      Will Eisner call this particular piece of work "graphic narrative" instead of "comic". A Contract with God is indeed very different from the comic we used to see before, it made a revolutionary leap into what form today's graphic narrative market. Although as the first graphic narrative, the work may still retain some characteristics of comic, but the style is obviously much more loose and free.

     Eisner abandoned borders and boxes, instead of traveling from one frame to the next across the pages, one image can take up an entire page. A lot of times, images are loosely arranged, one over another. Without lines and boxes, the story flows naturally. Sometimes, it evens seems like watching a movie, a scene fades into the next. Rather than having a cut in between which stopped one scene to begin a new one, the fade made the scenes intertwined with one another. Text also merge within the images, becoming part of the art. How Eisner composed A Contract with God is very unique, it had, in a way makes me feel more involved with the story.

     Dialogues of the characters have been reduced, we are not communicating as much with the characters. Instead, the plot relies more on narration. Without looking at the images, the readers can understand the story based just on the text. It indeed is just a narrative, but accompanied with images.

     In this book the page are not compacted with informations, because there are no limites on page numbers what so ever. We are given more room to "back up" from the reading, so we don't have to stare at the tiny little boxes trying to figure out what's going on. Comic can be overwhelming sometimes due to how "crowded" they are. The style of Contract with God is much more pleasing to the eyes. In fact, I think it's a much more enjoyable piece for Eisner too.