A Contract with God

Will Eisner’s 1978 book assembles connected stories of life around a Bronx tenement. The title story begins with a man whose faith is shaken by loss; the others turn to different residents and ambitions.

The shared setting makes the book feel like a portrait of a place rather than one continuous plot. People pass through the same social world under very different pressures.

A Contract with God helped establish a book-length form for adult comics in the United States. It is often discussed as a landmark in the modern graphic novel, though comics had already told long, serious stories before it.

Its importance is clearest in the way it joins literary ambition to Eisner’s command of sequential art.

The genre is urban literary drama. Questions of faith, class, desire and disappointment arise from tenement life rather than from a fantastic premise.

The stories give a single building the role of a social crossroads.

Eisner’s expressive figures carry emotion through posture and shadow. Architecture frames scenes without trapping them in rigid boxes.

The fluid pages make the streets and rooms feel lived in while allowing memory and feeling to shape the composition.