A review by inhonoredglory
A Contract With God and Other Tenement Stories by Will Eisner

5.0

There's not much to say about this graphic novel, the first proper one in the genre, that hasn't already been said by the great of the industry. It's eloquent, sparse, insightful, and beautifully drawn. It never preaches, but leaves you with a breadth of reality that touches on the good, dark, tragic, pathetic, and immeasurably human things that make up who we are. We're all just trying to survive, and how we do that might not look pretty and might not be right, but we believe it's the best we have. We'd do anything to get out of a bad life into a good one, and we'll imagine a story that we believe would make things better. Whether that changes our station or not doesn't matter; it's the fiction—the dream, the hope, even the lie—that keeps us going.