Will Eisner’s 3-D Classics featuring The Spirit (1985) #1 by Will Eisner

Kitchen Sink sold a lot of gimmicky things over its history, and I guess it started here. They’d later publish tin signs and chocolate bars, and at some points it seemed like the comics part of the business was just a quaint adjunct to the real business… but indie comics publishers always teeter on the edge of bankruptcy, so you can’t really blame them for trying stuff to stay afloat. But sometimes they start off doing business stuff to enable them to publish comics, and then it segues into doing comics stuff to enable them to stay in business.

But it seemed like Kitchen really kind of enjoyed doing these other bits and bobs, so I guess it never actually felt mercenary?

Anyway, this is a Ray Zone 3D-fication book, and you’d think that The Spirit would be well suited to this kind of thing…

And it is! Some of the pages, especially the splash pages, look really good. Lots of layers and depth.

However, it suffers from many of the same problems all comics that are made into 3D without being drawn with that in mind — on many of the pages, the 3D thing just doesn’t work very well, because of the overlapping parallax thing, meaning that many bits are only visible in one channel, which makes them un-3D again (especially if you push the effects, like Zone is doing).

The best 3D page is this ad, and I guess Eisner drew it with 3D in mind? Possibly? Because it looks great.

Steve Monaco writes in The Comics Journal #107, page 37:

This could
be the perfect way to read The Spirit. Eisper’s
work has always had a strong 3-D aspect all
by itself, ånd, for the most part,’ the four
stories here are naturals for extra-dimen-
sional enhancement. Only One story,
“Blood of the Earth,” has little to recom-
mend it, 3-D quality or otherwise; the other
three all look great, and one Story, ‘ •The
Vortex,” espeically stands out (sorry, I
couldn’t resist). The processing by Ray Zone
(and Tony Alderson, who did ‘The Vortex’)
is clean and inventive throughout the book.
This is 3-D—and possibly, The its
most entertaining.

This is the seventy-fifth post in the Entire Kitchen Sink blog series.

Death Rattle (1985) #1-18 edited by Denis Kitchen and Dave Schreiner

The 32 page anthology format is a difficult one to pull off. With a higher page count, you can achieve a nice mix of longer and shorter stories, and if you include one story that doesn’t quite work, it’s no big deal. And you can have a roster of familiar faces as well as dropping in surprises now and then. With a 32 page anthology, everything becomes harder — if you have a long story, it ends up totally dominating the issue. If you only run shorter stories, it gets samey after a while. If you use the same artists every issue, it gets boring. If you don’t have any recurring artists, the anthology can become schizophrenic.

But there were other successful 32 page anthologies around at the time — perhaps most notably Twisted Tales (published by Pacific). However, they solved all these issues by having most of the stories being written by Bruce Jones.

Kitchen Sink had a go at the Death Rattle title in 1972, and it was pretty horrific. I mean, not scary, but just really bad. So it’s slightly odd that they re-used the same title for their horror anthology in 1985 — but it’s a good title. And they managed to publish 18 issues before it was shut down (which is pretty unique), so it sounds like it sold well, and perhaps it’s really good?

I certainly thought so as a teenager: I bought (almost) the entire series at the time, and I remember reading and re-reading them — at least the early issues. So I’m excited to re-read them now: Do I remember correctly, and these are really good, or do they suck? Let’s find out!

Kitchen Sink’s previous anthologies have had a tendency to be… er… sloppily put together? In an interview in the 70s, Kitchen described how he’d be buying work over a long period of time, and then, when he has enough for an issue, he’d put an anthology together. Which explains why so many of Kitchen’s 70s anthologies were so incoherent, and didn’t really have much of an identity (even if individual stories in the anthologies were great).

Here he’s also insisting that there’ll be no ads, and that explains the (for the time) high price of the book (comics fans are notoriously cheap). And that also makes me go “right, as opposed to the earlier anthologies”, which were padded in all kinds of ways.

I’m not being grouchy or anything! I’m just wondering whether this is another one of Kitchen’s assembled-from-a-forgotten-drawer anthologies, or whether it’s… like… been edited.

So, on the inside front cover he mentions that the Corben cover is older work that he’d had lying around for a while. But nothing about the rest of the work.

And so it turns out that the Rand Holmes is a reprint from the late seventies, but newly coloured. It’s a fun take on a classic EC story, somewhat incoherently told, but with Holmes doing his very best Wally Wood impersonation, so that’s fine.

The centrepiece of the book is eighteen pages of exquisite Charles Burns horror, and I think this story basically explains why I remember Death Rattle so fondly. I mean, not that the rest of the series doesn’t have good stuff, but this is just so super creepy, and stylish, and alien. That little insect/monster is so fascinating.

But this looks like really early Burns work? It’s much simpler than the work Burns was doing in 1985, and it looks like it was originally done for publishing in black and white (what with the zip-a-tone and stuff).

What a nightmare!

This story has apparently never been reprinted. I guess that means that Burns doesn’t much like it? Burns has done plenty of horrific stories, but this tips way over into despair and torture porn, really — the ending is, to put it mildly, a downer. Which is probably why it made such an impression on me at the time.

I mean, apart from the fascinating artwork.

And then we end with a three-pager by Charles Dallas that doesn’t seem to have anything to do with anything, which is a typical Kitchen Sink think to do.

So: I think Kitchen’s approach to anthologies hasn’t changed since the 70s. I’m guessing he’d gotten the rights to the Burns story, and then he coupled that with the Corben painting he had, reprinted an old Holmes story, and then added some padding, and presto! Death Rattle is reborn!

But it’s totally worth it. This issue is wonderful.

So what to do for the second issue, then? Does Kitchen have more stuff? The point of the second issue is this Jaxon story, which is a harrowing, horrific and apparently true story. And Jaxon’s clear storytelling style makes things even more gruesome, somehow.

And then we get to the padding: A reprint of something Will Eisner did in the 70s?

And really fun thing Rand Holmes did in the late 70s. Check! So the second issue is also a “make this work” thing… but surely Kitchen would have to start actually soliciting people for new work to keep the series going?

And indeed, with the third issue there seems to be money to pay people for new material… but not too much, apparently, since we get this really bad thing from Doug Hansen.

More significantly: Jaxon. He starts his Bultu, The Cosmic Slug serial, which .would run throughout most of Death Rattle’s subsequent run. His artwork really is kinda gorgeous when he wants to, isn’t it?

Steve Stiles, a staple of Kitchen’s 70s anthologies, also makes a return, and contributes a bunch of EC-inspired shorts over the rest of the run

A number of people write in to say that they didn’t much like the Charles Burns story. I guess it unnerved more than it entertained?

Finally some new Rand Holmes (in a story scripted by Mike Baron). It’s very EC, but more gruesome, so very much on brand.

Death Rattle hits a kind of stride — we get a bunch of younger artists, like Sam Kieth and John Holland, contributing really strong stuff. The anthology has a good flow, and most of the stories work.

We do get some padding, but it’s superior padding, like Basil Wolverton.

The first half of the 80s was an interesting time for comics. When the direct sales market was created, there was such a hunger for product, any product, that publishers like Pacific and Eclipse were able to publish some pretty quirky and unusual books, in colour with good production values, and still make some money. After a few years, apparently the comics buying public had enough of that stuff, and reverted to only buying Marvel and DC super-hero comics again, but those few years were fun.

So with the sixth issue, the book switches to black and white, because sales were just too low. But horror looks good in black and white, too. Here’s Tom Veitch and Steven Bissette above, doing a twisty horror thing.

Rand Holmes and Jan Strnad explain to us that fat people are monsters.

And Jaxon takes to black and white in his stride.

It’s still a really entertaining anthology.

Kitchen explains that they lost money on every colour issue of Death Rattle? Uhm… well, if he says so.

Spain! Wow. (It’s one of those “Nazis are bad” stories, which is always good.)

One frustrating thing about many earlier Kitchen anthologies was the way he’d just drop in bits from other anthologies he’d also published. So here we get a long article about Ed Gein… that had run in Weird Trips earlier, I think?

I know that indie comic books usually hover on the brink of losing money, so you can’t be too annoyed with Kitchen doing this: Getting some pages of good comics is better than getting no pages, right?

Mark Schultz’ Xenozoic Tales makes it debut here, which makes this issue an expensive one on ebay…

Kenneth Whitfield and Dan Burr gives an accurate portrayal of the readers of the comic.

There’s definitely fewer well-known names in the anthology as the issues roll by. Here’s Nick Burns and Joseph Schmough — but it looks pretty interesting, doesn’t it? And it’s a good little horror story.

Note that the paper has gone from nice and white to newsprint, so I guess that’s another cost saving thing.

The series does have a strong identity, though — mainly through the many stories illustrated by Rand Holmes (and written various people), and, of course, the Jaxon serial.

But the fillers keep coming.

And on and on. I think the tenth issue had eight pages of new comics and the rest was filler? Text pages and…

… this Williamson (and a cast of thousands) thing from the 50s that was redone and printed in Witzend originally.

We get the explanation next issue — they had planned on cancelling the series with the eleventh issue, so they had presumably stopped taking in new submissions? But! The circulation unexpectedly increased, so they’re continuing the series.

Most of the contents of the 11th issue is pretty dire, though, with this Eric Vincent piece from 1980, for instance. But the Muller/Hartwig thing is pretty solid, and so are their subsequent pieces over the rest of the issues.

This Matthew Finch story about Howard Hughes, and the movie he made (where most of the crew got cancer, including John Wayne, to quote the song) was obviously meant for a different publication (note magazine form factor), but it’s graphically kinda intriguing.

Note that no women killed their husbands, because women aren’t protagonists here. (Mueller/Hartwig.)

Which brings me to something I meant to mention earlier: There are no women contributing to this series — at all. That’s pretty peculiar in itself, but it’s more than odd for a Kitchen series. Kitchen’s earlier anthologies always had more than a couple of talented women appearing, but none here. I guess it’s the 80s.

I wish I could say that the Jaxon epic turned out to be… epic… but he gets lost in the weeds. The story is ostensibly about an alien that is worshipped by some Native Americans, but Jaxon spends several issues digressing into stories about various Spanish commanders and stuff. In the end, the story just kind of fizzles.

It doesn’t help that many of the chapters feel like recaps of longer stories, either.

But the artwork’s solid.

John Wooley and Jim Millaway writes a story about Walmart coming to town, and you couldn’t choose a subject that Rand Holmes would be less interested in drawing. I don’t think there’s any female characters in this at all? Or half naked men? Instead it’s just pages and pages of people standing around talking, and then seemingly ninety pages of a baseball match.

It’s pure tedium.

But perhaps not as bad as this creepy thing by Gerard Jones and Douglas Potter. And not creepy in the way it’s meant to be creepy either.

Chris McCubbin writes in Amazing Heroes #151, page 70:

No All-Hallows summary of scary
comics would be complete without
Death Rattle, the uncrowned king of
the moment. Sadly, hmvever, the most
current issue is actually a remarkably
mediocre example of the comic.
While an issue of Death Rattle can
and often does hold five storys or
more, #17 has only two. The culprit
this issue is the cover story, “Slide,
Sinner, Slide,” written by John Wooley
and Jim Millaway, and illustrated by
DR regular Rand Holmes.
The story is an obvious homage to
the classic TWilight Zone TV show,
which always built up a satisfying level
of terror, then resolved at the last
moment into a happy ending which re-
enforced the wholesome values of the
time and kept the network off Rod
Serling’s back.
This is a bit of a departure for Death
Rattle, where the stories almost always
end grimly, and that’s fine. However,
Wooley and Millaway commit the
unpardonable sin of smirking at their
source material. On the last page,
when the hay-chewin’, pickup-drivm ,
overall-wearin’ narrator drawls “Nmv
I know that some of you—specially
those of you with liberal arts
degrees—might try an’ sift through
this story for a moral or somethin’,
some symbolism or maybe a
metaphor. Heck, some of you might
even think this is one of them
allegories.” I just wanted to slap
somebody.
The story isn’t completely irre-
deemable. There is a nice satiric edge
to it—the central premise is that the
huge Ke and Wal- type convenience
marts are a (literally) diabolic plot to
undermine small-town life. And Rand
Holmes’s art is, as always, gorgeous,
and a remarkable evocation of the EC
style.
Much better is the penultimate
chapter of Jaxon’s long-running
historical fantasy “Bulto.”
Jaxon is one of the most original
comics artists on the scene today, and
“Bulto” is, in many ways, his most
unusual uork. Like many other Death
Rattle stories ‘ ‘Bulto” takes the
inhuman, intergalactic, pulp horrors
of Lovecraft and sets them up against
simple human cruelty, bigotry, and
callousness. Human evil wins, every
time. As I said, “Bulto” will run only
one more issue in Death Rattle. If
Kitchen Sink doesn’t give us a graphic
novel it will be a crime.

The Comics Journal #110, page 72:

When you encounter something like
Rand Holmes’s IO•page “Killer Planet” in
the first issue or Steve Stiles 7•page “Mind
Siege!” in the third, it’s clear these artists
are paying hommage to certain traditions of
science fiction-horror Without tinkering
with the traditions. In the Holmes story, for
example, there are lots Of BEMS and a large
share of Wally Wood hardware and space
helmets; there is even the hallucinatory
vision of a prodigally endowed female, trig•
gered in the central character’s imagination
by a hostile ‘ ‘dreamweaver.” (At least the
character has the good sense to recognize
what he’s seeing and back away from the
apparition: it’s as if he’d read all the science
fiction stories in which characters don’t.)
This story, as well as Stiles’s “Mind Siege!,”
are satisfying examples of a writer-artist
working within an easily recognizable tradi-
tion While avoiding the hoariest cliches and
more ossified conventions of the by-now
sanctified standard-bearers in the field. The
reader thus garnet•s the satisfication of a
competently managed use Of the genre and
draws reassurance from the visual expertise.
Death Rattle has its ambitions, though.
Charles Burns’ Is-page “Ill Bred” (sardon-
ically subtitled Horror Romance’) is a
grotesque and haunting slice of horror that
is positively Strindbergian in its disturbing
overtones. Burns’s creepy image-making has
found its way into a number of publications.
(His most impressive showcase was in Raw).
While there’k an eccentricity about his style
that is rather distancing, he’s probably as
adept at establishing an atmosphere of
floating anxiety and soliciting a response of
genuine dread as any other current artist
that comes to mind.
Another major piece, Jaxon’s
Bosom” in the second issue, is an unex-
pected use Of historical sources—a group Of
shipwrecked Spaniards are systematically
terrorized and murdered by hostile Texas
Indians during the 16th century—as the
basis for horror. Jaxon’s visual approach to
comix in books is extremely sophisticated,
but there’s a kind Of emotional distancing
effect in much of his work. He doesn’t create
characters through whom the reader might
participate sympathetically in the telling of
the story. Jaxon doesn’t seem inclined to
individualize or develop his characters as
human beings; in a book like Los Tejanos,
you begin to suspect he pulls back from
exploring character in any depth because he
feels it would falsify the historical authen•
ticity of the stories he’s telling. (In Los
Tejanos, the characters Often seem stiff and
archly posed, like images from Old photo-
graphs.)

Russell Freund writes in The Comics Journal #107, page 48:

Death Rattle is the name of Kitchen Sink
Press’ new book of horror and full-blooded
adventure, and while the
first two issues range widely
in tone—the unifying theme
for this book’s tales might be
“no two alike-each con-
tains some first-rate work.
Could you ever mistake
Charles Burns for anyone
else? What a bleak, weirdly
compelling stylist he is. He
contributes “Ill Bred” to
issue a horror story that
expands on some images
that have appeared in his
non-narrative pieces, partic-
ularly ‘… And Pressed my
Hand Against his Face..
in RAW 3. In that pageful of
panels from a cool night-
mare, we saw a man and a
woman, bland and serene,
face a bed in which lay a
monstrous insect. That same
insect lives within the pro-
tagonist’s bed in “Ill Bred.”
I don’t want to give the
premise away, because much
of the story’s fascination is
in its horrid, almost vomitous premise, but
it’s a story of sexual dread that intertwines
human sex with the copulating of insects
(bug lust figured in the RAW piece, too).
Burns is onto something crawly. He is an
artist in the grip of grim fascinations, and
he has the ability to transmit those fascina-
tions to the reader.
At first his drawing looks as bland and
affectless as the art in a hack romance book.
But there is great dread at the edges. Take
the panel where the caption reads, didn’t
go Out on dates very often, and when I did,
they invariably turned into a nightmare.”
At first the illustration seems to contradict
the caption, as we see the protagonist kiss
a pretty blonde. Where’s the nightmare in
that? But wait, look at their eyes. They’re
open. Eyes like slits, staring at each other
as they’ kiss with, what, apprehension?
Loathing? Zonked-out boredom? Whatever
it is, there’s something lurking in those
nothing little eyes that takes the kiss into
the realm of nightmare.

[…]

Something by Will Eisner, evidently done
a decade ago, is printed in Death Rattle
Called ‘A QUagmire of Occult Stories,” it’s
not really a comic story, but a short text
piece with lots of illustrations. It’s very
minor Eisner, there isn’t much suspense, or
even interest, in these three musty ghost
stories, and telling the stories in text
supplemented by pictures robs us of the
pleasure of seeing Mr. Eisner do what he
does so brilliantly, that is to tell stories with
pictures, supplemented by words. Still,
Eisner is Eisner, and he favors us with no
fewer than seven drawings of the Spirit, who
narrates.
Rand Holmes is in both issues. “Killer
Planet” in issue ‘l lands some spacemen on
a planet teeming with exotic menaces, and
Holmes gives us one B.E.M. after another.
Holmes doesn’t quite have the control
needed to duplicate
the chilled-out poise of
Wally Wood, whom
he so clearly adores,
but he’s close enough
for the purposes of
this somewhat silly
material, and gives it a
good ride.

Amazing Heroes #120, page 64:

Okay, one last addition to the Best
of ’86 list before I drop the subject
(Oh, the anal-retentive’s lot is not a
happy one). This is one i kept vacil-
lating on, because it’s been so incon-
sistent, but overall this is a comic
book that’s made a good and distinc-
tive contribution to the field.
The best thing about Death Rattle
is “Bulto the Cosmic Slug,” an in-
termittent serial of mystical horror
by Jack Jackson (Jaxon), one of the
most powerful and consistent talents
to emerge from the old underground
comix. Telling the story of an alien
monster slug that appears as a god
to the Apaches during the Spanish
conquest of Texas, it combines
Lovecraftian chills with the Indian
lore and carefully detailed Texas
history that Jackson has made his
special provinces. It’s a potent com-
bination of elements, beautifully
crafted and told the only guy who
could pull such a mixture off, and
I am waiting eagerly for its
continuation.
Unfortunately, the rest of Death
Rattle hasn’t been nearly as solid,
and the issues without “Bulto” often
have trouble standing on their own.
Even when it’s weaker, hmvever, this
remains a distinct and creative com-
ic book. The greatest fun it offers
is its echo of the old E.C. Horror
comics. But this isn’t a slick pastiche
of craftsmanly E.C. stories, like
Twisted Tales and others. This stuff
is rooted in the underground, often
produced by writers and artists
whose vvork was shaped in the com-
ix of the late ’60s and early ’70s.
E.C. had an enormous influence on
the undergrounders, both through its
subtly antisocial horror comics and
the brazen irreverence of Harvey
Kurtzman’s Mad; its prematrue
demise at the hands of whitelipped
and trembling do-gooders seems to
have left many of those rebel car-
toonists with an angry desire to
revive those “nasty things” that has
not abated even after more than 30
years.

This is the seventy-fourth post in the Entire Kitchen Sink blog series.

A Contract with God (1985) by Will Eisner

This is a historically significant book, of course. After Kitchen Sink reprinted this in 1985, it hit the zeitgeist in a quite different way than when it was originally published in 1978. Soon afterwards, it was translated to basically all other languages, and was part of the wave of post-Maus-comics for adults looking for more stuff to read after the first Maus volume.

I bought this when it was published, and I was sixteen at the time. I don’t quite remember what I thought about the book — my copy here doesn’t seem to be well-thumbed, so perhaps I only read it once or twice?

I do remember A Contract With God being part of the conversation around comics, positioned as a kind of predecessor to Maus, showing that Maus wasn’t a singular freak of a book, but that it was, generally, possible to do intelligent comics. However, I don’t think the passing years have been kind to its legacy. First of all, Eisner would go around saying that it’s the first graphic novel, when there’d been several long (and serious) works in comics before the book, and besides, pendants would always point out that it’s a collection of short stories.

But the major reason is probably that the type of melodrama that Eisner dealt with was already three decades out of date by the time people became aware of the book.

We start with an introduction by Eisner where he pleads with the reader a bit.

Then we get another introduction by super-hero comics writer Denny O’Neil telling us how great the book is, and how different (because… it’s not about super-heroes…).

And then another introduction by Eisner!

C’mon.

Finally onto the first story of the book — about a guy making a contract with god, and the pathos is at 11 from the get go.

Eisner was a canny business guy, so it’s difficult not to imagine him calculating what themes to put into his book. “Hm, a book for adults… gotta have some adulting themes… how about… one story about god and stuff. But with an O. Henry twist! Yeah! That’d do it! ☑️” That’s really unkind on my part, but probably accurate?

Yeah, I think I pretty much was rolling my eyes constantly while reading this as a snotty teenager, and I’m even more snotty now. (Should I see a nose doctor, do you think?)

The artwork’s nice, and printing it using sepia instead of black ink was probably a good idea. Was it originally this way in the first edition? (Which Kitchen wanted to publish back in 78, but Eisner refused, taking it to a Real Book Publisher (who, if I’m reading things correctly, bilked him out of money and didn’t promote the book at all).)

Then we get a really, really 40s kind of story, but with sex. ☑️

It’s got an O. Henry ending.

Then a story about a paedophile janitor and a little girl that gets him killed (she’s bad to the bone). I’m not sure that counts as O. Henry? But ☑️.

The last story is the one that doesn’t seem rote: This seems like it’s going to be about two gold diggers that end up with each other instead of their targets (O. Henry A Hoy), but then that doesn’t happen. Instead one of the diggers rapes the other, and they both end up with their rich targets. Double whammy O. Henry!

But there’s also an unusual amount of sex and violence here that goes unresolved — no twist ending; just trauma and sadness. And that bit is the only bit that feels true and modern, while the rest is a 70s take on 40s melodramatic plots.

Is this a good book? It’s an interesting artefact, but I can see why I haven’t re-read it in three decades.

Eisner is interviewed in The Comics Journal #267, page 133:

KAPLAN: NOW, What do you rhink is
specifically allowed something like Maus to be
published in the ’80s, Where you
have something that was as overtly Jewish pub –
lishea’ in previous decades
EISNER: well, was published as a book
actually after Contract With God. I couldn’t
find a publisher then. According to what Art
Spiegelman told me, he began Maus early
on When he was an underground cartoonist,
and he did a thing called Breakdowns, it had
to do with his mother’s suicide and so forth,
and it’s just a thing that kept with him. He
had a bunch of those stories around. I’m
telling you What Spiegelman has told me. so
I have no other verification other than that.
He said that the publisher that ultimately
published Maus saw the collection Of stories
he had on that subject, and said, “You know,
this might make a book, I would like to
publish it!” So he continued it —a matter
of fact, he came to see me during the last
couple years It took him four years to put
the book together. He did a massive amount
Of research and interviewing. He came down
here in Florida to interview an aunt Who was
here in Florida, he
stayed here overnight
and we talked about
it. so the atmosphere
was growing, What
was happening was
that an adult audi-
ence was beginning
to appear. The same
reasoning that I had
in doing Contract With
God. The exception is
that he selected a sub-
ject that had greater
resonance than my
Story.
KAPLAN: Do you really
think so?
EISNER: Oh, yeah!
The discussion Of
the Holocaust the
Holocaust is a more
immediate and very
powerful subject! I
was talking about
something far more
intellectual, such as
man’s relationship
with God, a totally
different kind Of thing. The subject itself,
didn’t have the weight of a story about the
Holocaust. Aside from the fact that Maus
was a brilliant piece Of work.
KAPLAN: What specifically prompted you to do
Contract With God, do rhat story?
EISNER: Well, I was looking for stories that
were purely adult, that was not “cowboy
and Indian,” that it was something an adult
audience would be interested in. It was an
adult subject, if you will. I guess I put it
poorly, but it’s essentially an adult subject,
and I decided liked the Story that we are
all universally interested in. From our child-
hood, I realized that we have been told that
ifwe’re good, God will reward us. so, we
have a contract With God. And regardless Of
what religion you’re in, the same contract ex-
ists. If you’re a Christian, you’re told that if
you don’t sin, you’ll ultimately go to heaven.
That’ll be your reward. The Muslims believe
the same kind Of thing, Jews believe the
same kind of thing. They all believe that
we will sit on the right hand side of God. I
thought this would be a subject to explore,
so I did.

Dale Luciano writes in The Comics Journal #105, page 48:

When Eisner created A Contract With
God during the late 1970s, he did so out Of
personal need. He had in mind no particu-
lar publisher, there was no apparent market
for such a work, and how in the hell do you
pitch a melancholy book which uses words
and pictures to tell a series Of stories about
life in a Bronx tenement during the 1930s
to a publisher anyway?
Eisner went ahead wifh the book, regard-
less of the dim commercial possibilities.
Why?
Because he’d reached point in his life,
after all the years of churning out educa-
tional material for various clients (including
the Department of Defense), at which he
wanted to do something for himself.
Because he was an artist Who passionate-
ly wanted to make special use of his
medium, a form whose potential and POS-
sibility, he felt, had never been fully
explored.
Because he was a human being who
wanted to share With his audience a kalei-
doscope of recollection and reminiscences
from his youth.
And so he created A Contract With God,
in Which the portraits Of people and life we
see in and around the shabby, overcrowd-
ed Bronx tenement at 55 Dropsie Avenue
tell us something about what it felt like to
live in that particular time and place.
I had intentionally not re-read A Contract
With God since it originally appeared
because I’d been so moved by it. A work
of art which gives one considerable pleasure
at a certain point in life can appear “stale,
flat, and unprofitable” after the passage Of
a few intervening years. Unless stunted, one
gains something in knowledge, perspective,
taste, and (maybe) wisdom with age, and a
work which appeared audacious and
insightful on first encounter can, on later
re-examination, seem a juvenile embarrass-
ment. Often a work of originality and dar-
ing is so Widely imitated and so quickly ab-
sorbed into tradition that its impact when
first unveiled endures as nothing more than
a historical memory. (The work itself has
not changed; our individual and collective
attitudes toward it have.) In other cases,
especially in a field as hostile to innovation
and rethinking as the comic-book industry,
prevailing notions of what constitutes ori-
ginality and imagination are particularly
suspect.
All of which is also a roundabout way Of
saying that, on rereading, Eisner’s A Con•
tract With God remains for me a work Of
considerable merit, an artist’s testament that
he passed this way, saw these things, and
wished to share them with others. NO super-
heroes, no gimmicks, no hype, no visual
shenanigans, no garbage—just the stuff Of
raw experience, recollected with the perspec-
tive Of age, transfigured and elevated into
the realm Of contemplation and feeling by
an artist of’ compassion and sensi-
tivity.
A work of art, no ifs, ands, or buts about
don’t to say very much about the
book itself. One Of its chief charms is its
simplicity, and [ don’t want to spoil the
pleasure Of some Journal reader
who hasn’t yet encountered this book may
experience.
But I’ll say this: A Contract With God is
a remarkably unsentimental recollection Of
life in that shabby, Overcrowded tenement.
Those were difficult, soul-breaking years for
millions Of people, and Eisner recreates cer-
tain incidents—like the,suicide Of a building
superintendent, or the encounter between
a penniless street singer , and an aging
woman—that convey the bitter, frustrated
desperation of people whoknow intuitive-
ly their shabby, unhappy lives aren’t ever
going to get any better.
The Story which gives the book its title
concerns the disappointment and despair
of Frimme Hersh, a man who makes a “con-
tract With God” early in life. In return for
his many good deeds, God Will reward him
with justice. A decent man who has devoted
his life to good deeds, he is transformed by
the death Of his adopted daughter into a
withdrawn, embittered, solitary figure for
whom life offers no consolation. Late in his
life, he seeks a new “contract with
beginning—but it is too late.. .too
late…’
Hersh isn’t atragiC figure. He have
the kind of stature that makes for a tragic
figure. He’s a lost, pathetic, remote human
being, but Eisner somehow transforms his
story into a fable that evokes a sense of the
cruel, crushing, unforgiving fate that some.
times awaits us. We grieve for Frimme Hersh
because.. .life gets the best of him. And it
might do the same damn thing to us.
A Contract With God might have been just
a downer if it weren’t for the glimmerings
of hope and optimism that take on a special
poignance in view Of the more pathetic
passages. Most emphatically in “Cookalein,”
the hopefulness of youth—the yearning that
one’s lot in life be better and happier than
that Of loveless parents going grimly through
the motions of living—is embodied in the
figure of shy, Willie. ‘ ‘Willie” is
unmistakably Eisner’s self-portrait, and it’s
a tribute to his skill and discretion as a
storytellg_that Willie’s presence is anything
buf a maudlin or embarrassing presence.
Enough.
Eisner is one of the medium’s great story
tellers, and in A Contract With God, he
draws on life as his subject matter. His con-
siderable technique is placed in absolute ser-
vice of the story he’s telling, and there’s
never a moment when you feel he’s reaching
for an effect or hyping the material. In terms
Of the relationship between form and cone
tent, it’s a perfectly and exquisitely balanced
work.

Bill Sherman writes in The Comics Journal #267, page 94:

RETURN TO DROPSIE AVENUE
BY BILL SHERMAN
Reading the obituary of Will Eisner in
Time magazine, I caught a reference
to his status as an early grandmaster of the
graphic-novel format. In it, Eisner’s 1978
story collection, A Contract with God,
described as a novel about a Depression-era
slumlord. Studying that sentence, I imme-
diately felt the irritation most admirers Of
an artist’s work feel when the news media
gets the details wrong. Contract (which is
subtitled: And Other Tenement Stories) is
actually a collection of four stories, only the
first of which concerns a slumlord. Damn
it, I thought, is a graphic artist like Eisner
considered so trivial that they can’t even
fact-check his one-paragraph Obit?
That gaffe inspired me to pull the
book off the shelf, though, so I won’t grouse
too strongly. For all its stature as an early
graphic novel (we’ll pass over the non-issue
of whether Eisner “invented” the graphic
novel, since the artist himself references
Lynd Ward’s earlier woodcut graphic Sto-
ries in his intro), Contract had long seemed
rather musty to me, one of those works more
known for its quaint historical significance
than its capacity to entertain. Revisiting it,
I thought, would be like viewing a silent
melodrama: not bad for its place in the
development Of the medium but ultimately
out-of-step with our current “higher” stan-
dards of graphic storytelling.
That somewhat condescending at-
titude was happily knocked aside by my
rereading the actual book: a testimony to the
power of strong fiction to pull us out of our
preconceptions. Set in the Bronx during the
Great Depression, Contract tells a quartet Of
short stories about centering on the tenants
of 55 Dropsie Avenue, a setting Eisner would
return to with varying degrees of success in
books like A Life Force and The Neighbor-
hood. The protagonists of these stories are a
hardscrabble lot, many of them first genera-
tion immigrants stuck in a city that they
hoped would give them more. Eisner views
them With the unsparing unsentimentality

[…]

In a recent eulogizing appreciation
of Eisner by Vertigo editor Karen Berger,
a comparison was made between the
writer-artist’s later books and Isaac Bashevis
Singer’s city-based works. But an equally apt
comparison can be made to O. Henry’s tales
of (the phrase has a totally different con-
notation than it did When William Sydney
Porter first used it, but never mind) “Bagh-
dad on the Subway.” The book’s two middle
stories come closest to approaching both O.
Henry’s style and the visual look of the old
Spirit stories — “The Super” even opens
with a splash page ironically echoing Eisner’s
classic Sunday series, while “The Street
Singer” caps its comeuppance ofa thorough-
ly unpleasant drunk and wife batterer with
a nicely set-up twist that O. Henry would
have surely recognized.
Eisner’s debt to a writer many serious
critics dismiss these days as contrived and
sentimental doesn’t help those of us attempt-
ing to stake a case for his larger artistry.
But, again, the artist’s sure visualizations of
his people are what really take A Contract
with God to a higher level: the moment
when aging would-be diva Marta Maria in
“The Street Singer” eagerly primps for street
singer Eddie is both comic and pathetic;
the scene where Germanic building super
Scuggs silently retreats to his basement to
both feed his dog and then masturbate is
still startling coming from Eisner; as is the
moment in “Cookalein” when wife Fan-
nie grimly rebuffs her cheating husband by
showing off her “ugly body.” Away from the
pulp world of Denny Colt, Eisner’s char-
acters proved to be deeper, sadder and ulti-
mately more interesting. It’s this simple step
forward in comic storytelling that makes
Contract and — Eisner’s other early graphic
novels — both groundbreaking and contem-
porarily vital. •

It’s #57 on the Top 100 Best Comics in The Comics Journal #210, page 59:

Will Eisner’s breakout book A Con-
tract With God and Other Tenement
Stories has a contentious claim to be
considered the first graphic novel.
This makes it important as a histori-
Cal curiosity, but hardly accounts
for its inclusion in this list. Much
more importantly, it marks a master
craftsman’s first attempt to turn the
comics medium from genre-based
storytelling to straight, literate fic—
tion. As great as all those old Spirit
stories are, Contrad is Eisner show-
ing us comics can be art and
self-expression as well as entertain-
ment.

[…]

Striking a precarious balance of
urbanity and malevolence, Addams
sympathy for a grouchy, porn-ad-
dicted building manager who lusts
after a young tenant. Eisner is not
interested in heroes and villains,
and the characteristics which would
make the man repugnant in most
stories are coupled with vulner-
ability and humanity. In the final
story, “Cookalein, Eisner
casts his sympathetic eye
for human foibles on a
group of urban residents
summering in the country
who grope about in
clumsy searches for love,
sex and social advance-
ment.
The specificity Of set—
ting lends authenticity to
the universality Of
Eisner’s concerns, which
include love, loss, alien-
ation, hope and despair.
Eisner’s formal creativity
and mastery of atmo-
sphere invest these tales
with emotional power.
The novelty of the format
aside, A Contract With God
is a moving and compelling
book, and the masterpiece
ofone ofthe medium’s first
true artists.

Huh! The one bit I found convincing in the book — the Willie bits — was autobiographical? Huh!

This is a very good summary of the history of the book:

Revisionist history may credit Eisner as a pioneer in the graphic novel field, and Eisner’s shadow still looms so large over the entire medium of comic books that it seems impossible that his work in 1978 wouldn’t have been a gauntlet thrown down to the industry. But it wasn’t Eisner’s A Contract With God that broke through the bookstore barrier. It was just a weird, largely ignored picture book when it was released; one that might have been appreciated by a certain portion of the readership, like the comic book aficionados who had been catching up with black-and-white Spirit reprints and were curious to see what Eisner was up to at the age of 61.

[…]

I don’t know that A Contract with God is hailed as a masterpiece anymore. A landmark, maybe. Masterpiece? Not so much.

This is the seventy-third post in the Entire Kitchen Sink blog series.

Harold Hedd in “Hitler’s Cocaine” (1984) #1-2 by Rand Holmes

This is another book I bought at the time, so I guess I was fifteen? I remember enjoying it quite a bit, and a major part of that was because of the artwork which is a mixture of Wally Wood (in rendering) and perhaps Gilbert Sheldon’s figures and storytelling style? That is, it’s very dense, and gags keep on rolling in.

The rendering is simpler than his 70s style, though.

This starts off pretty oddly for a two issue series: Half the first issue is basically one page gags, slowly setting up the main plot and giving us some insight into the characters.

Indie publishers hadn’t quite figured out how to do “classier” comics — I mean, dropping pages of ads into the middle of indie comics would be pretty unheard of a couple years later.

I’m slightly intrigued by those ads — not only can you buy Bill Elder originals, but it sounds like Cat Yronwode was finally done cataloguing the Eisner archives, so they’re selling off duplicates and stuff.

Heh heh. That’s a gag I remember clearly.

Oh yeah, the plot — Harold Hedd and his two friends go off to try to find a shipment of cocaine meant for Hitler, and they have both the cops (seen above) and some mobsters on their tails. It’s not a very complicated plot, but Holmes carries it off in a very amiable way. It doesn’t feel rushed or padded — it’s got a really nice flow to it. And lots of gags along the way.

So by this time, Kitchen was doing mail order for basically all the underground companies? In the 70s, Kitchen was mostly selling Kitchen Sink stuff only, but now it’s basically all the major books (most of them published by Last Gasp and Rip Off).

Having got all the preliminaries out of the way, the second issue is all about swimming around trying to find the treasure. So fewer gags and more action.

Holmes also invents the most practical scuba gear ever.

And everything ends in an ironical way — Hedd’s plans don’t come to fruition, but by an amazing twist, everything ends up happily for everybody. Except the cop, who has a more Underground ending.

Oh yeah, there isn’t that much nudity in this book, and I think that’s the only sex scene? (For some values of “sex scene”. (Editor: Remember to insert some sentences with the word “problematic” inserted here and there; don’t have the time right now.)

Steve Monaco writes in The Comics Journal #103, page 37:

In the another new book.featuring
another old underground favorite—Harold
Hedd in “Hitler’s
and the remembrance of better things past,
makes one want tolike it. more than one
ultimately doesl The new two-issue mini-
series published by Kitchen sink Press is the
first Hedd Story by creator Rand Holmes
in 10 years, and a decade is such a long time
for expectations to simmer that anything
would probably seem a bit Of a let-down,
expecially considering Holmes’s impressive
work before. But the new story, as good as
it is in places, will probably disappöint most
Hedd-heads and, especially, admirers Of his
creator’s artwork.
part Of the problem with this new book
is, that as I said above, Holmes has given
himself such an impressive past body of
•work (small though it may be) that it Would
be hard for anyone to surpass it. Anyone
who ahs ever read the second original
Harold Hedd book can vouch that, when
the man is in peak fcrm, thetQ• are few con-
temporary artists better at creating a
realistic adventure-strip than Rand Holmes,
and not many more comics writers who can
be so funny. The second issue Of Harold
Hedd and aits book-length tale Of dope-
smuggling is still a joy, with the kind of
break-neck action and gritty, snappy
dialogue that puts most action films to
shame. Best Of all was the beautiful artwork;
While only a total comics novice would be
unable to see at a glance the heavy’ debt
Holmes’s art Owed that Of Wally Wood,
the panels looked so gorgeous and the
action flowed so well that whatever degree
of derivativeness there might be in spots
was, and is, easily forgiven.
Holmes’s meticulous and richly embell-
ished artwork is seen ‘at little more than
half-strength in the new Hedd adventure
“Hitler’s Cocaine,” and while it is the one
single aspect of the Older books that is the
most sorely missed, the whole work has a
peculiar not-quite-right look that is dis-
concerting. Granted,there’s nothing wrong
with the story’s premise: in fact, the xon.
cept that a giant cache Of primo cocaine in-
tended to bolster the Fuhrer’s last days is
waiting to be retrieved from the ocean’s
bottom by Harold and cousin Elmo is even
a better one than that of the earlier classic.
Unfortunately, the story takes much too
long to really get going, and for the first
two-thirds of the first book, there is a lot
of pointless meandering and diffusion of the
narrative that is unlike Holmes at his best.
Whereas in the earlier Hedd epic Holmes
structured the Stow With the care and preci-
Sion of a novelist, here he throws in bits
and Shtick primarily, it seems, just to pad
out the book. He also introduces some truly
bad characters in the Story that further slow
down the action, including a mediocre and
none-too-timely parody of Kojak. Things
pick up in the second issue, and the
climax(es) are good and surprising, but they
need a better, more solid build-up than
what Holmes has delivered.
The Kojak take-off (complete with a
second-banana named Crocker) raises the
question, of just how long this piece had
been on Holmes’s drawing board before he
finally finished it. The book’s first few
chapters have a disjointed, choppy rhythm
to them that gives the impression that the
work was done in pieces at the beginning,
and those pieces were never satisfactorily
sewn together. In addition to the Kojak
character, there is’ also a three-page parody
Of “Shogun,” of all things, that does
nothing except bring the story to a
screeching halt. The worst thing about the
patchy plotting is that in trying to incor-
porate all the• secondary storylines and
characters, Holmes slights his most valuable
asset—his main character. Even though the
book is named for him, Harold has really
very little to do with most of the action in
the book, and his great who-gives-a-shit per-
sonality hardly comes through at all.

I think that’s a fair critique.

Bill Sherman writes in The Comics Journal #98, page 96:

Since the early ’70s Holmes the artist has
built his reputation around his Woodlike
renderings, most tellingly in Bruce Jones’s
recent EC modernizations, which has
given him an audience outside the tradi-
tional underground. “Cocaine” has been
packaged, in part, with the hope that at
least part of that non-underground reader-
ship will follow the artist into his new
Kitchen title, and Holmes has made some
visual concessions to that readership (no
dripping depictions Of cunnilingus here,
folks, like we saw in Harold’s last appear-
ance) without abandoning the basics of his
character’s universe. Holmes’s Hedd is still
a drop-out • with no specifically identified
means of economic support; cousin Elmo,
his biker roommate, still meanders
through a series Of low-paying jobs, living
primarily, one suspects, off the latest in a
series of unbelievably voluptuous girl-
friends. Like Sheltön’s Freak -Bros.,
Holmes’s characters have made few conces-
sions to the ’80s, and nobody really expects
them to, any more.than they expect Dag-
wood Bumstead to get a new haircut.
What’s occasionally disconcerting about
the world in “Cocaine” is its umiter-artist’s
relative unhipness, most specifically in
regards to his parodying use of media
figures. “Cocaine” contains two full.
blown parodies (Of James Clavell’s Shogun
and Telly Savalas’s Kojak) that give one the
impression of a •work begun three years
earlier—as a potential series for one of the
dope mags, perhaps—and only recently
finished. These dated references play
awkwardly against Holmes’s introductory
assertion that his present adventure is tak-
‘ ing place in 1983. Perhaps a little concerted
couch potatoing is in order, Rand.

[…]

At this point, Holmes’s tale has the
potential to rival Harold Hedd ‘2’s straight
action sequences, if the artist can keep a
hold on his more digressive tendencies.
Holmes’s graphics, as befits an artist’ who
has been mining a style for the better part
of a decade, is slick, assured, and attractive.
Ocasionally his figures move like they’ve
got a steel rod up their back (especially
Elmo’s girlfriend, Irma, who looks twice as
unnatural with her overblown physique),
but after the first few pages they’ve created
their own physical integrity: I could have
done without Holmes’s placement of a
series of tiny parrot strips at the bottom of
several pages of his first chapter: they’re too
openly reminiscent of “Fat Freddie’s Cat”
and disruptive to continuity besides. But
those who have come to Holmes via his
Jones-scripted artwork probably won’t be
disappointed by hiw work here.
For all my reservations about the work
and its package, I genuinely enjoyed the
first part of Holmes’s re-entry into
underground work, and am looking for-
ward to its conclusion. I’ve even been fan-
tasizing about some color mini-series with
other former underground heroes: new
Mr. Natural adventure perhaps, or some-
thing with Jumpin’ Jack Flesh. Noy there’s
a hero for the ’80s!

R Fiore writes in The Comics Journal #97, page 26:

I always admired the way Rand Holmes
turned his back on his still-marketable set
of characters when they became socially
Obsolete. If he went for a big payday after
10 years then I certainly wouldn’t begrudge
it to him. You didn’t get the impression
that he was doing it out of love in the first
book of the new series. Where Gilbert
Shelton (him again) uses the Freak
Brothers as a symbol of his estrangement
from current bohemia, Holmes just
dropped his old characters into the pre-
sent, styles and values unchanged, as if
they’d been trapped in an ice cube like
Captain America. It even got its villain
from a long-dead TV show. Fortunately
the second part gets down to pure comic
adventure, and a good adventure comic is
never dated. Hitler’s Cocaine is a worthy
successor to Harold Hedd (old reckon-
ing) which was the best adventure comic
ever to come out of the underground. If
Holmes wants to go into business, maybe a
new adventure title would be the way to
go.

This is the seventy-second post in the Entire Kitchen Sink blog series.