Spurgeon has a couple books, The Power of Prayer and Prayer and Spiritual Warfare, and when he talks about how the prophets used God’s own words to hold Him to His promises, I got an idea. Luciano, Dale (February 1986). Groth, Gary (ed.). "Remembrance of Things Past and Future". The Comics Journal (105): 46–49, 97. ISSN 0194-7869. Fasting for an answer to prayer sometimes results in what feels like the wrong answer. But when I fasted for three days about God’s will for my relationship with my boyfriend, I was still surprised when he broke up with me the first day after the fast. Heartbreak slaps you hard. It hurts whether or not you are expecting it. I felt mad, disappointed, and in pain. If you were to ask me who I was mad at, I am not sure I could answer you. All I knew was God had promised me a husband and a father for my four daughters. Their own father disappeared from their lives, leaving the five of us to fend for ourselves. So I got busy.

Not all books are created equal. Some we love, some we hate. Some make us laugh or cry or doze off. Some illuminate or aggravate or confuse us. A few become favorites, and of these, there are the ones we cherish, the ones that transform us, the ones that rescue us, and finally, the ones to which we accord that highest status in any personal library — the ones we read to pieces. It is summer, and the inhabitants of 55 dropsie, take their annual trip to Cookalein, i.e. the cook-for-yourself hotels in the country. They travel there to unwind, relax, and for some to socialize and find their other half. A Contract with God” was always a special book for Will Eisner and he held it close to his heart through out his life, which can be recognized from his words: Gardner's comprehensive introduction to this volume, "A Life in Pictures," introduces readers to Eisner's biography. Eisner had one of the most storied careers in comics—albeit one bisected by a long absence from the public eye—and is probably the central figure in the American tradition, at least as a shaper and theorist of the medium's formal development. Later careers as divergent as those of Scott McCloud, Art Spiegelman, and Frank Miller are unimaginable without his example. The political subtext of Groth's critique in particular is worth considering, however. Recalling Eisner's as a propagandist for various industries and for the U.S. Army, Groth finds Eisner to be a mercenary capable only of a perfunctory and ultimately commercial gesture toward "the literary" but no true literary achievement. After The Spirit, Eisner founded American Visuals, a commercial art house that went on to secure a contract with the U.S. Army to produce P.S. magazine, a monthly instructional periodical (propaganda organ) for Army personnel. Part of Eisner's contribution was to design strips that attempted, in Eisner's words, "to produce 'attitude conditioning''—a phrase that surely couldn't have existed before this century. […] Eisner continued to attempt to condition attitudes throughout the Viet Nam war; all such instruction had to cater to the (low) educational level and cultural prejudices of Army management's perception of the average GI.And considering Eisner's theoretical writings on "sequential art" as collected in the Norton, which focus from a craft perspective on commanding and controlling the reader's attention and, more grandly, on designating comics the avatar of the new post-verbal literacy, we might even paranoiacally extend Groth's critique: was the graphic novel designed as a new form of mass psychological control by the military-industrial complex, in effect if not intent, in the same way that traditional high culture—Abstract Expressionism, the Iowa Writers Workshop—wittingly and un- fought the Cold War on behalf of the intelligence services? Too paranoid, I'm sure.Elsewhere, Sam has come to the country, to ask for divorce from Fannie, so that he can be with his lover. Fannie is having none of it, having known about the affair for a while now. She cares not with whom he sleeps, but she won’t give him a divorce, and jeopardize their children’s future. The titular first story is one that is close to the author’s life. Having gone through a similar traumatic experience, the loss of his daughter had caused Eisner to question his own covenant with God. He had channeled his personal anguish from the loss, to question the sacred contract with the divine, and his personal anguish at the injustice of his innocent child who would never be able to experience the full life she deserved. In the first story titled “ A Contract with God” we witness the story of Frimme Hersh - an immigrant who fled the terrible anti-semitic pogroms of 1882 after the assassination of Alexander II of Russia as a child and who became a prominent religious and social figure in the Hassidic community in the New York City - giving up his religious faith after the death of his young adopted daughter. This is based on Eisner’s own loss of his 16-year-old daughter and reflects some of his inner feelings towards god and faith he felt during those times.

A Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories (1978) is the first Graphic Novel written by Will Eisner, who also wrote The Spirit in the 1940s. Although it popularized the concept and term "graphic novel", it is not so much a novel as a collection of short stories, each with a different cast of characters but each dealing with the inhabitants of a tenement in Dropsie Avenue. Klingenstein, Suzanne (2007). Walden, Daniel (ed.). "The Long Roots of Will Eisner's Quarrel with God". Studies in American Jewish Literature. Purdue University Press: 81–88. ISSN 0271-9274. Eisner based the story on memories of an unemployed man who made the rounds of tenements singing "popular songs or off-key operatic operas" [20] for spare change. Eisner remembered throwing the street singer coins on occasion, and considered he "was able to immortalize his story" in "The Street Singer". [20] "The Super" [ edit ] Replacement Goldfish: Alluded to in one panel near the end: Frimme Hersh, when he plans to renew his contract, dreams wildly of getting married, having a daughter, and naming her Rachele, just like his deceased adopted daughter.It existed in its own continuum, patiently waiting for the rest of its kind to quietly arrive — by the thousands as it turned out — on the shelves of North American bookstores. If I understood correctly, the moral is that Frimme should've never made demands of God and he got punished for his arrogance. But I think the conclusion he jumped to (the idea that he can make a contract with God in the first place), stems from the fact that you are always promised rewards or punishment for different behavior in the Abrahamic religions. Yes, many people of faith will argue that it's not the right interpretation of the holly scriptures. But that's the problem! Their meaning strongly depends on interpretation! Fast forward several years, the rich, callous, indifferent and miserly Hersh, finds something missing in life. No matter how much money he made, how many buildings he owned, there was a hole in his heart, which neither alcohol, nor his beautiful companion could fill. Let me give an example. In a subplot in the story "Cookalein," we have a little case of mistaken identity. Benny and Goldie, who have both gone to a summer resort explicitly to bag a wealthy mate, each think the other is loaded. After courting for a few days, they steal away into the woods in the middle of the night to cement their union, but then—surprise!—they find out they're both poor. After she cries, "Benny, if you love me, nothing else matters!," he drops his pants and growls, "It's a whole new ballgame now, baby," then lunges at her, ripping her clothes and taking her by force. So how does the story end? Goldie winds up with a doctor (whom she had previously scorned because she thought he was poor), and Benny seduces an heiress. Neither is punished. Everybody wins. The singer, Eddie is an out of work accountant, with no formal training in singing, and a drunk himself, taking care of a pregnant wife and child. He buys booze for the money he got, and barely leaves anything for the family. Once drunk, he too is none too reluctant to beat up the wife.

the world was redefined by his camera eye. More than anyone else, Eisner was able to squeeze more human interest and more dimension and take heroes and use them—as he used the Spirit—as side characters to telling another story…”

Royal, Derek Parker (Summer 2011). "Sequential Sketches of Ethnic Identity Will Eisner's A Contract with God as Graphic Cycle". College Literature. 38 (3): 150–167. doi: 10.1353/lit.2011.0035. So we see that the New Covenant is actually a contract between man and God and it promises eternal life to those who will contract with Him. A contract signed in the precious blood of Jesus. A contract that offers eternal life, in exchange for sin. A contract of reconciliation and redemption, rather than guilt and condemnation. We can meet characters who are ambitious, who are lonely, who have dreams and anxieties about future, who fight against despair & poverty in these depictions of the plain true-life brimming with sights of desires, frustrations and cynicism happening among the tenements which the author fishes out of his memory. Will Eisner blend past and present to create an artwork based on realism in which he fuses together words and illustrations to give them a similarity to the world of dreams or memories. Since these memories about the people and his views about the surroundings are from way past, they have a certain amount of dullness in his mind, which he recaptures in the illustrations through caricature like figures and a monochrome tone which mimic the world of dreams perfectly on the paper.