Will Eisner's "The Contract with God" Trilogy

Does God listen? Keep promises? What if instead of having a table before your enemies you're kept out of the banquet? Is it ask and ye shall be answered, or ask and strain your ears until something- anything- sounds like a response? What makes us keep on living beyond our disillusions? Is it the same force that inspires cockroaches to struggle for life? Surely God cares for cockroaches as much- or as little- as He cares for us? Who owns land? Who owns a neighborhood? What makes for a neighbor? Why do the Dutch hate the English who hate the Irish who hate the Italians who hate the Germans who hate the Jews who hate the Blacks who hate the Puerto-Ricans? Do we matter?



You can guess why Will Eisner's "The Contract with God" trilogy goes beyond questions of whether Spiderman would win against the Hulk; why the comics industry major award is called the Eisner; and why the first tome, published in 1978, is considered the originator of today's adult-minded "graphic novels" (even though it's more of a "graphic short-story-collection.")
But as I see it here, Eisner's contributions to the idea of "graphic novel" is still not fully explored by today's artists. (Correctly, a blurb by the late John Updike says that not only was Eisner ahead of his time- the times haven't caught up with him yet.) Here he's trying to work towards a graphic novel that is MORE than just a a traditionally panelled comic book with "adult" subject matter. He envisions a work where the panels are divisional tools to be used when appropriate, not cages. What he was aiming at here, if not always achieving, was a totally fluid experiential merging of words and drawings. We may yet in the future be perplexed by how most of today's novels are consigned to a single, same-sized font- BORING!- or how the author didn't scribble auxiliary drawings on the side of the page whenever he or she felt like it. After all, didn't books START as a far more syncretic combination of graphics and letters than they are now?