A Life Force

 

By Will Eisner
Published most recently by WW Norton & Co ISBN: 0-3933-2803-1
DC Comics edition ISBN: 1-5638-9789-X

Eisner’s elegiac fascination with the ghetto culminated in this series of interlocking life stories set during the Great Depression. The tenement at 55 Dropsie Avenue, stage for so many of his later dramas, was the cohering force for a disparate crowd of survivors to come together. The lives of an aging carpenter and his family, a bankrupted gentile stockbroker, and an Italian illegal immigrant are welded together by the forces of poverty, political unrest and the rise of organised crime. This vast yet concentrated human melting pot provided Eisner with a microscope to examine the strengths of the human spirit during a time that shook and crushed many American Dreamers.

Eisner skilfully sets the grand passions of Love, Greed, Laughter, Ambition and Malice against his preferred backdrop of Jewish folk culture. His unquestioned mastery of the graphic form subtly understates and with the narrative enhanced by the canny selection and utilisation of headlines and quotes from newspapers of the period, he contrives to embed the reader in the grim, ferocious yet oh-so-ordinary world of 1930s New York.

A Life Force once again confirms his single-minded conviction of the overwhelming power of the Human Spirit to overcome adversity and his belief that the medium of comics was an ideal one to handle the big questions in life. This is one of those works that no real comics fan can afford to ignore. Do so at your own cost.

© 1983, 1984, 1985, 1988, 2004. Will Eisner.