Review: Three Will Eisner Reprints – ‘A Family Matter’, ‘Minor Miracles’, and ‘Life on Another Planet’
Will Eisner has a towering place in the modern comics field
– the premier awards in the field are named after him, and for good reason –
due both to his pioneering Spirit
newspaper insert from the ‘40s and ‘50s and to the graphic novels he started
creating in the late ‘70s, after a long hiatus from the field. And that puts
him in an enviable position, in that huge swaths of his work is in print much
of the time. But perhaps that isn’t
all that enviable, since it means that some, well, lesser work gets reprinted as well.
The three books below were brought back into print this year
by W.W. Norton as part of their large and growing Will Eisner Library; they’re
packaged handsomely and would fit well on the shelf along with other books in
that series. But these three titles also show some of Eisner’s most glaring
faults and problems, particularly the biggest issue: his unbreakable addiction
to the most obvious strains of melodrama.
A Family Matter
By Will Eisner
W.W. Norton, July 2009, $15.95
Norton’s cover for [[[A Family Matter]]] – originally published in 1998 by Kitchen Sink –
telegraphs the melodrama here, as a dumpy Eisner middle-aged woman bawls, her
hands clenched in front of her dramatically underlit face. (The clichéd pose is
to the negative, but, on the other hand, Eisner is one of the few major comics
artists willing and able to draw realistic, unattractive people regularly and
put them at the center of his stories. And since the majority of humanity is unattractive, it’s important to have artists who show
them as they are.)
The story is set in familiar Eisner territory: a rich patriarch
has been ailing for years, and is essentially unable to communicate now. But it’s
his ninetieth birthday, so the entire squabbling clan – and no one squabbles
like Eisner characters – must gather for the occasion and maneuver for position
in the old man’s good graces. There’s the ne’er-do-well son, the daughter who
married a successful man, another daughter whose husband isn’t quite as
successful, the downtrodden lawyer son (lawyers are always harried and
overworked in Eisner; always small storefront shysters rather than high-powered
white-shoe types), the artistic younger daughter, and a sprinkling of kids from
the next generation. Despite one cell phone, the story feels like it’s set in
the usual Eisner time and milieu – vaguely mid-‘50s, relatively prosperous but
with dark clouds, with domestic servants for middle-class people, and all the
women wearing dowdy dresses and aprons all the time (and probably have
whale-boned foundation garments underneath).
Eisner’s characters also talk a lot, explaining the plot,
their motivations, and dreams to each other – it’s a bit like a musical on
paper in that way, and has to be taken in a similar spirit, as a contrivance
that makes thoughts manifest. (Eisner doesn’t use captions in this story, and
was never much for thought balloons – his people say what they feel, no matter what.) But he’s also
rehashing three generations of family history here, much of it only alluded to
or mentioned once, so there’s a density in Family Matter which is uncommon in a graphic novel outside of the
work of Gilbert Hernandez. But, again, that’s the soap-operatic aspect of Family
Matter: there’s always another
complication, another skeleton in the closet, another grievance.
Family Matter is soapy and sometimes obvious, a comics version of
the mid-20th century ethnic soap operas. (Though, thankfully, he’d
toned down his most over-the-top Borscht Belt Jewish material and the bold and
dotted E*M*P*H*A*S*I*S in
dialogue that he used so heavily earlier.) It will feel very old-fashioned and unusual
to readers used to the cool, deadpan modern independent comics scene. But
Eisner is wonderful with body language and character types, and his people
never lack for motivation, so books like this will continue to be of interest –
particularly to aspiring creators, who want to see the broad, obvious ways of
creating effects so that they can then work on making those ways more subtle
and quiet.
Minor Miracles
By Will Eisner
W.W. Norton, July 2009, $17.95
This 2000 collection of stories is even more old-fashioned,
another look by Eisner back at “the block” – an idealized or just romanticized
Jewish Bronx of his youth early in the 20th century. Despite the
title and Eisner’s overwrought introduction, the “miracles” of the title aren’t
supernatural, but either ironic turns of fate or just the activities of normal
people.
So Eisner has a nearly vaudevillian story of a loudmouth “uncle”
rescued from the gutter by a milquetoast “cousin,” complete with the uncle’s
loud protestations of the requirements of his dignity, until the uncle is rich
and the cousin is poor…and then the circle turns again at the very end. He has
a quick story about street bullies, and a long retelling of Caspar Hauser on
those Bronx streets, complete with the nameless boy’s immediate positive
affects on those around him. And last is another long, O. Henry-ish story, in which
a dumb young woman marries a man with a twisted leg, but then recovers her
voice and races away from her husband, in search of the fast times so many
young women look for in Eisner’s stories – until another calamity strikes her.
One might well argue that [[[Minor Miracles]]] is indeed minor, and that it contains rather more shtick than miracles – but that would be as cruel as the
postulated divine being who would strike a woman blind to send her back to her
husband.
By Will Eisner
W.W. Norton, July 2009, $17.95
Eisner worked in a large number of fiction genres over his
long career, but he was never thought of as a science fiction writer. And [[[Life
on Another Planet]]] – originally published in
the late ‘70s as [[[Signal from Space]]]
– explains why. It’s as over-the-top and high-strung as any of Eisner’s more
character-based stories, and is additionally handicapped by having a cartoonish
view of politics and business and only the most tenuous of grasps on the
science in its science fiction.
It’s one of the many stories that ask what would happen if
an obviously intelligent signal from an extrasolar planet reached Earth, and
places the origin of that signal on one of the planets of Barnard’s Star.
(Though Eisner never actually calls it “Barnard’s Star;” he refers to the “Star
Barnard” and a “planet Barnard” and generally takes Barnard as the name of this
planet.) According to one off-page expert, this planet is ten years away by
then-current (Apollo) technology, which is unlikely, since Barnard’s Star is 6
light-years away. (I would advise anyone more rigorous than I in their requirements
of fictional science to stay far away from Life on Another Planet; this is a book that could cause rapid apoplexy.)
Oddly, no one attempts to decode the message, or to send a
reply – even if it would take six years for the reply to arrive at Barnard’s
Star, that would be much faster than sending a probe and getting word back that
way. Instead, there’s a lot of vastly overdramatized Eisner hugger-mugger, with
corrupt politicians, deluded religious fanatics, devious caricatured African
supreme leaders, scientists both noble and base, social-climbing women,
scheming corporate heads, and lots and lots and lots of supposedly high-minded talk about “uniting the
world” behind a single reply to this message.
As if the entire human race has ever, or could ever, be
unified by anything!
Eisner makes many other ridiculous science gaffes here – the
worst one is that a scientist invents a “cellular mutation” to make living
things from Earth able to live on other planets. No, not xenoforming them to
fit some particular set of conditions – giving them a general “mutation” so
they could live on any possible planet, anywhere! (Which is completely different from Earth life, in unspecified ways that
don’t prevent the resulting organism from living on Earth just fine until the
lift-off.) After swallowing that,
the reader is unlikely to balk when this process turns its experimental subject
from a human being to a houseplant – what else would you expect?
Life on Another Planet
is by turns histrionic and bizarre, as Eisner turns his always-strong
storytelling abilities to spin a story that makes little sense and is only incidentally
believable. This is very minor Eisner indeed, and one might have wished that
Norton had left it quietly out of print; it will do no favors for his
reputation.
Andrew Wheeler has been a publishing professional for
nearly twenty years, with a long stint as a Senior Editor at the Science
Fiction Book Club and a current position at John Wiley & Sons. He’s been
reading comics for longer than he cares to mention, and maintains a personal,
mostly book-oriented blog at antickmusings.blogspot.com.
Publishers who would like their books to
be reviewed at ComicMix should contact ComicMix through the usual channels or
email Andrew Wheeler directly at acwheelep (at) optonlinep (dot) net.
I read Life On Another Planet some years ago, and felt much the same way. To any sort of science fiction fan, it's quite a poor showing. However, Will Eisner said himself that he was never really a fan of science fiction and that the sci-fi element of the story was more of a Macguffin than anything else, and he was trying more to showcase the humanistic point of view he felt lacking in comics. He also wanted to use the story was a proof-of-concept that science fiction as a genre could work in the graphic novel format, although why I could not guess as sci-fi has obviously long been a part of the comics world.