Mon Nov 30, 2009 — by Andrew Wheeler

Review: Three Will Eisner Reprints - 'A Family Matter', 'Minor Miracles', and 'Life on Another Planet'

Two soap operas and a stab at science fiction from the man who invented the graphic novel

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-20^th 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 20^th 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.

Life on Another Planet
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.

Jump to comments (1)