I am about to commit heresy:  Will Eisner could not write dialogue.  At first glance, that may not seem like much.  I am criticizing only one aspect of Eisner’s work, but as a writer myself, I will not let this slide.  But before I go any further, let me say that I adore the man, and I owe him a great deal.

            If there were to be a god or patron saint of comic books and graphic novels, Eisner would be it.  He was one of the first creators to see the potential of comics as a medium, not a genre, and he pursued it, creating the first original graphic novel, A Contract With God.  He did not do superheroes like everyone else apart from The Spirit (which is more pulp than super).  His stories were down-to-earth tales, mostly set in the 1930s New York City of his youth.  His characters had a uniqueness to them, each line having significance even when it wasn’t there.  Eisner’s expressiveness was his true gift, so much so that he almost didn’t even need word balloons to tell his story.  The first ten pages of A Contract With God are the perfect example of this.  In it Frimme Hersch is walking down a street in the Bronx.  The rain is pouring down on him and the world so hard that it’s streaming off his back and the staircase like a waterfall.  The water is thick, painful, and depressing.  Immediately, we know what’s happening.

            Then, people start speaking.  Like I said, as a writer, I will not let bad dialogue slide, not even when it’s the great Will Eisner.  Bad dialogue can instantly ruin a story.  It pulls you out of the narrative, suspending your suspension of disbelief.  Any hint of triteness or any instance of reader-information dialogue is a cardinal sin of all good writing.  Some writers inherently understand how people speak and how to transcribe that to the page (i.e. Mark Twain, Brian Michael Bendis).  Some do not, and Eisner is in this woeful group.

            Case in point, exploring A Contract With God even further, we see plenty instances of bad dialogue.  One of the most galling offenses by Eisner comes when he supplements his already expressive artwork with needless dialogue.  On page 52 in the first story, Frimme Hersch is having a heart attack.  In the fourth panel, he clutches his heart, his face in agony.   This should be enough, but the word balloon above him goes, “ULP my chest a pain in –.”  The panel clearly shows this, and with Frimme collapsing in the next two panels, we should be able to understand this on our own.  A few pages later in the epilogue to the first tale, we see Shloime, a new boy in the neighborhood, who happens to be a Hassidic Jew.  Three neighborhood boys are chasing him, ready to give him, as one of them puts it, “a nice e-nee-she-ay-shun.”  Throughout the course of human history, we can probably guess that kids have and generally always will harass the new kid, especially if he or she is different.  We don’t need to be told that Shloime is going to be beat up for being new or given the reason for the “e-nee-she-ay-shun.”  Yet, we get it anyway.  “That’s Shloime Khreks, He’s a Hassid—Haw!” says one kid, “He wears a funny hat!” says another (59).  In this panel we see Shloime bending down to grab a rock to defend himself.  And in the next panel, he throws a rock back at his offenders.  The “toughs,” as Eisner puts it, respond as such:  “Hey look out.  He’s fightin’ back!” says one, “Let’s get outta here,” says the middle one as he jumps over the fence, and “He’s throwin rocks back at us…Owch,” says tough number three.  As great a visual storyteller Eisner is, this is amateur writing.

            I don’t say this lightly, and it pains me to even say it.  But comics are a marriage of words and pictures.  They need to work together, each satisfying the need of the story the other cannot provide.  Words should be used only when the pictures can’t convey the message over the course of the story.  They should never repeat what the pictures say or the supposition of the narrative.  For example, in the third story, “The Super,” we meet Mr. Scuggs, the super at 55 Dropsie Ave.  This mountain of a man is introduced twice (95-96).  We know who he his, and thanks to Eisner’s wonderful artwork, we cannot forget him.  Yet seven pages later, it seems that Eisner thinks we have forgotten him somehow.  As Mr. Scuggs is walking around the building, he hears a noise and knocks on the offending door.  When the tenant opens the door, asking who it is, Mr. Scuggs replies, “It’s me, the super, Missis Farfell!  Wotcha knockin’ on the pipes for??”  This is reader-information dialogue, and it never sounds natural, and here, it’s even nonsensical.

            Whenever I read an Eisner story, it’s always a challenge.  At times it feels like Eisner writes the words because he has to, like it’s a chore.  If he doesn’t do it, then the story cannot progress.  As a writer, I understand this very well.  There are always parts of the story that need to be played out in order for things to make sense but tend to be the least interesting.  But when Eisner does this, it feels rushed and trite.  In the final story “Cookalein,” we meet several young adults meeting at a hotel in the countryside for summer vacation.  Upon arrival, the flabby, nerdish Herbie is trying to talk to the beautiful Goldie, who is way out of his league.  Visually, we can see they’re not going to become an item.  After Goldie gives a poor excuse for not accepting his offer for a date, Herbie says, “Aw, come on…  What’s wrong with me?”  To which Goldie replies, “Oh, it’s not you…it’s just—well…I mean socially we’re not equal.  I didn’t come up here just to meet a-a saxophone player!”  While not terrible, it’s quick, flat, and to-the-point (148).  Later in the story, Goldie meets up with the better-looking Benny.  Out in the woods, as things get steamy, it’s revealed that neither of them are from well-to-do families.  This infuriates Benny so much so that he proceeds to rape Goldie (170-172).  Goldie makes her way back to the hotel and happens to run into Herbie.  She’s crying and yelling, “Oooh…I’m a ruined woman!!  My God…a tramp..a whore!  Who will want me after this!?  Oh my god…”  Benny replies, “I’ll have you Goldie…I love you…It doesn’t matter to me whether you’re a virgin or not…It’s you I want!”  The relieved Goldie replies, “Snff you??...Y-You’re Herbie…We met on the train…Later I snubbed you…I-I’m so ashamed…Herbie!”  In the matter of two panels, Goldie went from hysterical sobbing after a horrible and traumatic experience to feeling ashamed for snubbing a decent man (173).  It happens way too fast.  Eisner doesn’t write a lot of back-and-forth dialogue or provide too many quiet panels.  Instead, he seems to get the story done as fast as possible, which I assume is a by-product of his Spirit days when page counts were at a premium.  But with A Contract With God, he has all the pages he could ever want.  What is lost here is the emotional punch this morality play should have.

            While Eisner is easily the most respected creator in all of comics (including myself), his skills as a writer were sorely lacking.  His style of dialogue followed him for the rest of his career, and it makes it difficult to truly engross myself in his work.  Dialogue has a way of making you forget you’re reading a work of fiction, but with Eisner’s words, I don’t lose myself in the story.  I am always aware that I am reading a book, and that is a tragedy.

Comments

Posted by: comixmaniac | Thursday 01 October 2009, 01:47  |

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Well, Eisner was being a cartoonist in every sense of the word, even in his written words. You may be suffering from "alternate reality syndrome" whereby you are missing one of the central aspects of Eisner's work, namely that he was writing consistent parody and used speech to further emphasize his art. I think we as modern readers of comics expect a certain "realism" of sorts in our books, a certain "alternate reality" if you will, wherein our characters exist in "real" time and in "real" situations. But Eisner and his contemporaries did not see comics in this way. To them, comics were like some twisted mirror held up to the world, examining the social and political aspects of life in a very critical way. His work exemplifies the idea that the world was a very different place then, when he was growing up and when he was doing comics. Much of what you may find objectionable in his work is actually just going to be a difference in the way people of his time and place spoke and reacted as opposed to today. I think his dialogue is fine, even sort of warm and appealing; but the fact is, it is also very dated and set in time and space by its very foundations. One of the most endearing aspects of his work is, in fact, that this is true. His work represents not just comics, but also a reflection of the world and the time he lived in. This makes it historical documentation of a sort. Be careful what you criticize in his work, because you may just be viewing it with eyes that are a little too young to appreciate the subtlety of his concepts. He was making fun, rolling with the spirit of the story, enjoying the idiosyncratic nuances of his own people. This is what a master comic artist does… he observes and he inflates and he distorts, all for the purpose of showing us just how odd we all are in certain ways and how similar we are in others. That his dialogue makes you uncomfortable may say more about you than him.