Contracts and Blankets

I find it strange to think that a graphic novel had not been developed before Eisner's Contract with God, simply because it seems that the format is so conducive to storytelling, even in its long-form narrative. The stories Eisner created seemed to flow and deliver just as well, if not better than standard novels. Where the text left off, Eisners pictures picked up, for the images were able to express a page's worth of textual description at a glance which was how the stories gained such a fantastic momentum.

Comparing Eisner's work with Thompson's, I could see that Eisner was still working out the kinks with just how to make a graphic novel work. At times I felt as though the way Eisner handled the text in blocked form made it seem too much like a children's story-book format. Sometimes the text felt very well integrated, while other times it separated itself from the graphics like oil and water. Nonetheless, Eisner's approach to borderless imagery really seemed to segregate this work from episodic comic books or comic strips and gave it a feel of it's own. The stories themselves were very unlike what I've come to expect from a comic book in that they deal with very real scenarios and rarely distinguished a character as a hero or villain. The endings to the tales were what I noticed most about his work. The fact that Eisner didn't feel the need to wrap up the stories into neat packages was really compelling. They were often just open ended and allowed the character to really come to their own conclusions about what may or may not have happened next. Having experienced 4 years of being taught the linear narrative structure to storytelling, I found these short stories to be refreshing.

To me it was interesting that both Eisner and Thompson used graphic novels to capture pieces of their own history. It was as if the format somehow captures memory better than text alone, inviting the viewer to try and experience the scenario as they did. Thompsons work was hugely emotional and managed to pull me through from beginning to end without any breaks. I could see that by the time Thompson completed Blankets, graphic novels had developed much more of a sound structure. Thompsons text and imagery seemed to work much better than had Eisners, yet maintained the same black and white illustrative approach. I feel that despite such a limited palette, Thompson managed to capture an immense amount of mood and atmosphere. The way images were arranged with lots of negative space or conversely with lots of claustrophobic energy, managed to set up scenes in my mind that text alone can sometimes fall short of. All in all, I feel both Eisner and Thompson have really managed to legitimize the comic art-form with these works.