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Tag: new york city

Book Review: Will Eisner’s Contract With God Trilogy

I wasn’t sure what to expect from this collection, which gathers together Eisner’s three graphic novels about the mythic Dropsie Avenue, a street in New York patterned after Eisner’s own childhood neighborhood. I’d never read any of Eisner’s work, famous as he is, and I mostly thought of him as the creator of The Spirit, a comic book hero.

This trilogy, though, is both an autobiography of sorts for Eisner and a biography of a street in New York City. The three books share an attention to detail combined with an epic sweep of history. Eisner explores religion, the meaning of life, aging, poverty, immigration, racial and ethnic relations, and the development of urban centers with a keenly observant — if not objective — eye.

The black-and-white illustrations are perfect for the stories. The drawing has a raggedly realistic style that catches every piece of cracked plaster, every shadowed face, every trick of the light.

Recommended.

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Thomas Flynn’s Bikeman

People react to tragedy in different ways. For Thomas Flynn, a network news reporter covering the 9/11 tragedy as it happened, the story became more than an object to be studied. It became an all-encompassing, life-or-death struggle through the debris-strewn, dust-blind streets of New York.

Seven years later, Flynn tells his tale through the underused medium of the epic poem.

I picked up this book several weeks ago at The Book House, an independent bookstore (!) here in Albany. Today I went back there to have the book signed by its author during his in-store appearance. It turns out that Tom Flynn was born in Albany and still has many connections here.

His book is worth your time.

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