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''A Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories'' is a 1978 graphic novel by American cartoonist Will Eisner. It is a short story cycle that revolves around poor Jewish characters who live in a tenement in New York City. Eisner produced two sequels set in the same tenement: ''A Life Force'' in 1988, and ''Dropsie Avenue'' in 1995. Though the term "graphic novel" did not originate with Eisner, the book is credited with popularizing its use. ''A Contract with God'' is made up of four stand-alone stories: in "A Contract with God" a religious man gives up his faith after the death of his young adopted daughter; in "The Street Singer" a has-been diva tries to seduce a poor, young street singer, who tries to take advantage of her in turn; a bullying racist is led to suicide after false accusations of pedophilia in "The Super"; and "Cookalein" intertwines the stories of several characters vacationing in the Catskill Mountains. The stories are thematically linked with motifs of frustration, disillusionment, violence, and issues of ethnic identity. Eisner uses large, monochromatic images in dramatic perspective, and emphasizes the caricatured characters' facial expressions; few panels or captions have traditional borders around them. Eisner began his comic book career in 1936, and had long held artistic ambitions for what was perceived as a lowbrow medium. He found no support for his ideas, and left the world of commercial comics after ending his signature work ''The Spirit'' in 1952. The growth of comics fandom convinced him to return in the 1970s, and he worked to realize his aspirations of creating comics with literary content. He wanted a mainstream publisher for the book and to have it sold in traditional bookstores, rather than comic book shops; the small press Baronet Books released ''A Contract with God'' in 1978, and marketed it as a "graphic novel", which thereafter became the common term for book-length comics. It sold slowly at first, but gained respect from Eisner's peers, and since has been reprinted by larger publishers. ''A Contract with God'' cemented Eisner's reputation as an elder statesman of comics, and he continued to produce graphic novels and theoretical works on comics until his death in 2005. ==Content and plot summaries== ''A Contract with God'' mixes melodrama with social realism. Following an author's introduction, "A Tenement in the Bronx", the book contains four stories set in a tenement building; they derive in part from Eisner's personal memories growing up in a tenement in the Bronx. His goals in writing ''A Contract with God'' were to explore an area of Jewish-American history that he felt was underdocumented, while showing that capable of mature literary expression, at a time when it received little such regard as an artistic medium. In the preface he stated his aim to keep the exaggeration in his cartooning within realistic limits. The story "A Contract with God" drew from Eisner's feelings over the death of his sixteen-year-old daughter. In his introduction to the 2006 edition of the book, Eisner first wrote about it and the feelings he felt toward God that were reflected in the story. "The Street Singer" and "The Super" were fictional, but sprang from his memories of people he had met in the tenements of his youth. "Cookalein" was the most explicitly autobiographical—even the main character's name, "Willie", was Eisner's own boyhood nickname. Eisner remarked that "it took a lot of determination, a kind of courage, to write that story". Sexual content is prominent in the stories, though not in the gratuitous manner of , which celebrated a hedonism that was in contrast to the conservative lifestyle of the middle-aged businessman Eisner was. Eisner used no profanity in the book, and according to critic Josh Lambert the sex in ''Contract'' is not so much erotic as disturbing, the characters frustrated or filled with guilt. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「A Contract with God」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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