Illustrating Nostalgia

Both Will Eisner's Contract with God and Craig Thompson's Blankets are graphic novels that use a series of short stories to compile into one big one. Despite both being dealing with faith, their style, message and content are almost completely different.

Most of Eisner's Contract with God short stories are about the tenants of the Bronx. However, his most religious piece ends up being the graphic novel's title. The main story is also told differently from the other Bronx-inspired story too, having almost an uncolored picture book quality while the others use more dialog form. Well, the main story did use dialog too, but it is almost treated like a visual statement to support the narration and not really its own driving force. Hence, the first story personally reminds me of animation beat boards.

Thompson's Blankets on the other hand, is a continuous novel compiled by multiple childhood memories. Although both "Contract with God" and "Blankets" are inspired by real-life events, their different emphasis on character makes them very different. While Eisner's told stories from an audience's perspective to create a variety of characters from the Bronx, Thompson told a more personal, autobiographical story. His work is more like a train of thought and we see the abstract qualities of his thoughts and emotions in visual form as seen below:

Eisner shows the complexity of emotion through jutaposing man and weather, like the scene where God is likely represented by thunder when Frimme broke the contract. We feel the intense emotions through the visceral association with lightning and his high contrast tonal value. Due to its short story nature, Contract with God's religious message is also more straightforward-showing the merciless nature of God. Blankets, on the other hand, has a more direct message at the end when Craig changes his mindset on how to view christianity, but throughout most of the story we go through an emotional and thought slump with him. Personally, it is an endearing first love story of a boy who is trying to find something to hold on too. His nearest subject to home was religion, so he held on to its values despite it conflicting his own. Loving someone helped him realized a more humane and ruleless approach to treating himself and others. It is just sad to see him sacrifing his first love to start a new canvas (meaning I don't see how this adds to the story, but it's autobiographical so I don't have to agree with all his decisions). 

Basically, Contract with God is an insightful documentary that captures the emotional state of lives in the Bronx while Blankets is a coming of age story. So although they dealt with similar subjects like religion and real-life events, their style of story telling has to be different because they are telling completely different stories; a communal one and a personal one.

Personally, I like both works because of how they dealt with Nostalgia. By reading both works, I get to experience what it might have been like to know the 1930s Bronx as a "movie audience" and being a teenager who doesn't know his/her place by walking in Craig's shoes. I also loved that the religious aspect of both works is there to confuse the audience of what it means to truly live, rather than giving clarity. Thus both shows a more realistic interaction between man and faith, because a thinking man will always find more questions whenever they seek answers from it.