Week Five: Reading A Contract with God

This week I read A Contract with God. This is a graphic novel created by Will Eisner. 

The overall feeling of this comic is really different from comics I read past few weeks. One of the reasons is the story not only focus on narrating, but also focus on depicting emotions, especially the inner world of the characters. Natural gestures of characters help the artist to convey this information very efficiently. In his interview I saw in class, he talked about that conveying emotions through actions is important, which is why he always observes people around him, because by learning from life you can get the honest and natural actions, reactions, and emotions. And he did very well in A Contract with God. 

Also, another good way of showing the strong emotional feeling is depicting one small action by sequence. For example, the part where Frimme Hersh came back from the rain, he picked up the photo of his daughter, then he put it into the drawer, then showed him kindling the candle, and sat beside the window. Comic stripe artists might not think it is necessary to depict this action in such detail, because it doesn't seem straightforward, they can just showing his loneliness with one margin. However, I personally think Will Eisner conveys stronger emotion by doing this, because it allows me to follow the character, gives me more information about the character, and I will feel he is the person who is just in my life, and I will feel stronger empathy to the character.

Since the stronger ability of conveying emotion I prefer graphic novels more than comics strips or other normal comics. I believe creating empathy with audiences should be a main goal of comics, which is the reason that I feel in love with comics.