New York: Life in the Big City by Will Eisner,  W.W. Norton & Company, 2006, 423 pages,  $29.95


By Donald H. Harrison

SAN DIEGO, Calif.— Having worked in the New York City headquarters of the Associated Press for about a year and a half (before taking a job as a politics writer for The San Diego Union), I could relate on a personal level to many of the stories sketched by Will Eisner in this graphic fiction, or cartoon fiction, book about the City of New York.  But I don't think its appeal will be limited to people who have lived in New York or other big cities.

New York: Life in the Big City is a collection of the late cartoonist's whimsical, sometimes maudlin, looks at the infrastructure, buildings and ordinary people of New York City, including those who take its subways, put up with its noise, endure its crowds, and yet somehow would never live anywhere else.  In the illustration-jammed pages, many ethnic groups are represented—African-Americans, Puerto Ricans, Italian-Americans, and, of course, Jews.

Some of the "stories" are a single page long; others involving hundreds of drawings are as long as 22 pages, and each tale can be devoured in a single sitting.  However,  I would recommend savoring each panel of the cartoons to enjoy Eisner's little jokes and ironies that sometimes find their way into the backgrounds.

One of my favorite stories in the book was a single page tale in which a man awakens at 7 a.m., looks out his window while dressing, packs himself a breakfast and a folding chair, and hurries down a peeling and cracked stairwell.. In the final panel, he is seated on a sidewalk watching  a building across the street being knocked down by a crane with a wrecking ball.  The title of this wordless essay?   Jericho.

I'm a sucker for analogies to biblical stories, but I liked it as well as a prelude to a 75-page section, a book within a book, called "The Building" in which Eisner imagines the lives of four people who now, as ghosts, stand quietly by a new building that has replaced the one where they spent important parts of their lives.  One of these ghosts is Monroe Mensh.  He was an ordinary shoe salesperson until one fateful day when a stray bullet fired at someone else in a drive-by shooting ricocheted past him and killed a child.  Mensh, guilt ridden that he didn't save the child, quit his job to raise funds for children's charities.  His contributions sometimes were diminished by the avarice of others, but he persisted—need I say it, he was a real mensh.

Another ghost is Gilda Green, the high school beauty, who loved  Benny the poet, and throughout her life carried on an affair with him—even after her marriage to Dr. Irving Glumpen. Benny and Gilda used to meet in front of that very building.

Other recognizably Jewish  characters in the book are Pincus Pleatnik, who learned the art of staying invisible, or at least living as anonymously as possible, in a dangerous city.  One day, inexplicably, his obituary appeared in the newspaper, even though he hadn't died. But if it is in the newspaper, it has to be true—right? Therefore  his obituary notice set into motion a chain of events that upended his carefully-ordered life of danger-avoidance.

Another flight of Eisner's imagination is titled "Mortal Combat," about two middle-aged librarians who find they had led similarly unsatisifying  lives as caregivers and companions for an elderly parent  After Hilda's father died, she met Herman and soon fell in love with this man with whom she has so much in common.  But she didn't figure on what would happen when she incurred the eternal enmity of Herman's mother Yetta.  

In addition to these feature stories, readers will enjoy the little vignettes that Eisner makes up such as one explaining how a key, a knife and a ring ended up below a subway grate.  He also creates stories about garbage cans, fire alarms, subways and mailboxes.  They are stories you can come back to again and again, not to see how the plot turns out, but to enjoy the fine art of illustration.  The book is a nice memorial to a man who is considered one of the pioneers of the cartoonist's art.