| Title | : | Dropsie Avenue: The Neighborhood (The Contract With God Trilogy #3) |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0393328112 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780393328110 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 188 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1995 |
Dropsie Avenue: The Neighborhood (The Contract With God Trilogy #3) Reviews
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Nic specjalnego, doceniam kilka rzeczy w tym komiksie, ale to nie dla mnie.
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Piirroksille täydet pisteet - Eisnerilla oli taito hallussaan. Dropsie Avenue vyöryttää kiehtovasti historian suuret tapahtumat yhdelle Bronxin kadulle.
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I read this book because I had read the first book in the
Contract with God trilogy.
This graphic novel is the story of "Dropsie Avenue" a fictional neighborhood in the bronx that is also featured prominently in the other two books in the series
A Contract with God and
A Life Force. The story follows the neighborhood from when it was a farm owned by a Dutch Family, till it became an English, then predominantly Irish, Italian, Jewish, Hispanic, and Black. Changin with each wave of immigration or migration. The story is told as a series of vignettes of people who live on the block, and as their lives intertwine with each other, they either set off or witness events that change the character of the neighborhood. This shows the birth, life, death, and rebirth of a neighborhood. My special lady friend is an urban planner and the sort of issues discussed in this book are exactly the sort of stuff that she studied in school.
This book shows many aspects of life in a neighborhood: Prejudice based on ethnicity, religion, or race, prostitution, drug addition, and other crimes. It shows ethnic and religious intermarriages. Assimilation of immigrants and many other aspects of life. All these personal events leave their indelible mark on the city.
Will Eisner is the father of the graphic novel style. This novel excellently showcases his abilities and work. The writing and art are truly superb. -
Eisner mixes short character anecdotes into a larger framework about the life, death, and rebirth of a neighborhood. This one's a little rough around the edges. Eisner's "paneless" storytelling works most of the time, but there are still pages where I get a little lost. There's also something kind of off about his portrayal of race and ethnic disputes. A lot of the characters are well rounded, but some of them also come off as stereotypical. All that said, this is still masterfully done. Eisner had me hooked from the beginning, and by the end I felt myself getting emotionally swept up by his story. His books have a tendency to be overly sentimental, but sometimes that just works.
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Wonderful. Amazing. It's not just that the illustrations are great or that the storyline is strong. It's more than that. In this book of the Contract with God trilogy, Eisner depicts the history of Dropsie Avenue over the years, beginning with 1870 and going well past the 60s. The depiction isn't just about how the land has changed but the rotation of people, memories and how that has affected a community a neighborhood. Reading book 3, reminded me of how I grew up, and where I am now. Not in the sense of this personal being but in the sense of place, location. We forget sometimes how land has its own memories of people and things. We forget how my neighborhood may have been yours, though our memories are not. It is easy to forget about place as a being, but on Dropsie Avenue Eisner magnifies it that it is hard to escape and easy to remember.
Book 3 doesn't bring a whole to the parts, it doesn't complete book 1 or book 2, in fact each novel stands on its own. But the idea is the place, the location, the transformation of how so many individuals who are connected and not connected intertwine because of a single entity. You start off becoming attached to these people, those people and their stories but it really is the story of a place of a building, a block, a neighborhood.
I am so glad that I stumbled upon these novels and I completely understand how a place, a physical aspect, a building, a street name, a block a town can carry so much more weight than our own minds and souls can hold. I am a sucker for the idea/concept of neighborhoods but because I know them and Eisner does such a wonderful job describing-explaining-stating, to be honest I can't even fully explain exactly how he has done what he has. I just know that he has, and the result is amazing. -
The art was terrific, but the storytelling quickly became repetitive. Okay, I get the idea — each group that lives in this part of the Bronx thinks that it is better than the newcomers and the neighborhood slowly gets worse and worse. But because we are going through decades, we don't have any characters to follow, and it quickly just becomes the same thing over and over again, with differently dressed ethnic types despising each other. Feh!
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This graphic novel covers the life-cycle of a neighborhood. Eisner's art and words work together seamlessly to show vignettes about the changing people, ideas, and politics that shape the lives of the people in Dropsie Ave. Very thought-provoking, but Eisner makes the reader work to recognize recurring characters as they age and change. It's also highly symbolic at times. It's about as far from a "comic book" as you can get, but that's actually a compliment.
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I have become a huge fan of Will Eisner. I loved this book as well. Good book for anyone who wants to have an experience with graphic novel medium. They will never think of it as just comics..
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Dropsie Avenue prende il titolo dall'omonima fittizia strada del Bronx che dà poi vita a un intero quartiere del quale Eisner tratteggia la vita, dalla nascita, intorno al 1870, sino quasi ai giorni nostri. Un angolo pulsante di esistenze, luoghi, fatti e sensazioni, un microcosmo specchio dell'umanità intera, parallelamente a quello che Eisner ci mostra in New York e in Contratto con Dio. Tuttavia, rispetto alle due graphic novels appena menzionate, Dropsie Avenue appare un'opera più moderna, o meglio più odierna, più vicina ai libri e alle graphic novels dei giorni nostri sia per lo stile che per le tematiche trattate: rispetto alle vignette di New York e ai racconti di Contratto con Dio, Dropsie Avenue è infatti un'opera più "parlata", più ricca di dialoghi, parole, conversazioni, simili a quelle che caratterizzano la frenesia delle nostre città attuali; inoltre Eisner, nel tratteggiare la storia del quartiere si azzarda a esplorare importanti temi moderni, quali la corruzione politica, la speculazione edilizia, la violenza tipicamente metropolitana e, soprattutto, l'immigrazione e le difficoltà di integrazione nel disordinato "melting pot". Ci troviamo dunque fra le mani un graphic novel moderno ed elaborato, nel quale il tratto non perde incisività e fascino ma nel quale il quartiere protagonista diventa sempre più simile a uno che potremmo attraversare nella nostra quotidianità. Dropsie Avenue appare come una babele, caotica e confusionaria, ma in continua espansione e crescita. E in questo si dimostra perfettamente rappresentante dell'umanità nelle due facce opposte che segnano la sua crescita: da un lato appunto l'espansione e l'arricchimento, dall'altro il materialismo, la sopraffazione, la sete di ricchezza e potere che uccide la morale e gli ideali, insomma, tutto ciò che di negativo l'arricchimento porta con sè. Eisner rappresenta nè più nè meno il mondo e ancora una volta si dimostra un autore di grande genialità.
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Man. I just could not decide how to grade this book at first. I almost didn't want to grade it because the philosophy vacillates between pretty liberal ideology of acceptance and looking at immigration/emigration anxiety to the point of almost preaching it. And the ending just left me so cold that I wondered for a moment if my copy was missing some pages or something.
But then I thought about it more. It's not about immigrants, though it sort of is. It's not about fear of the other, though it sort of is. It's not even about Dropsie Avenue, really, even though it tells the entire 100+ history of the eponymous neighborhood (a truly brilliant way to end a trilogy so geographically oriented).
It's about a thread touched on a bit in A Life Force, but really fleshed out here. The life cycle. It's birth and death and birth again. Once I realized that this whole thing is about the cyclical living/slowly dying nature of all things, I thought my chest was going to explode. You see so, so, so many lives go through those same cycles over the pages of these three books, so when this last book in the trilogy is dedicated entirely to the rich, painful, beautiful, difficult cycle of EVERYTHING (weighted a little too heavily on the male perspective, for sure, but what are you gonna do--it's crazy-progressive for his time), I'm a little floored.
This whole trilogy is a tome I want to have on my shelf forever, so I can go back and reread every few years. It goes right along with Fun Home, MAUS, Watchmen, and Blankets as graphic novels I need to always renew in my periphery every few years. -
This stunning historical panorama of one Bronx neighborhood--mostly focused on one lot on one street--is the culmination of Will Eisner's amazing trilogy (the first two are Contract with God and A Life Force). It begins with the English displacing the Dutch, skips rapidly through a few centuries, but then concentrates on the twentieth century as waves of immigrants and migrants move in and partially displace the previous waves--Irish, Italians, Jews, Puerto Ricans, Hasids--often with significant friction, bigotry, violence and corruption--and less often with the traditional melting pot of American imagination.
The characters are great too, many of them recurring over the course of fifty or more years, like Abie Gold who we first meet hitting a baseball through a window in the 1930s (or thereabouts) but then grows up to be a lawyer, city councilman, and then when his patron is killed a lawyer again helping in an attempt to revitalize the neighborhood. A number of other characters, including a boxer turned political boss and a succession of ethnically-appropriate priests make a number of reappearances throughout the book.
The story is one of constant change and motion but also stasis--as the same patterns occur over and over again. And just when you think the story has a redemptive ending, think again as a new set of immigrants come in, the older residents flee, and the neighborhood goes back into a downward spiral. The only thing Eisner misses in the story is gentrification, which clearly had not come to Dropsie in 1995. Maybe someone should write that sequel. -
"...How do we get the city to develop it?"
"You don't! Whites are pulling out!!"
Or as John Oliver would put it, "funding tends to follow white people around the way white people follow the band Phish around." lol
I preferred this one to the other two in the trilogy, but all in all, it was a interesting story of a neighborhood in New York City and its change in development, population, and political climate throughout the decades by following the lives of various different tenants. The more graphic novels I read the more I become aware of my artistic preferences. It varies but just like with Asterios Polyp, I've come to love more simpler artwork that's also deals with little or no color. I loved the sepia tones with this trilogy. However, I also love graphic novels like Saga that are teeming with color. Anyway, it was a good read and the nostalgic ending of Dropsie Avenue really wrapped up nicely and gave true meaning to everything comes full circle and the fact that humans do a great job of spouting out sayings like: Those who don't remember history are doomed to repeat it, but do a horrible job of actually heeding those words. -
Dropsie Avenue is a made-up neighborhood, but it echoes many real neighborhoods and towns I've known. Many of the characters aren't likeable: they're racist and mean-spirited, but some of them are kind and loving. The book's true main character isn't any one of the people, although we do get to know some of them quite well. The true main character is Dropsie Avenue itself, in all its messy, gritty, dirty, glory. And even the racist, mean people love it and call it home. So you do feel something as the neighborhood grows and changes and ultimately dies and is reborn, the same way you might feel if a block of your own neighborhood were bulldozed for tenements or a playground or whatever. Not all real neighborhoods get a second chance the way this one does, but that's where the fiction of this story comes in, and without it, it would be a pretty depressing book. It's a good story. And it made me examine my own neighborhood a little more closely.
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Actually found the hardcover edition for fifteen bucks at Modern Myths in Northampton, MA. It was good, Eisner only gets better throughout his career. Great characters, and Eisner toys with a lot of comic art effects that I think I take for granted (see any scenes in this book where there's a traumatic fire), but because Eisner's plots are a bit less enthralling than your typical graphic novel nowadays these stick out more. Take that how you please, a special thanks to N.C. Christopher Couch's class at UMASS-Amherst, otherwise I don't think I could've appreciated this book to its fullest.
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Dropsie Avenue takes a look at the chronology of a neighbourhood in New York (based on Brooklyn). How the different characters shared their lives her from the Irish migrant wave, German arrival, Italian domination to Jewish hike, Spanish drift and African roaming.
It started off with disconnected stories but it all comes together at the end. I really enjoyed the accuracy to the real history and colourful characters. I still consider A Life Force being the best of the trilogy but Dropsie Avenue was still fun to read. -
Like so much Eisner- awful sentimentality, melodrama (think of Chaplin at his worst) stereotyped characters and, even worse than usual, some truly clunking dialogue. Add to this the absurdity that the only ethnic group passing through Dropsie Avenue that is kindly and tolerant of others are the Jews...Oy vey!
It still gets four stars because Eisner is a genius of character drawing and storyline- I just wish he could have worked with someone else! -
Trilogi gila dari Will Eisner, buku terakhir.
Simpel namun rumit, sekelumit kisah dari berdirinya Dropsie avenue, masa puncak dan akhir dari Dropsie Avenue itu sendiri, dan awal dari kemungkinan Dropsie Avenue Mark II di akhir cerita.
Mengenaskan tapi memang kenyataannya seperti itulah hidup, akan ada masa-masa gemilang, dan akhirnya tergantung dari si empunya, akankah berakhir baik atau hancur sama sekali.
Brilliant -
If one has to read a book on the development of communities, this is a good primer. Eisner continues his tradition of delivering significant points about human existence in a comic yet subtly profound manner. And again, we see in him a discontinuous way of telling the story but in the course of his narrative, bringing all things together into a single strand, seeing that this is a history of a neighborhood which existed for 90 years and has long taken different social forms.
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I haven't been in New York yet, but reading Will Eisner makes me feel like I lived there for some decades. People move, people change, but the neighbourhood stands still. Movies and books usually tell us the story of one or few persons, not the story of one or few buildings. I love this changing in the point of view.
I definetly wanna read more. -
“Life on Dropsie Avenue” was a fast read. It’s about the rise, decline and fall, and rise and fall again of the Bronx. Tales of racism, and ethnic clashes. Of payoffs, and bribes. Of New York, wonderful and corrupt city that it is. The Bronx literally was burning in the 70s. ***1/2 (4 GR)
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My favorite Eisner so far. If you consider comics to be too childish and superficial, well, you've never read Will Eisner. "Dropsie Avenue" is pretty much a sociological study on human interactions. And all the themes brought to surface in this novel are treated with a genuine artistic sensibility.
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Dropsie Avenue is the third book of Will Eisner's trilogy, "A Contract With God." It offers the sweeping history of the fictional Dropsie Avenue neighborhood in the Bronx, starting when the place was nothing but a rural intersection among Dutch farmland owned by the VanBronk family.
A true textbook of urban planning, this graphic novel is like a condensed bachelor's degree with a major in urban planning: the birth, growth, maturation, decline, and decay of the Urban neighborhood. And, as the living, breathing force of nature that we all must recognize it to be -- a marvelous life force -- the neighborhood is reborn once again, through urban planning, zoning, and city design.
The book also offers a minor course of study in sociology -- tracing the life cycle of the neighborhood to the ebb and flow of the newcomers.
Factors like socioeconomic mobility; the clashing of ethnic subcultures; the divisons created among residents by religous beliefs; the influx of hispanics into whites only Irish, Italian, and Eastern European Jewish, ethnic sections of the neighborhood; followed by the Northern Migration of Southern black citizens into these very same Irish, Italian, Jewish, and hispanic sections of town create an increasingly untenable situation.
And when politicians and city zoning czars, developers, and landowners, all seeking either payola or profits, are thrown into the mix, the underlying tensions of bigotry, racism, and "return on real estate investment" trigger the downward spiral that leads to urban ruin, and renewal.
The life cycle of the Urban Neighborhood continues today. And the guiding light, the silver lining, is this simple observation, " . . . Dropsie Avenue as we know it is gone. Only the memory of how it was for us remains. In the end, buildings are only buildings, but people make a neighborhood." -
Very much like the previous graphic novels, this one is another example of human nature at its worst, but also at its best. Most of the neighbors are stepping over each other like mad. They hate each other with abandon, but hide their feelings behind closed doors. I've rarely seen such raw human nature in comics before. The high class people are worried that the lower class is bringing down the neighborhood. The lower class people do their utmost to screw the high class over. Everybody is glad when their hated neighbor suffers. It's beautiful! Monstruous, but difficult to put down.
Other characters' behavior is completely different. They try to help those in need, improve themselves and advance the neighborhood. Others yet are too poor to do anything other than earn a basic living. They live and die in a place where the leaders are trying to build a fortune on the weak man's back.
The story follows multiple generations in lightning fast progression. There are tragedies, pregnancies, natural deaths, a marriage, an abortion, an arrest, people moving in and out like mad, the Great War, business transactions, politics, manipulation, corruption, bootlegging during the Prohibition, protests, a drive-by, religious differences, racial and ethnic tensions, rent problems. O, boy! The neighborhood grows over the years, then becomes corrupted from within and eventually ends up in ruins. It's people who lived in Dropsie that band together to rebuild it, only to restart the cycle all over again. -
Eisner encara la ambiciosa crónica de la historia de la calle del título y los más de 200 años que pasan entre su fundación a manos de los primeros inmigrantes holandeses en New York hasta mediados de los 90s con su reconstrucción en barriada residencial. Cabe admitir que al principio es bien fácil perderse con la acumulación de nombres y los numerosos personajes que van apareciendo uno atrás de otro -muchos de los cuales no califican ni para extras- y que hasta promediar el libro el esquema "llega un grupo étnico/racial/religioso nuevo, las cosas se complican, los anteriores se mandan a mudar, el barrio empobrece" se torna algo reiterativo, pero es de Will Eisner del que estamos hablando así que no tarda en hacer su pase de magia. De repente, algunos personajes comienzan a mantenerse presentes -Abie Gold, Izzy Cash, el Padre Gianelli, el Rabino Goldstein, Rowena- o reaparecen sorpresivamente y se vinculan con la historia que enriquece y enriquece a medida que pasan sus páginas y crece en complejidad y emoción. Y aunque el final es algo meláncolico y hasta tristón, nada que conmueva de esta manera es una mala experiencia. ¿Y qué decir del dibujo de Eisner? Siempre brillante, aquí lo encontramos maduro, entregado a su obra, sintético cuando lo necesita y barroco cuando corresponde. Maestro en la expresividad de sus personajes y creador de universos, hace de la Avenida Dropsie un lugar inmortal.
