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4.07 AVERAGE
4.07 AVERAGE
informative
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
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!
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.
I definetly wanna read more.
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.
I really like how the narrative weaves social changes due to immigration with political and economic such as the rise of real estate business at the neoliberal turn to give an image of how neighborhoods live and die leaving its traces in the form of memories.
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.
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.
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.
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..