New York: The Big City

Will Eisner, responsible for two separate revolutions in comic art, set his sights on his hometown in New York: The Big City. These short (one to four pages) reflections and observations are grouped thematically by components of Eisner’s city: Subways, Stoops, Windows, Walls, and more. As usual, he finds universal truths buried underneath urban waste and banal street conversations. Of particular note is his reverence for the joys of living directly, an almost Zen approach to sensory overload. His humor is at turns grinningly juvenile and starkly black. If he starts the book cataloguing things dropped down a sewer grate, he ends with dispossessed poor folks leaving a newly gentrified area muttering, “There goes the neighborhood.” –Rob Lightner