A Family Matter
Eisner, who created the masked crime-fighter the Spirit in 1940, is one of the few early comic-books veterans still active and certainly the only one turning out new work more ambitious than the genre tales for which he is best known. Eisner now mostly creates graphic novels depicting Jewish life in America. In the latest, family members prepare to observe their patriarch's ninetieth birthday as he sits silent and paralyzed after a stroke. Eisner portrays the clan's ambitions, pretensions, and disappointments broadly. At the gathering, as long-standing resentments surface, family members face deciding how to provide for the old man, and he makes a crucial choice of his own.Family Matterlacks the scale of some of Eisner's newer work and features bluntly one-dimensional characters. But its depiction of how families are held together by a force "that sometimes seems to be neither love nor loyalty" rings true. Moreover, Eisner's drawing here, less slick and dramatic than that of his prime, has an agreeable looseness that helps convey the story movingly.Gordon Flagg