Assignment 5: Eisner and Thompson

There are a lot of storytelling similarities between Eisner's Contract with God and Thompson's Blankets, but they also have their drastic differences.

They are both seemingly very personal stories, coming from a very specific point of view on life and the situations that the characters are faced with. They have similar themes involving religion, morality, and the consequences of those actions, as well as how these characters choose to resolve those situations. They feel very human and honest, as if we are being told someone's life story and the lessons they learned in each of those cases.

Because they are so personal, we as an audience are able to more easily relate to these feelings that the characters are going through, even if we may have not been faced with the same situations. Blankets especially brought up some questions in my own head of things I have gone through, and make me question what it is the character learns in this story, and how I could have done things differently in my past. Or, even how they apply to me now.

Between the two, Blankets definitely resonated with me more, but I also think it's because of how the story was conveyed visually and how it was narrated.

 Contract with God was narrated from a 3rd person POV, which at times can distance ourselves from the characters, and see them more as what they are; characters in a story. The drawings certainly add to the mood, and tend to be very descriptive and in line with the dialogue that is being told to unify both aspects of the narrative. Blankets however, uses a 1st person approach with its dialogue so we are experiencing the story with the character. The drawings in this are also very descriptive, but they are not always directly connected with the dialogue and leave room for more abstract thought, and to make more metaphorical meaning between what is being narrated and what we are looking at.

I find these differences very interesting between the two styles of storytelling, but for me the more personal approach of Blankets had me gripped, whereas Contract with God was telling some similar messages and from a personal place, but it was farther removed from me on a personal level.

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