The Graphic Narrative

I read the Will Eisner novel Dropsie Avenue. One of the fist things that struck me was that the art style seemed almost Baroque. Steep contrast using lots of absolute black to convey drama. Tense compositions. The subject matter of the first scene could be baroque or biblical, hatred of another clan causes a man to do an unspeakable horror, leaving two graves under the same family tree.
The subject matter that takes up the majority of the novel isn't exactly what you would expect from a classical painting or a pulp comic book. It details the squabbles and relationships of a neighborhood. Not exactly the mundane details of their lives, but the events and arguments that define them. It was fascinating to me how he didn't need to stick with the same characters to have a consistent story. A vignette would focus on one family and after the conclusion of their main drama we would hear characters a generation later lightly gossiping about their great horrors that befell them.
I remember you mentioning in class that Eisner's favorite way to communicate meaning and emotion is through body language. I tried to pay attention to this throughout the novel. A characters shift in mood during a scene can be told entire through this.
A final take away from the graphic novel was how unique it was to this medium. A film definitely couldn't have contained all these interweaving stories. A set that transformed from populating farmland into a fine established street into a slum. However, I don't think it would have worked as a novel either. There's so many characters that you meet for such a short amount of time, it would be hard to form a connection and be interested if you didn't form a visual connection with them.