Minor Miracles: Long Ago and Once Upon a Time Back When Uncles Were Heroic, Cousins Were Clever, and Miracles Happened on Every Block

AUTHOR: Eisner, Will

ARTIST: Will Eisner (illustrator)

PUBLISHER: DC Comics; W. W. Norton

FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION: 2000

Publication History

Will Eisner’s Minor Miracles, subtitled Long Ago and Once Upon a Time Back When Uncles Were Heroic, Cousins Were Clever, and Miracles Happened on Every Block, was first published in 2000 by DC Comics. In 2001, it was translated into French as Petits miracles, published by Delcourt, and Spanish as Pequen~os milagros, published by Barcelona Norma. It was republished in English by W. W. Norton in 2009.

Plot

Eisner’s Minor Miracles contains four, thematically related stories. “The Miracle of Dignity,” “Street Magic,” “A New Kid on the Block,” and “A Special Wedding Ring” all share the theme of modern-day miracles in an urban setting. “The Miracle of Dignity” concerns the Depression-era rags-to-riches-to-rags story of unscrupulous Uncle Amos. Uncle Amos takes advantage of his honest and well-meaning cousin Irving, a well-to-do furniture dealer who takes pity on the impoverished Amos. Amos is given a new lease on life when Irving lends him ten thousand dollars; Amos refuses to sign a promissory note because he has no intention of paying back the money. Amos blackmails Irving emotionally to secure a furniture store on the Concourse and watches nonchalantly as Irving goes bankrupt. Suddenly, Amos and Irving have switched places; Amos has become a financial success, and Irving has become penniless, but no longer naïve. The plot comes full circle as Irving blackmails Amos emotionally, coercing him to pay for the education of Irving’s son, who becomes a successful lawyer as Amos reverts to his impoverished, homeless life.

The second vignette tells the story of Mersh, an immigrant boy walking through a tough neighborhood with his young cousin. The street-savvy Mersh employs his craftiness to avoid being beaten up. Three hoodlums intercept him the day after they have beaten him up, telling him that immigrants of his kind (the text never indicates what kind) have no right to walk in their territory. One hoodlum writes “GUILTY” on two pieces of paper and places them in a hat, telling Mersh that one paper is blank and the other says “GUILTY.” If Mersh selects the one that says “GUILTY,” he will be beaten up, but if he picks the one that is blank, he will not be harmed. Mersh selects one paper and, without reading it or showing it to the predators, swallows it. Because the remaining paper says “GUILTY,” Mersh announces that the one he swallowed must have been blank; thus, he outsmarts the gang members and is free to walk away with his cousin.

The third story in Minor Miracles is a poignant one about a homeless boy who does not know his past or how to speak. Miracles occur around him and are, perhaps, attributable to him; Eisner leaves this point ambiguous. Regardless, characters throughout the story are “saved” or helped with or without the boy’s interference. For example, the nameless boy recovers money from a stolen cash register; a man tries to leave his wife for his secretary, but miraculously he ends up staying with his wife because his valise is stolen; neighbors reconcile after a missing garbage can miraculously reappears. The story ends with the boy being taken in by the character Melba, but the boy eventually leaves, never to return.

“A Special Wedding Ring” is a touching tale of Marvin, who is disabled, and Reba who is deaf and unable to speak. The two are thrown together and coerced into marriage by their widowed mothers who fear that their children will be forever alone unless they marry. Marvin and Reba overcome their reluctance and do marry; the marriage of convenience succeeds at first—a blessing attributed to the special ring donated by Shloyma Emmis. Then a miracle occurs: Reba regains her hearing and speech, causing her to be happy and feel that she no longer needs her disabled husband, whom she leaves. Marvin becomes miserable until another miracle occurs—Reba loses her sight and becomes helpless again. When Marvin finds out, he reclaims his former wife, and they live happily ever after.

Characters

•Cousin Irving is a furniture-store owner who tries to help Uncle Amos become a successful and dignified man.

•Uncle Amos is a schnorrer, a deceitful con artist, who takes advantage of Irving, but who, after a brief stint as a successful businessman (which he achieves at Irving’s expense), resumes his rightful place as a beggar.

•Mersh is a streetwise immigrant who needs to outsmart bullies in his rough neighborhood in order to survive.

•Melba is a bookstore owner who becomes emotionally attached to the unnamed boy and delves into his past to find out who he is. She is a caring person who enjoys helping others, which is a trait that the boy apparently shares.

•The unnamed boy may have been kidnapped at a young age and thus never acquired language. He is emotionally fragile and easily scared, which is logical because he was allegedly locked up by kidnappers.

•Marie Rizzo is a woman who owns a boarding house and who mistakenly believes that her dead son, Silvio, whom she misses terribly, has returned to her in the form of the unnamed boy.

•Shloyma Emmis is a deeply religious Jew who sells jewelry.

•Marvin is a disabled man who lives with his mother until she insists that he marry Reba, believing no other woman would want to marry him. He is a caring and forgiving man who is deeply devoted to Reba, even when she is not loyal to him.

•Reba is deaf and unable to speak. She marries Marvin unwillingly after being pressured by her mother. Once she recovers her hearing and speech, she leaves her husband, believing herself superior and feeling ashamed to be married to a disabled man.

Artistic Style

Eisner uses black, white, and gray with shadows. He begins the stories with splash pages, which consume the entire page, drawing the reader into the action. He creates panels of different sizes for variety and to emphasize certain scenes within the stories. Eisner employs shadows effectively to portray both the poverty of the tenement community and the unscrupulous nature of some of the characters, such as when Mr. Golin leaves his wife by sneaking out the window to the fire escape, when Marvin and Reba fight after she regains her hearing and speech and wants a divorce, and also when Shloyma Emmis is murdered. Eisner does a wonderful job of creating the visages of the hoodlums who threaten Mersh—delinquents who seem simultaneously realistic and caricatured with bulbous noses, weird hats, and goofy grins. Eisner’s shadows also locate the text in time and place—aging, run-down brick tenement buildings in the early part of the twentieth century. Eisner also employs exaggerated facial expressions and hand gestures, such as when Marie Rizzo convinces herself that the nameless boy is the reincarnation of her dead son and when Shloyma Emmis gets excited when he hears about Reba and Marvin’s engagement.

Themes

The primary theme is divine miracles and divine intervention versus coincidence and human action. A second theme involves survival in the urban environment. Eisner suggests that the unnamed boy in “A New Kid on the Block” creates miracles because of his innate, unspoiled goodness. During the mysterious boy’s presence on Dropsie Avenue, chaos transforms into order, and feuds and unhappy marriages are healed. The narrator leads the reader to question whether the cause is coincidence or the result of the boy’s possible divine ability to create miracles.

In “A Special Wedding Ring,” when Shloyma Emmis learns that Reba and Marvin will marry, he calls it a miracle from God; God provides for the disabled by allowing them to find, marry, and comfort each other. Emmis gives them a special wedding diamond that seems small or luckless but is miraculous in its symbolic ability to keep the couple together. It seems, perhaps, that Emmis watches over Marvin and Reba through the ring. When Reba leaves Marvin after regaining her hearing and power of speech, thus apparently ending the marriage, Emmis is murdered (perhaps martyred); his death causes Reba to go blind and return to Marvin.

“The Miracle of Dignity” and “Street Magic” involve “fake” miracles, which manifest Eisner’s theme of the prevalence of street smarts in poor, immigrant tenement communities. Uncle Amos rises to financial success not because of a miracle or his dignity, but rather because of emotional exploitation. The homeless Amos refuses to accept small acts of charity because he claims he has dignity; he therefore demands large charitable donations such as a ten-thousand-dollar loan that he never repays and a large furniture store on the Concourse. By garnering these large gifts during the Great Depression, he looks like a sagacious businessman, and he attributes his “success” to his dignity (demanding only large acts of charity). However, he has simply received these gifts without earning or working for them. As with most of the characters in Minor Miracles, Amos gets what he deserves by losing everything in the end. Irving, who has true dignity, is restored to financial health through his son’s success.

The miracle in “Street Magic” consists of Mersh outsmarting the three bullies who terrorize him. In an example of Eisner’s false miracles, Mersh’s cleverness, not divine intervention, saves him from the bullies. Eisner thus points out to us all that some events can be attributed to miracles while others are simply coincidence, fate, or the result of human intelligence (or the lack of it).

Impact

Eisner was hugely influential on the comic and graphic novel industries. He proved innovative as the genre transformed from comic strip to comic book. He broke new ground in the medium by creating avenues for comic book structure and form. He mastered the “jump cut”; worked with unique perspectives and camera angles, dark shadows, and oddly-shaped panels; and he introduced other innovations as he worked on The Spirit (1940-1952). The unusually shaped and frameless panels that he used helped him to redesign the comics format. Eisner influenced comics creators such as Jack Kirby, Lou Fine, Bob Kane, Chuck Mazoujian, Bob Powell, Klaus Nordling, Harvey Kurtzman, Scott McCloud, and Neil Gaiman. Thus, in 1987, the Will Eisner Comic Industry Award for excellence and innovation in the business was created to honor him. The award was also created in part to honor Eisner for his positive impact on future comic book and graphic novel creators.

Further Reading

Eisner, Will. The Contract with God Trilogy: Life on Dropsie Avenue (2006).

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Will Eisner’s New York: Life in the Big City (2006).

Katchor, Ben. The Jew of New York (2001).

Bibliography

Eisner, Will. Comics and Sequential Art: Principles and Practices from the Legendary Cartoonist. New York: W. W. Norton, 2008.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative. New York: W. W. Norton, 2008.

Wolk, Douglas. Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean. Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, 2008.