One of the first, if not the first, graphic novels, and it's a series of interwoven stories that, from the introduction, are based very much on Eisner's own experience of tenement life in the first half of the twentieth century. What struck me most was the size of it. Not the length, but the illustrations. Many of the graphic novels I read now are structured, on the page, in the same way as comics, with the odd full-page illustration. Lots of small pictures, lots of (often very tiny) text. But this is like... oh, imagine you're in the large print section of your local library. This is the kind of graphic novel you'd expect to see there. Everything blown up, lots of space on the page, big print. It really shows, I think, how the format has changed over the decades. I'm not the biggest graphic novel reader in the world but I've read some, and I don't remember reading a contemporary one that looks like this.

The presentation, I admit, was the most notable thing for me here. The subject matter's mildly interesting, but I didn't connect to a lot of it (I found the comments in the introduction on the death of Eisner's daughter more affecting than the part of the novel based on it) and the last section, with its sexual assaults, left me particularly cold.