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From today's featured article

Will Eisner

A Contract with God is a 1978 graphic novel by American cartoonist Will Eisner (pictured). It is a short story cycle focusing on poor Jewish characters who live in a tenement in New York City. In the lead story, a religious man gives up his faith after the death of his young adopted daughter. The four stories in the novel are thematically linked with motifs of frustration, disillusionment, violence, and ethnic identity. Eisner uses large, monochromatic images in dramatic perspective, and emphasizes caricatured facial expressions. Few panels or captions have traditional borders. The small press Baronet Books released A Contract with God in 1978 and marketed it as a "graphic novel", which then became the common term for book-length comics. It sold slowly at first, but gained respect from Eisner's peers, and has since been reprinted by larger publishers. Eisner produced two sequels set in the same tenement: A Life Force in 1988, and Dropsie Avenue in 1995. A Contract with God cemented Eisner's reputation as an elder statesman of comics, and he continued to produce graphic novels and theoretical works on comics until his death in 2005. (Full article...)

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Cokato Temperance Hall

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In the news

Roch Marc Christian Kaboré

Thirty-two workers die as a result of fire at the Azerbaijani Gunashli oilfield in the Caspian Sea.
Flooding across southern India kills at least 300 people and displaces approximately 1.8 million others since November.
Fourteen people are killed and twenty-one injured in a shooting in San Bernardino, California.
Roch Marc Christian Kaboré (pictured) is elected the first president of Burkina Faso since the 2014 Burkinabé uprising.
Japan resumes whaling against the ruling of the International Court of Justice.
The International Monetary Fund approves adding the Chinese renminbi to its basket of reserve currencies.

Ongoing events:
- European migrant crisis
Recent deaths:
- Scott Weiland
- Joseph Engelberger

On this day...

December 6: Hanukkah begins at sunset (Judaism, 2015); Independence Day in Finland (1917)

Blast cloud from the Halifax Explosion

1060 – Béla I the Champion was crowned king of Hungary.
1865 – Slavery in the United States was officially abolished when the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution was ratified.
1917 – A ship in Halifax Harbour, Nova Scotia, Canada, carrying TNT and picric acid caught fire after a collision with another ship and caused the second-largest man-made accidental explosion in history (pictured).
1975 – Four members of the Provisional Irish Republican Army took two people hostage in a house on Balcombe Street in Marylebone, London, surrendering six days later.
2005 – Members of the People's Armed Police shot and killed several people in Dongzhou, Guangdong, China, who were protesting government plans to build a new power plant.

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Today's featured picture

Self Portrait with Physalis, by Egon Schiele (1890–1918) completed in 1912. Schiele, an early expressionist painter from Tulin, Lower Austria, produced numerous self-portraits during his career, including several in which he depicted himself naked. His works are characterized by twisted body shapes, intensity and raw sexuality.

Painting: Egon Schiele

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