Mood And Setting In Will Eisner's Dropsie Avenue

Different emotions are often associated with certain settings in a person’s life, and the mood of these places can lead to a bigger picture. In the graphic novel Dropsie Avenue, Will Eisner uses mood and setting to create different emotions that the readers feel throughout the story. The story follows immigrant life in the south Bronx on a mythical Dropsie Avenue. Throughout the story, Eisner uses mood and setting to convey the themes that people are not welcoming towards change from ethnic groups, and there can be disastrous results when too many groups are in a small area.

Throughout the graphic novel Dropsie Avenue, Will Eisner uses the mood to show the theme that people are not welcoming toward change from ethnic groups. For example, on

At this time in the novel, many new ethnic and religious groups are moving onto Dropsie Avenue, creating a variety of new cultures, such as Jewish and Hispanic culture. This is shown by the signs written in Spanish and the Star of David present on the page, and by having an angry man standing right outside the signs, which creates a somber and distressed mood, as readers see how members of the community react harshly to new ethnic groups. By having this disgruntled man standing in front of those signs, Eisner shows how various ethnic groups are affecting the culture in the neighborhood, but members of the community are not welcoming to the new groups. A similar situation occurs earlier, on page 7, where the mood of the characters is one of anger, as the people who live on Dropsie Avenue are very upset that immigrants are coming. The English come, and one man who is very upset about the English moving in drunkenly goes to set their land on fire, but ends up setting his niece on fire and killing her. Eisner shows the anger by using lots of black ink on the page to create a somber and distressed mood, as well as the very detailed

Also, 1870 is a time before many ethnic groups have moved in. Eisner does this to foreshadow what will come so readers can relate to this beginning of the book after we see what happens after there is an influx of immigrants into the Bronx. By including this setting of the Bronx, and the way Eisner describes it, readers have an idea of what the Bronx was like before the immigrant groups, making the theme that there can be disastrous results when too many ethnic groups are clumped together more poignant. On pages 156-157, a century after the beginning of the book, Eisner describes the setting of Dropsie Avenue: “15,000 buildings became vacant in the area...Dropsie Avenue was “bombed out”, while drawing very eery and physically decrepit buildings. By showing the setting of Dropsie Avenue and describing it as such, Eisner is able to show the reader all the effects that all the ethnic groups had just a century after its creation. By using setting to show how much Dropsie Avenue changed in just under a century, Eisner allows readers to physically see how disastrous the results can be when too many ethnic groups are clumped together. To end the novel, on page,