Will Eisner was amiable, gentle, friendly, approachable, encouraging, yet with steel beneath. He had a practicality, an awareness of human frailty and fallibility, an enormous generosity of spirit. In the work of his third career, Eisner demonstrated himself an American storyteller, like Ray Bradbury, like O. Henry, unashamedly populist while creating stories for a populace who were not there to read them, not yet.

It would be easy and dishonest to view the stories in this book as valentines to the Big City, to New York. And yet, if they are, these are peculiar valentines—a concatenation of unconsummated desires, unmet loves, fates avoided and unavoidable, people—damaged and bruised, hopefully or hopelessly on their way to the grave, with or without each other.

The Big City is a series of vignettes, of tiny plays, some silent, some not; some are stories and some merely moments. While Eisner was producing most of the drawings in this book, he was teaching at the School of Visual Arts in New York, and there is a teacher’s eye in the way many of these stories and especially the short-shorts are told. Eisner’s mastery of silent storytelling is apparent. Dialogue, when he uses it, tends to be drawn with a broad brush, a cartoon of speech with never a word wasted, but his ear for the rhythms of the ways New Yorkers talk is remarkable. On occasion, rereading these, I was reminded that Jules Feiffer was Eisner’s assistant, over half a century ago: “Go to work, Charlie,” repeats the wife in “Trash,” who has thrown out Charlie’s cap and with it all his hopes and dreams and youth. Charlie says, “I don’t feel so good. I’m tired, my feet hurt . . . Maybe I shouldn’t carry so many samples. That bag gets heavier every day.” And he carries the heavy bag past the garbagemen who are disposing of his past.

All his life, Eisner was, as I have remarked, an observer of people. The tales and fragments in City People Notebook are, as the title suggests, observations—notebook pages, and stories built up from notebook pages, ranging from sketches all the way to complete short stories, stories about Space and Time, neither of which is quite the same in a city.

“The Building” is a ghost story, although the four ghosts in it are, we learn, as much ghosts while they are alive as they ever are when dead. Mensh, who could not save children; Gilda Greene, who did not marry a poet; Tonatti, the street violinist who died as the building died; and Hammond the developer, a driven man. The optimistic ending of “The Building,” though, contrasts painfully with the last three short stories, Invisible People. The protagonists of “Sanctum,” of “Mortal Combat,” of “The Power” could be characters from The Spirit, forty years earlier, but the fundamental hospitality and (occasionally ironic) justice of the world of The Spirit has been replaced by a place as bleak and unwelcoming as Kafka’s. There is no justice here: there is no place for you in the world, magic will not help you, and nor will love. The last three stories are cold things, as unsentimental as three stories could be.