Will Eisner

Will Eisner (Brooklyn, New York, 1917 - Lauderdale Lakes, Florida, 2005) was an American cartoonist, writer and entrepreneur who worked in comics from the late 1930s until his death. He created The Spirit in 1940 and is remembered for helping to establish that comics could carry adult stories, and for popularizing the term graphic novel in 1978.

Born in Brooklyn to a Jewish family of immigrant parents, he grew up poor during the Great Depression, selling newspapers on street corners while drawing for his high school's publications. In 1936 he began selling strips to Wow, What a Magazine!, edited by Jerry Iger. When that title folded, the two set up a studio that supplied original material to publishers, one of the typical arrangements of the period.

In 1940 Eisner pitched a new format to Quality Comics: a sixteen-page Sunday supplement. The result, The Spirit, followed Denny Colt, a detective without superpowers who protects a fictional city. The series stood out for its near-cinematic framing, its contrasts of light and shadow and its experimental storytelling. Eisner stopped drawing it when he was drafted during the Second World War, and he returned to it later; it ran until 1952.

Afterwards he spent several decades running an illustration and commercial art firm and drew very few comics. He came back to the medium in the late 1970s with longer works aimed at a literary readership. A Contract with God (1978), set in the Bronx of the 1930s, is the book most often linked to the phrase graphic novel. Later works such as The Dreamer and The Building explored personal memory, urban life and the experience of immigrants.

His lasting influence is also theoretical. Comics and Sequential Art (1985) and Graphic Storytelling (1996) were among the first systematic attempts to describe how comics work as a language, and he taught at the School of Visual Arts in New York. The Will Eisner Awards, established in 1988, are presented each year at the San Diego Comic-Con.