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Will Eisner (1917-2005) saw himself as “a graphic witness reporting on life, death, heartbreak, and the never-ending struggle to prevail.” The publication of A Contract With God when Eisner was sixty-one proved to be a watershed moment both for him and for comic literature. It marked the birth of the modern graphic novel and the…
Called “a masterpiece” by R. Crumb, A Life Force chronicles not only the Great Depression but also the rise of Nazism and the spread of socialist politics through the depiction of the protagonist, Jacob Shtarkah, whose existential search reflected Eisner’s own lifelong struggle.
Through a quartet of four interwoven stories, A Contract With God express the joy, exuberance, tragedy, and drama of life on the mythical Dropsie Avenue in the Bronx. This is the legendary book that launched a new art form and reaffirmed Will Eisner as one of the great pioneers of American graphics.
Before the Lower East Side was cool, there was the grit and grime of Avenue C, a world filled with street musicians, overflowing sewers, and peeping toms, all recalled in Eisner’s unforgettable style.
A roman à clef about Eisner’s early years in the thriving comics industry prior to World War II–featuring new annotations that reveal comics pioneers such as Bob Kane and Jack Kirby who appear under pseudonyms.
A haunting trio of stories about life’s forgotten shut-ins in the tradition of Kafka, Gogol, and Melville. Invisible People tells the story of three ordinary individuals adrift in the city. The characters who inhabit these tales each value their privacy; their lives are lived alone, without engaging with the outside world. And yet each reaches…
A historical novel touching on prejudice, assimilation, and anti-Semitism, this sweeping saga takes us from New York in the eighteenth century to Vienna before World War I, and finally to America during the depression and World War II.
In Dropsie Avenue: The Neighborhood, Eisner graphically traces the social trajectory of this mythic avenue over four centuries, creating a sweeping panorama of the city and its waves of new residents, whose stories present an unending “story of life, death, and resurrection.”
In this classic graphic novel, Will Eisner’s pen cuts an expansive swath through all aspects of the human condition. A Family Matter starts close to home, following a family as it gathers to observe the ninetieth birthday of its patriarch. While they must decide how best to provide for him, he ends up making a…
With an unparalleled eye for stories and expressive illustration, Will Eisner, the master and pioneer of American comics art, presents one of his renowned celebrations of the Big Apple. No illustrator evoked the melancholy duskiness of New York City as expressively as Eisner, who knew the city from the bottom up. The Building is a…
Will Eisner was present at the dawn of comics. In the 1940s, he pushed the boundaries of the medium with his acclaimed weekly comic strip The Spirit, and with the publication of A Contract with God in 1978, he created a new medium altogether: the graphic novel. It was unlike anything seen before, heralding an…
Will Eisner’s work on The Spirit was, in its way, as groundbreaking as Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane. Both artistic achievements rewrote the book on sequential storytelling and had lasting impacts on all that followed them. Featured within these pages are 17 Spirit stories all from Eisner’s peak period, 1946 – 1950, generally regarded as his…
Wherever men live, be they nomads or city dwellers, there they must have law and a man to enforce it. Meet Detective John Law of Crossroads City. Strong, decent, hardworking and hard-nosed. He’s a man who believes in the law and order. He’s the last of a dying breed. In 1948, Will Eisner produced the…
