William Erwin Eisner was born on March 6, 1917 in Brooklyn, NY and died on January 3, 2005. Eisner was one of the most influential comic book artists as he is widely regarded as the creator of the graphic novel with the release of A Contract With God.

Eisner started his career working for the comics magazine Wow. The magazine had a fleeting longevity, which led Eisner to form Eisner and Iger, an independent publisher with his fellow cartoonist Samuel Maxwell "Jerry" Iger. Under their publisher company, they employed artists such as Bob Kane and Jack Kirby, which would also later go down as some of the founding fathers of comics as we know them today. 

As for his own personal work, Eisner is widely known for his comic strip The Spirit and his aforementioned graphic novel A Contract With God. The Spirit, which debuted in June 1940, had such a large contrast from other comics at the time, as the hero did not have any super powers or intricate gadgets to make him stand out from the rest. Rather than go for super, Eisner made hero in The Spirit, which went by the same name, a more noir style of character.

In 1978, Eisner made his return to the world of comics with his release of A Contract With God. Referring to it as "sequential art", Eisner redefined the medium by creating comic books with full, complete stories, changing the publication of the comics from always being periodical to being presented in a book format. 

Having himself been inducted into several Hall of Fames, most notably the Jack Kirby Hall of Fame, he was also honored with his own hall of fame called the Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards.