A superhero of the comics world

When Will Eisner died early this week following complications from coronary bypass surgery, more than a few of his cartooning peers noted that it felt as if he’d been cut down in his prime, despite his being 87.

Outside the world of comics, few people knew his name; within comics, he was legendary as the cartoonist who opened up the possibilities of his medium multiple times over the course of six decades. He didn’t try to prove that his work could be art -- the shortest route to proving it’s not. Once he hit his prime, he simply worked from the assumption that it was art.

Eisner started drawing comics professionally as a teenager -- his “Hawks of the Sea,” which began in 1938, was a solid but typical adventure strip of its time. In 1940, he came up with his first great idea: the Spirit section, a weekly 16-page (later eight-page), full-color comic book that appeared in Sunday newspapers, anchored by an Eisner story starring his character, The Spirit.

The Spirit was a superhero of sorts, but a “middle-class” one, as Eisner put it; his outfit was a blue suit and hat, a red tie and a mask that almost seemed like an afterthought, and he seemed to be getting beaten up or shot on every other page. While other comics of the day had the feel of the action serials that preceded feature films, “The Spirit” was closer in tone to the features themselves; even in its earliest days, Eisner was experimenting with mood lighting and “camera angles” and writing playful, bantering dialogue inspired by screwball comedies.

The first page of every Spirit story was a witty, inventive piece of design, and he never used the same logo twice: The Spirit’s name would appear as a reflection in a puddle of water, as a set of bars in a prison cell window, as fluttering paper in the air.

Eisner opened up the cramped comics-page layouts of the time to huge open spaces and menacing swatches of black. A postwar Spirit story could be campy topical satire, a brutal crime narrative or a wry miniature that had more to do with its setting (Central City, a barely disguised New York) than with any of Eisner’s recurring characters.

The strip started to feature bombshell femmes fatales with such names as Sparrow Fallon, Lorelei Rox and Sand Saref who couldn’t keep their hands off The Spirit. (The archetypal Spirit image is of the hero beaten and bound, with lipstick smooch marks all over his face.) And everyone else Eisner drew seemed to be made of hyper-expressive rubber: Every wrinkle in their clothes and contortion of their faces underscored what was happening in the story, as did the landscapes behind them. The torrential downpours he tended to draw to emphasize a grim film noir mood have come to be known among cartoonists as “Eisenshpritz.”

Some parts of “The Spirit” have aged badly -- it’s hard to bear the antics of Spirit’s thick-lipped, bellboy-attired sidekick Ebony White and his pal Bucken Wing. But a lot of the postwar stories are still enormously entertaining. (The entire run of “The Spirit” is being reprinted in hardcover editions, now in their 14th volume.)

Through the ‘50s and ‘60s, Eisner kept a fairly low profile, doing commercial art and producing instructional comics for the armed forces. In the ‘70s, as the comics fan community began to build a canon, old Spirit sections became prized among collectors, and reprints of them began to appear.

Other cartoonists, meanwhile, had picked up on Eisner’s postwar formal innovations. Virtually every comic book artist working today has taken something from Eisner, directly or indirectly. Frank Miller, the creator of “The Dark Knight Returns” and “Sin City,” is very much a disciple of Eisner’s (his early Daredevil comics paid explicit homage to “The Spirit,” right down to the Eisenshpritz), and hot-cartoonist-of-the-moment Craig Thompson (“Blankets,” “Carnet de Voyage”) owes a lot to the rough brushstrokes and free-form layouts of later Eisner.

Eisner’s next great leap came in 1978: “A Contract With God and Other Tenement Stories,” identified on the cover of its paperback edition as “a graphic novel.” Though that wasn’t the first time the phrase had ever been used, it caught on with “Contract.”

“A Contract With God” is actually less a novel than a collection of four linked short stories set in New York’s old Jewish tenements, but it was unlike any American comics before it. It wasn’t genre fiction, which was all that mainstream comics publishers were selling; it wasn’t transgressive in the manner of underground comics, although Eisner had similar sympathies.

Instead, it took its cues from literary fiction, and if Eisner never quite overcame his tendencies toward melodrama, the art more than made up for it. “A Contract With God” opened up Eisner’s style -- he began to tear away panel borders, drawing everything with scratchier, looser, more impressionistic lines.

Over the following years, he experimented with wordless comics and memoiristic stories and codified his ideas about visual narrative in 1985’s “Comics and Sequential Art,” the first book of theory about the medium. (The phrase “sequential art” appears to be his own; the idea was that comics are an art of implication, suggesting movement and change between panels.) He also kept publishing graphic novels.

The last few Eisner books are eccentric and often sentimental; “Fagin the Jew,” for instance, is an attempt to portray the “Oliver Twist” villain as a victim of anti-Semitism. (His final book, “The Plot,” about the history of the anti-Semitic text “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” will be published this year.) But his increasingly rough, dynamic drawing was always a treat.

The late-period Eisner was happy to play elder statesman -- he remained curious and encouraging about younger cartoonists’ work and occasionally collaborated with his stylistic heirs.

Since 1988, American comics’ annual awards have been called the Eisners. They’re presented every summer at Comic-Con International in San Diego, and Eisner always handed out the awards. In 2002, Eisner won one himself.

As writer Mark Evanier joked, “he’d missed out on the best part. He didn’t get to have Will Eisner hand it to him.”