powered middle class crimefighter who seemingly returns from the dead and wears a little "Lone Ranger" style mask to obscure his true identity. The weekly Spirit comic books ran for twelve years, but Eisner never considered them to be his best work. For years, he had something else in mind; elevating the comic book format to the status of high art.
He succeeded with this goal when he became the inventor of the graphic novel format with his A Contract With God, a series of four connected short stories about the lives of the Jewish immigrant inhabitants of a 1930's tenement in the Bronx. The stories are interesting because they are so universal, as all great stories are.
Some comment that the artwork is somewhat cartoonish, but it can be seen as exhibiting an exaggerated realism such as that evidenced in the great caricatures, such as the work of Bill Mauldin, who used the form to show the spirit-dulling effects of World war II on the soldiers involved. The characters are real people but the way in which they are drawn shows that they are archetypic symbols representing many people who have found themselves in similar situations. A Contract With God is rightly considered to be a classic because of the depth of its content, and not just because it was the first graphic novel.
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