Detective Denny Colt, left for dead after an encounter with a criminal's explosive experiment, comes "back to life" to fight crime in Central City from his base in Wildwood Cemetery, letting villains think he’s a powerful ghost named The Spirit, his costume a rumpled blue suit and fedora, red tie, and domino mask. Groundbreaking illustration and storyelling full of fast-paced action and dialogue, femme fatales, grotesque villains, and dark cityscapes, with just enough sly humor behind our hero's mask. Darwyn Cooke (who revived The Spirit for DC Comics in 2006) lists eight essential Eisner Spirit stories to read, most of which are included in this great collection!

All three A Contract with God stories (A Contract with God, A Life Force, and Dropsie Avenue) are collected here for the first time. Will Eisner's legendary graphic novel narratives are set during the Great Depression and the city tenement backdrop of his immigrant youth. The main theme throughout all the stories is human beings' fractious and uneasy relationship with God and the unseen forces in the universe effecting our existence (or creating an existential crisis, depending on how you look at it). The perfect example of the graphic novel being an American art form. Essential reading!

Will Eisner does for New York City what Harvey Pekar did for Cleveland. This collection of stories (New York, The Building, City People Notebook, and Invisible People) is probably the greatest celebration of the Big Apple--warts and all--in literature. Eisner, a lifelong New Yorker who knew the city from the bottom up, creates more dark and melancholy vignettes on city life in these stories, with just enough of an inkling of hope and salvation. In the forward, Neil Gaiman describes the book as containing "tales as brutal, as uncaring as the city itself", with "ancient buildings barnacled with laughter and stained with tears" to the subways, "humorless iron reptiles, clacking stupidly on a webbing of graceful steel rails."

The stories in this book are collected from Will Eisner's Quarterly magazine, taking a more humorous look at life. Stories include "The Telephone", one-page phone vignettes reminiscent of the slapstick style of Don Martin from MAD Magazine; black humor engulfs "The Long Hit" as an assassin botches a job only to retire to Florida 50 years later and run into the man he was supposed to kill; "A Sunset in Sunshine City'' is also set in Florida (Eisner retired there in the mid-1980s) and concerns a man, a neighboring widow, and a big inheritance; "Humans", in which Eisner chronicles caveman ancestors as they hunt a mastodon. All of these are fairly obscure little stories, but still worth a read!

For all intents and purposes, this collection is Eisner's illustrated autobiography, containing intimate and personal reflections on his life and work. In "To the Heart of the Storm", Eisner rides a train through Europe on his way to war and as sees images and scenes from his life up until then play out on the sprawling countryside outside his window. "The Dreamer" is about his early ambitions and hard fought victories early in his life and career in New York City. "The Name of the Game" chronicles his wife’s family tree and history. "The Day I Became a Professional” describes Eisner’s first rejection from a potential publisher. The book also features famous characters from the world of comics (under pseudonyms, 'natch) and other historical figures and family members, all drawn with Eisner’s realistic and striking style.