Will Eisner

William Erwin Eisner (1917–2005) was an American cartoonist, writer, and entrepreneur, one of the earliest pioneers in the comic book industry, best known for his innovative series The Spirit (1940–1952) featuring the masked detective Denny Colt. In 1978, he popularized the term "graphic novel" with A Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories, a collection of stories about Bronx tenement life, and later produced influential graphic novels exploring immigrant experiences and myths. IMDb. He also created educational comics for the U.S. military, taught sequential art, and authored Comics and Sequential Art (1985); the Eisner Awards are named in his honor.