In a career of over six decades, Will Eisner has helped to establish comic books as something more than mere juvenilia. Cofounder, with Jerry Iger, of the first comics art studio in the 1930s, he helped transform the early funny strips into original comic books, with artwork from such talented illustrators as Bob Kane, Lou Fine, and Jack Kirby. In 1939, leaving his studio, he launched the innovative series "The Spirit," a superhero comic with a difference. "The Spirit" features a man not imbued with super powers or tights, but one who dresses in regular clothes and uses his own physical powers and personal cunning to protect Central City from the criminal element. While comic books often bring to mind pumped-up superheroes in tights, meaner than mean villains, and melodramatic plots, as David Hajdu noted in the New York Review of Books, with Eisner, "the comics medium becomes something...