WILL EISNER, who called himself a “writer with pictures”, did more than any other to make the comic story emotive, real, gritty and relevant. Perhaps most of all, he made it respected.

His work after the age of 60 was his most revolutionary. Denis Kitchen, Eisner’s friend and publisher at Kitchen Sink Press, said: “At an age when he could have retired and gone fishing every day, he was creating new genres.”

Eisner was born in New York, in 1917, the son of Jewish immigrants. His father had been a scenery painter in Vienna. He attended DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, where he drew comic strips for the school newspaper. His first published character was Captain Scott Dalton in WOW — What a Magazine!

Eisner started a company with Jerry Iger, the Eisner and Iger Studio. The pair pooled $15 in savings to pay for three months’ rent on a tenement on East 41st Street, Manhattan. Eisner would later describe his business as a “packaging company that produced the contents of comic books for publishers. It created characters and stories with a staff of writers and artists.”

Eisner, who created the buccaneering Sea Hawk and Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, was sure that the demand for pulp literature was about to explode. With the arrival of Superman in 1938 it did just that, although Eisner — a lover of antiheroes and underdogs — had declined to develop the man of steel. He did, however, employ Bob Kane, Batman’s creator, and Jack Kirby, of the Fantastic Four.

At the height of the studio’s success, Eisner sold his share to Iger and left to develop his favourite character, The Spirit. He joined Quality Comics Group, which developed the character for a Sunday newspaper. The Spirit — a police coroner presumed dead and buried alive — was not a particularly super hero. Dressed as a gumshoe detective with a Lone Ranger mask — and this only because his paymasters demanded it — The Spirit was dubbed “The world’ s most outnumbered crimefighter”. He had no special powers and was distracted by wasp-waisted femmes fatales named P’Gal and P’Gel, whose names derived from the red-light area of Paris. Chained women were in constant need of rescue in this cheerfully misogynistic world, and The Spirit was not too much of a hero to spank them on occasion.

While its politics belonged to another age, The Spirit was graphically and conceptually well ahead of its time. Unlike Superman, Batman or Captain America, the original Spirit adventures still look fresh. Eisner pioneered a cinematic style with extreme close-ups of faces and moody frames with no speech bubbles that conveyed a melancholy sense of time and space. The strip held a great spark of humour, despite its bleak storylines of abuse and corruption. “My stories are all centred around the human being, the business of survival, of struggling against the forces of life itself,” Eisner said. “My interest is not the superhero but the little man.”

The Spirit ran in 20 newspapers, reaching an audience of five million, between 1940 and 1952. When Eisner was drafted into the Army, The Spirit was taken on by his assistants, Jules Feiffer and Lou Fine. Feiffer is now a Pulitzer prize-winning cartoonist and playwright. Indeed, Eisner oversaw the apprenticeships of much of the US’s cartooning talent, including George Tuska, Bob Powell, Reed Crandell and Nick Viscardi. In the Army, Eisner created an instructional character, Joe Dope, to tell soldiers how to mend Jeeps and maintain equipment.

When The Spirit ended, Eisner spent 25 years at the American Visual Corporation, which produced guides and educational material for the Government. This kept him out of the firing line when anti-Communist paranoia extinguished many superhero strips in the 1950s. The Comics Code Authority of 1954 made much illegal: sexuality, gore, vampires, zombies and any suggestion that evil might triumph. Many distributors would not touch anything without a CCA label, and the genre went into creative decline. Eisner stayed away from comics. He started a commercial-art company which attracted clients such as RCA Records and the Baltimore Colts.

In the late 1970s, comics underwent a new revolution. Eisner came out of obscurity at 61 to redefine the genre with a masterpiece of moral struggle. The first graphic novel, A Contract with God, was about an immigrant, Frimme Hersche, who becomes a Bronx slum landlord after being forsaken by God. With it Eisner made his strongest case for comics as adult literature.

He followed it with more than a dozen graphic novels, including Fagin the Jew (2003), redefining the Dickensian character. He explored the roots of anti-Semitism in The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which will be published in May. He also produced two textbooks on “sequential art”, a term he coined when asked to teach a cartooning course at New York’s School of Visual Arts in 1972. DC Comics is reissuing all 645 Spirit stories in hardback as The Spirit Archives.

Will Eisner, cartoonist and entrepreneur, was born on March 6, 1917. He died on January 3, 2005, aged 87.