Artist, Author, Entrepreneur. He received world-wide acclaim during the 20th century as an American who became a pioneer cartoon producer, a writer, and an entrepreneur. He is considered one of the most important contributors to the comic medium beginning in 1936 with the "Wow What a Magazine!. After this magazine folded, he and artist Jerry Iger formed Eisner and Iger, an independent publisher that employed comic legends such as Bob Kane, who created "Batman" and Jack Kirby, who created the "Fantastic Four," "X-Men," and "Captain American." Eisner developed a number of comic characters of his own during this period such as "Sheena, Queen of the Jungle," but he was remembered mostly for "Spirit," the working-class hero that debuted in June of 1940. He was considered the "Orson Welles of Comics" and the "Father of the Graphic Novel." For the next 25 years, his company produced visually stimulating and highly effective educational comic books for schools, government, and the military. They produced flash cards for teaching children colors, mathematics, and other subjects. This became a very successful business enterprise. In 1978 he returned to the mainstream comic world, but with a more mature sense. His final work, "The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion," was published posthumously. He wanted to publicly recognize new comic artists, hence the Will Eisner Award is considered to be the most prestigious annual award given to artists in the comic world. He was one of the first inductees to the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame. In 1985 he wrote "Comic and Sequential Art," a well-known book on creating the art of comics. He wrote over two dozen books in his lifetime and gave numerous lectures in universities. In 2007 a documentary about his life was released, "Will Eisner: A Portrait of Sequential Art." Born William Ervin Eisner into a East European Jewish family, his father had been a fairly successful artist prior to immigrating to the United States before World War I. His mother did not appreciate her husband being a professional artist as there was no steady income. His father had to overcome the fact that he spoke very little English but managed to paint scenes for theatrical performances. After his father's death during the Great Depression of the 1930s, Eisner became as a teenager the family's primary breadwinner by selling newspapers and later becoming a budding newspaper artist. After high school graduation, he studied a year at the Art Students League of New York. There he learned of a position an advertising writer-cartoonist for a newspaper, which led to the position at "Wow What a Magazine!" and his cartoon career. He married and was the father of two children. Will Eisner Week is celebrated by comic fans around the world in the month of March. The Will Eisner traveling art exhibit debuted in the fall of 2018. Bob Andelman's authorized biography "Will Eisner : A Spirited Life" was published in 2005, and Michael Schumacher's "Will Eisner: A Dreamer's Life in Comics" was released in 2010. In 2002, he was honored as the second recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Federation for Jewish Culture.