Eisner was not the first artist to focus his love of physical action in his wrist and fingers, and decades later, in a discussion with the consummate draftsman Milton Caniff (the virtuoso behind the Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon newspaper strips), Eisner described contests with other budding cartoonists as they developed inking skills: “ike two local bullies hand wrestling, one of us would draw a long line and the idea was for the other to go over it without appreciably thickening it, until one or the other would waver his line. Eisner was a poor athlete, but he impressed neighborhood toughs by drawing national hero Charles Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Few artists have had as deep a love affair with New York City’s vast stage-set of elevated trains, sewer grates, streetlights, fire escapes, and clotheslines strung between tenement buildings.

The eldest child of immigrant parents (his mother was born on a boat sailing to New York from Romania), Eisner had a true appreciation for the downtrodden. In the next panel, this figure has been gunned down a frightened reporter witnesses the crime, her torso gridded by windowpanes. The long shadow cast by a dissenter on the street echoes the foreboding of Edward Hopper’s famous Night Shadows etching (which the Brooklyn-born, Bronx-raised Eisner might have seen at the Metropolitan Museum as a teenager, when he sketched the old masters there). Even before the United States entered World War II, Eisner was drawing skulking figures with swastika armbands. The Society of Illustrators’ two-floor retrospective of Eisner’s work reveals that as early as the March 1940 issue of Smash Comics, he was employing noir shadows and dramatically angled viewpoints in tales of global intrigue. Both auteurs expanded their mediums in ways we still reckon with today. Welles apprenticed in classical theater, while Eisner studied narratives almost as psychologically complex (and more innately American): reams of newspaper strips and Sunday funnies. The Spirit has been called the Citizen Kane of comics, and it would be accurate to say that Eisner and Orson Welles - the actor/writer/director who brought Charles Foster Kane to life in that 1941 masterpiece - sprouted from the same loam of pulp magazines and cliff-hanging radio serials.

Humanity leavened with contradiction, pathos, and humor describes the cast of characters Eisner (1917–2005) created in his trailblazing career, most notably in the adventures of a heavy-fisted, lighthearted crime-buster, the Spirit. “I’ve never been able to see a villain as absolute! Always in the back of my mind I say, ‘I bet he’s good to his mother.’ ”

“I have problems with villains,” the comic-book virtuoso Will Eisner once said in an interview. “The Super,” from A Contract With God, 1978 Courtesy Kitchen Sink Books

Will Eisner's New York by Will Eisner