A Contract with God
Four interconnected stories about the Jewish immigrant tenants of a Bronx apartment building — a man who abandons his faith after his daughter's death, a corrupt landlord, a child prodigy who manipulates her singing teacher, and a street girl who uses men for survival. The stories are drawn in an expressive, painterly style that owes more to newspaper illustration than standard comic book art. Eisner deliberately used the term "graphic novel" on the cover to signal his artistic ambitions.
A Contract with God is the work that popularized the term "graphic novel" as a designation for serious, book-format sequential art, arguing through its existence that comics were a legitimate literary form capable of addressing adult themes with formal sophistication. It inspired Art Spiegelman, Alan Moore, and Neil Gaiman to push the medium toward literary respectability. Eisner's advocacy for the medium as a worthy artistic form changed how the industry saw itself.
Eisner created the book after a period away from comics, having spent the postwar decades working on instructional comics for the U.S. military. His return to personal storytelling coincided with the direct market's emergence, which for the first time allowed comics to be sold in bookstores rather than only at newsstands, making a book-format work a viable commercial proposition.
Phil Seuling's creation of a direct distribution system — selling non-returnable comics directly to specialty shops — broke the newsstand monopoly and allowed small publishers to reach dedicated readers without national distribution. This infrastructure enabled the creator-owned revolution and made possible the publications of titles like Cerebus, Elfquest, and eventually Maus and Watchmen.