Will Eisner

An American cartoonist and writer whose 1978 book A Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories, combining thematically linked short stories into a single square-bound volume, popularized the term 'graphic novel' by appearing on its trade-paperback cover. Fan historian Richard Kyle had first used the term in a 1964 fanzine essay, and Eisner himself later said he was unaware of that earlier use; his own account of the book's motivation was that the readers he had written for as children in the 1940s had grown into adults who wanted more than costumed heroes fighting.