Will Eisner, who died Monday after heart surgery at Fort Lauderdale, was present at the creation of the comic book, and his most famous strip, “The Spirit,” made him one of the most influential comics artists ever.

“The Spirit” was uniquely distributed as a 12-page color insert in big-market Sunday newspapers for a decade beginning in 1940. It set new standards with its artwork and layout, as well as with its writing, which tended toward the sardonic and flatly humorous.

Eisner was an anomaly because he both wrote and illustrated his own material. He insisted on retaining copyrights as well. That allowed him to keep volumes of “The Spirit” in near-continuous reprints to the present day.

During the 1930s and 1940s, Eisner employed and helped launch the careers of many of the most important comics authors, including Jack Kirby (“Spider Man” and “Fantastic Four”), Bob Kane (“Batman”),and Jules Feiffer.

In the early 1950s, Eisner abruptly shut down “The Spirit.” He then spent two decades producing illustrated instructional materials for the armed forces. Later, when he found himself inspired by the “underground” comics artists of the early 1970s – many of whom were his disciples – Eisner returned to cartooning by helping to launch the graphic novel.

Will Eisner was born in Brooklyn and grew up in tenements in the Bronx, the son of an impoverished Viennese set painter who often worked for the Yiddish theater on the Lower East Side.

As a youngster, Eisner sold newspapers on Wall Street and was a consumer of his own wares. “I avidly followed the works of artists like ‘Popeye’s’ E.C. Segar,” he said in an interview in his collection “The Spirit: The Early Years.” “The adventure strips especially were very, very exciting for me, and around the time I started reading them they were entering their heyday.”

While attending De Witt Clinton High School, Eisner designed sets for dramatic productions and served as art director for the school newspaper, the Clintonian. He also studied at the Art Students League.

After graduating from high school in 1936, Eisner went to work in the advertising department at the New York American, where he worked the night shift. He later attributed his noir visual sensibility in part to the scenes and people he saw on breaks in the early hours of the morning.

By the next year, Eisner published his first comic, “Hawks of the Sea” – which he described as inspired by the great Italian-born creator of swashbuckling novels, Rafael Sabatini. Soon, he and a classmate, Jerry Iger, formed Eisner & Iger as an agency to provide graphic content for the burgeoning market in pulps.

“Like brokers who forecast a sudden demand for pork bellies, we believed that pulp publishers, who were repackaging newspaper comic strips into magazine-size formats, were going to run out of them at any minute,” Eisner wrote in 1990.

Iger handled business matters while Eisner drew five strips in five styles under five pseudonyms. The strips included “Sheena, Queen of the Jungle” and “Dollman.” The business was instantly successful, although in one infamous decision it turned down a submission from two young New Yorkers called “Superman.” In short order, Eisner was earning enough to support his family after his father became ill.

In 1940, Eisner sold his half of his company to Iger and launched “The Spirit,” starring a masked crime fighter who had no super powers. Eisner imagined him as “a satirical combination of Zorro and Philip Marlowe.” Each Sunday’s insert was a self-contained adventure, and at its height the comic appeared in 20 markets with a combined circulation of 20 million.

“For the first time I began to receive mail from people other than 10-year-olds in the Midwest,” Eisner wrote. “Mother and father were reading ‘The Spirit’ too. And I was able, at last, to deal with story material that wasn’t confined to the superhero formula.”

Eisner was drafted into the Army in 1942 and worked in the service as a cartoonist until the end of the war. He produced educational cartoons featuring an inept private named Joe Dope, along with instructional publications on topics such as how to replace the carburetor on a Jeep and how to maintain weapons. In some ways, Eisner’s approach prefigured today’s “For Idiots” books, but, at a time when instructions normally came in densely printed manuals, it was a new concept.

Eisner returned to “The Spirit” after the war, which by then counted among its staff Mr. Feiffer and Wally Wood (later of “Mad”). When he folded “The Spirit” in 1951 to return to work for the Pentagon, it wanted new educational materials for use in Korea. Eisner’s magazine, “P.S., The Preventive Maintenance Monthly,” was published until 1972.

Eisner also was involved in various newspaper syndication businesses and produced educational comics for schools, although with comics’ bad reputation in the 1950s and 1960s he wrote that he sometimes felt “like a drug pusher caught red-handed.”

In 1978, Eisner published “A Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories,” a semiautobiographical graphic novel that is often called one of the first in that genre. He later wrote 10 more titles.

Recently, Eisner seemed to be embracing his Jewish roots. Last summer, he published “Fagin the Jew,” in which the Dickens character confronts his creator and scolds him for perpetuating religious stereotypes. Forthcoming is “The Plot,” a historical account of the notorious forgery “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”

Eisner embraced his reputation as one of the most influential cartoonists of his times, and he enjoyed teaching for many years at New York’s School for Visual Arts. One of the two major comics-industry awards was named for him, and Eisner would travel each year to the Comic-Con International at San Diego to present it himself.

Upon being awarded the 2002 Eisner Award for Best Serialized Story, “Bat man” writer J. Michael Straczynski punched the air and said: “You know, you get the Emmy, you don’t get it from ‘Emmy.’ You win the Oscar, you don’t get it from ‘Oscar.’ How freakin’ cool is this?”

William E. Eisner

Born March 6, 1917, at Brooklyn, N.Y.; died January 3 at Fort Lauderdale, Fla., of complications from coronary-bypass surgery; survived by his wife, Ann, and son, John.