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A legendary graphic novelist gets the (bio)graphic novel treatment
In 1992, Art Spiegelman’s Maus won the Pulitzer prize.
The first graphic novel to win the award, Maus testified both to Spiegelman’s singular brilliance and to the graphic novel’s acceptance as a serious medium. This owed a great deal to one man: Will Eisner.
A legendary figure within the comic book and graphic novel industries, yet comparatively lesser-known without, a new biography of Eisner from longtime graphic novelists Steve Weiner and Dan Muzur introduces Eisner to a new generation.
And to do justice to the life and career of the man who coined the term graphic novel, the duo have written — you guessed it — a graphic novel, entitled Will Eisner: A Comics Biography.
“What, it should be an opera?” Mazur joked, when I met him and Weiner over Zoom. “If you want to learn about Will Eisner, and you don’t want to read a graphic novel, I don’t know how that works.”
Mazur and Weiner had moved in the same comics circles in Cambridge, MA, for several years. Their work had even appeared side by side in 2017’s Cambridge Companion to the Graphic Novel. But they officially met only in 2022, when Weiner pitched Mazur a graphic novel about Eisner-the-artist and Eisner-the-man.
The pair clicked immediately. “We just started talking about the books and comics we liked,” said Weiner, who has a shock of curly white hair. “I thought: This is going to work.”
Mazur, an expert on early comic history, was especially taken by the idea of illustrating Eisner’s “grubby, romantic career beginnings.” What’s more, he and Weiner both felt Eisner’s early career had never been properly examined.
“We wanted to think about what the challenges really were for him in this industry that wasn’t yet an industry,” Weiner told me.
Striking out on his own
The biography’s first section takes the reader from Eisner’s upbringing in 1920s Jewish Brooklyn to the still-fledgling world of comics in the 1930s. Mazur’s drawings are effective at capturing the poverty of Depression-era New York, while Weiner, who wrote the narrative, details the considerable drive Eisner needed to pull himself up.
Interestingly, though the biography is about Eisner’s work, we don’t see examples of his drawings; the duo are less concerned with the specifics of Eisner’s art than with the life that made it possible and the stories he told.
During the first half of the 1930s, Eisner eked out a living as a writer-cartoonist for the New York Journal-American, a now-defunct New York City daily that was the first American newspaper to publish a daily comic strip. He also found work as a freelance illustrator for various pulp magazines. One such publication was the short-lived Wow!, which lasted just four issues, but whose editor — Jerry Iger, now perhaps overshadowed in popular memory by his grand-nephew Bob, CEO of the Disney corporation — took a particular liking to Eisner’s work.
The two formed Eisner & Iger in 1936, which established itself as the most important comic book packager of its time. Several artists who would eventually rank among America’s most influential passed through the business’ one-room office on East 41st Street — including, most notably, Jack Kirby (Jacob Kurtzberg, by birth), who went on to create many of the Marvel Comics characters that are today Hollywood staples.
Eisner, though, sold his share of the firm to Iger in 1939, having signed an agreement with a Sunday newspaper to draw comics. The Spirit, an Eisner character that first appeared in the Des Moises Register in June 1940, would morph into a regular 16-page Sunday comic strip supplement known colloquially as “The Spirit Section.” At its height, it featured in 20 Sunday newspapers and had a circulation of more than five million copies.
The Spirit was the first truly highbrow comic strip, and Eisner’s most enduring creation. (“It made a big impact on me,” said Mazur.) The domino mask-wearing private investigator possessed no superpowers, relying on his wit and physical prowess alone. In many ways, he was a vehicle for Eisner to experiment with genre and tone, exploring the kind of thorny moral terrain that conventional superhero comics wouldn’t even gesture at.
P’Gell of Paris, for example, a supporting character in The Spirit Section, was a none-too-subtle allusion to the Parisian district of Pigalle, which, during World War II was a red light district popular among U.S. servicemen. Her dark, seductive demeanor was Eisner’s tribute to the femme fatales of the noir films that dominated 1950s cinema, while her success in getting under the Spirit’s skin — Eisner’s protagonist was usually unflappable — upended the gender dynamics of 1950s superhero comics.
In time, The Spirit would provide a blueprint of sorts for a later generation of graphic novelists. In its depth and ambition, however, it was wholly out of step with the so-called Marvel Boom of the 1950s and ‘60s.
“He was too far ahead of his time,” Mazur said. “That’s why he left.”
The graphic novel arrives
After the United States entered WWII in 1941, Eisner spent four years in the Pentagon designing instructional comics for military magazines. He enjoyed the relative dependability of the work, Mazur told me. He had also grown tired of the homogeneity of superhero comics, so what began as a wartime position grew into a peacetime business.
For the better part of three decades, Eisner supplied the military and other companies with educational comics. His most frequent publication was Preventive Maintenance Monthly, which colorfully detailed ways to guard against equipment mishaps. (Its protagonist was G.I. Joe Dope, a chronically wayward infantryman.)
Two things revived Eisner’s interest in the comics industry. First, the emergence of a new, and decidedly Eisner-esque, approach to comics. Eisner attended various comics conventions in the early 1970s, where he was surprised by the variety of offerings and, on occasion, feted as a returning hero.
“Guys in their 20s were running up to him, saying, ‘Oh, Will Eisner! The Spirit is so great!’” Mazur said. “For a guy who’d always wanted to be creative, what was happening then was just too appealing to not want to be part of.”
The second was less heartening: The death of Eisner’s 16-year-old daughter Alice, from leukemia, in 1970.
The result was Eisner’s profoundly personal 1978 book, A Contract with God: and Other Tenement Stories, about life in an impoverished Jewish tenement in New York City; the titular story described a religious man giving up his faith after his young daughter dies.
Eisner presented Contract with God to publishers as a “graphic novel,” the first known use of the term. Though comics had already outgrown their superhero origins, Eisner wanted to make this difference obvious for audiences.
Contract with God ushered in the era of the graphic novel as a longer, more literary endeavor, distinct from comics; Eisner would write no fewer than 20 over the next 30 years. Many explored Jewish themes — Fagin the Jew, expanding the backstory of the Charles Dickens character, is an obvious example — while others were artistic takes on classic novels like Moby Dick.
Though Mazur’s more expressive drawing style is nothing like the rigid, straight-edged approach Eisner favored, it is nonetheless superb at conveying Eisner’s evolution. The result is warm and inviting, or, as one reviewer put it, a haimish biography, a term Eisner would have doubtless recognised.
It’s a worthy tribute to a man who, first with The Spirit, and later with Contract with God, laid the foundation for Spiegelman’s Pulitzer win.
“Eisner saw what no one else saw,” Weiner said. “He saw that there was no limit to how this form could be used,” Mazur added.
The post A legendary graphic novelist gets the (bio)graphic novel treatment appeared first on The Forward.
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Nvidia in Advanced Talks to Buy Israel’s AI21 Labs for Up to $3 Billion, Report Says
A smartphone with a displayed NVIDIA logo is placed on a computer motherboard in this illustration taken March 6, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration
Nvidia is in advanced talks to buy Israel-based AI startup AI21 Labs for as much as $3 billion, the Calcalist financial daily reported on Tuesday.
Nvidia declined to comment, while AI21 was not immediately available to comment.
A 2023 funding round valued AI21 at $1.4 billion. Nvidia and Alphabet’s Google participated in that funding.
AI21, founded in 2017 by Amnon Shashua and two others, is among a clutch of AI startups that have benefited from a boom in artificial intelligence, attracting strong interest from venture capital firms and other investors.
Shashua is also the founder and CEO of Mobileye, a developer of self-driving car technologies.
Calcalist said AI21 has long been up for sale and talks with Nvidia have advanced significantly in recent weeks. It noted that Nvidia‘s primary interest in AI21 appears to be its workforce of roughly 200 employees, most of whom hold advanced academic degrees and “possess rare expertise in artificial intelligence development.”
Calcalist said the deal to buy AI21 is estimated at between $2 billion and $3 billion.
Nvidia, which has become the most valuable company in history at more than $4 trillion, is planning a large expansion in Israel with a new R&D campus of up to 10,000 employees in Kiryat Tivon, just south of the port city of Haifa – Israel’s third-largest city.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has described Israel as the company’s “second home.”
Nvidia has said that when completed, the campus will include up to 160,000 square meters (1.7 million square feet) of office space, parks and common areas across 90 dunams (22 acres), inspired by Nvidia‘s Santa Clara, California, headquarters. Nvidia expects construction to begin in 2027, with initial occupancy planned for 2031.
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How The New York Times Used Selective West Bank Data to Shape a False Moral Verdict
The New York Times building in New York City. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
The New York Times’ recent interactive project on the West Bank avoids incendiary terminology. It does not accuse Israel of ethnic cleansing outright. Yet the impression it leaves readers with is unmistakable: a story of systematic dispossession, driven by Israeli settlers and tolerated by the state.
That conclusion is not argued directly. It is constructed indirectly, through selective facts, emotional imagery, and critical omissions.
The article portrays a daily reality of Palestinian villagers under siege by armed settlers, shielded by Israeli soldiers, and backed by state institutions. The tone is stark and accusatory. But the apparent coherence of this narrative depends on three elements that are completely biased.
1/
The New York Times doesn’t use the phrase “ethnic cleansing” in its West Bank project.It doesn’t have to.
Selective imagery, distorted data & erased Palestinian terrorism lead to one conclusion: Israel is driving Palestinians off their land.
That claim is false.
pic.twitter.com/a4boarQwVq
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) December 22, 2025
Casualty Statistics
The first is the use of casualty statistics. The Times relies extensively on data from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) to demonstrate a dramatic rise in settler violence.
What readers are not told is how those numbers are assembled. UNOCHA does not consistently distinguish between civilians and terrorists killed while carrying out attacks. Palestinians who die while attempting stabbings, shootings, or vehicular assaults, are frequently recorded simply as casualties.
This methodology matters. It collapses perpetrators and victims into the same category and inflates the appearance of civilian harm. When such figures are presented without explanation, they create a misleading picture of violence divorced from context. The New York Times adopts these numbers uncritically, allowing a flawed dataset to underpin its central claim.
Ignoring Palestinian Terrorism
Second, the article ignores Palestinian terrorism. Over the past year, according to Israel Security Agency data, thousands of attacks have targeted Israelis in the West Bank, ranging from shootings and stabbings to Molotov cocktails and explosive devices. Many were intercepted before civilians were harmed. This sustained campaign is essential to understanding Israeli military operations and security measures. Yet it appears only faintly, if at all, in the article.
HonestReporting visualization based on B’Tselem data of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces from October 7, 2023, to October 31, 2025.
The absence extends further. Palestinians killed during Israeli counterterror operations are frequently affiliated with armed groups such as Hamas or Islamic Jihad, particularly in hotspots like Jenin and Nablus. These affiliations are rarely acknowledged. Readers are left with an image of indiscriminate force rather than targeted security activity.
Visual Storytelling
The third biased element in the article is the visual storytelling, which reinforces the narrative.
Images of demolished homes and emptied landscapes suggest deliberate displacement. But the legal framework governing much of the territory is barely explained.
Many demolitions occur in Area C, which, under internationally recognized agreements, falls under Israeli civil and security authority. Construction there requires permits. Unauthorized structures, whether Palestinian or Israeli, are subject to enforcement. By omitting this context, regulation is reframed as expulsion.
The article also implies that Israeli institutions tolerate or even enable extremist settler violence. This claim overlooks documented realities.
Israeli political and military leaders have repeatedly condemned such acts, warning that they undermine security and divert resources. Extremist settlers have been arrested, prosecuted, and in some cases have violently clashed with Israeli soldiers themselves. Internal accountability exists, but it is erased from the story.
Criticism of Israeli policy is legitimate and necessary. But journalism carries an obligation to present complexity honestly. When context is stripped away, when flawed data is treated as fact, and when terrorism is sidelined, reporting stops informing and starts directing. The New York Times’ project offers readers a powerful story, but not a complete one. And when narrative takes precedence over evidence, the public is misled.
HonestReporting is a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.
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Israel, Greece, and Cyprus: In Search of New Synergies
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (center), Cyprus President Nikos Christodoulides (left), and Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis hold a joint press conference after a trilateral meeting at the Citadel of David Hotel in Jerusalem, Dec. 22, 2025. Photo: ABIR SULTAN/Pool via REUTERS
The 10 trilateral summit of Israel, Greece and Cyprus, which took place in Jerusalem on December 22, showcased the continuing commitment of the three countries to the expansion of their collaboration. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hosted his Greek counterpart Kyriakos Mitsotakis and Cypriot President Nikos Christodoulides in an effort to revitalize the trilateral mechanism. The ninth trilateral summit took place on September 4, 2023 in Nicosia, and the regional order has changed a great deal in the two years since. Israel responded to the terrorist invasion of October 7, 2023 by engaging in wars on multiple Middle East fronts, including a 12-day war with Iran. Despite the multidimensional and complex character of all these conflicts, Israel managed to show its power and resilience.
Both Greece and Cyprus continued to value their strategic partnership with Israel even as the Jewish State was being roundly condemned and vilified. Unlike the EU member states that chose to condemn Israel for the war in Gaza, Athens and Nicosia took a mild and balanced approach. Premier Mitsotakis has been able to prioritize what he perceives as Greece’s national interests and fend off criticism from other parties. Nikos Androulakis, the leader of the main opposition PASOK party, did not hold back in his excoriation of Israel in the context of the war in Gaza, inaccurately using the terms “ethnic cleansing” and “genocide” to describe Israel’s conduct during the war and denying that both terms in fact apply to Hamas’s assault on Israel, as well as to its ongoing plans for that country. On October 16, 2025, Androulakis called Netanyahu a “butcher” and demanded that Mitsotakis apologize for aligning Greece’s interests with those of Israel. Similarly, the parliamentary spokesperson of PASOK, Dimitris Mantzos, spoke of a “live-streamed genocide” and wondered “what strategic partnership might endure the pain of this bloodshed.”
Interestingly, it was the former leader of PASOK, George Papandreou, who laid the foundations for the Greek-Israeli friendship while serving as prime minister in 2010.
During the Israel-Iran war of June 2025, Greece and Cyprus served as hubs for Israeli civilians unable to return to their country. Planes belonging to Israeli airlines were stationed at Greek and Cypriot airports, and the aircraft serving Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Isaac Herzog departed for Athens after Operation Rising Lion was launched on June 13. When the conflict ended, the Greek and Cypriot authorities coordinated with the Israeli government to implement Operation Safe Return to facilitate the repatriation of Israelis. Former Knesset member Gadeer Kamal-Mreeh praised Greece and Cyprus in a Jerusalem Post commentary in which he argued that the two countries had stepped up to help Israel – with actions, not just with words – at a time of serious crisis.
In the sphere of defense, Greece and Cyprus have looked favorably towards the Israeli market for years. Greece is now finalizing an agreement with Israel to purchase 36 PULS rocket artillery systems for $757.84 million. The Greek Parliament and the Government Council for National Security have approved the budget for the purchase, according to a press release from Elbit, the PULS manufacturer. Cyprus reportedly deployed Israel Aerospace Industries’ Barak MX air defense system last September and is eyeing new military deals with Israel to equip its National Guard. In addition to the arms transactions, Jerusalem, Athens and Nicosia are expected to conduct joint drills in 2026. In the past, Greek-Israeli exercises in the area between Israel and the island of Crete have allowed Israeli pilots to engage in bombing exercises and to rehearse the kind of aerial refueling necessary to cover a distance equal to that separating Israel from Iran’s Natanz nuclear enrichment facility.
Israel, Greece and Cyprus are all apprehensive about Turkish tactics in the Middle East and the Eastern Mediterranean, a common concern that facilitates dialogue. Jerusalem is of course primarily concerned about Ankara’s attitude toward Hamas and presence in Syria, while Athens and Nicosia are more focused on Ankara’s policies in the Aegean and the Eastern Mediterranean as well as on the Cyprus question. Israel, Greece and Cyprus support the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC), which bypasses Turkey, though IMEC will inevitably have limitations. The Turkish market is too big to be ignored, and the Corridor is still lacking tangible investments.
Energy also brings the three countries closer. Last November, Israeli Energy and Infrastructure Minister Eli Cohen put the idea of the East Med pipeline back on the table. Cohen made the comment on the sidelines of a ‘3+1’ Energy Ministerial Meeting in Athens that was also attended by US Energy Secretary Chris Wright. Although the East Med pipeline project remains expensive and technically difficult, attention is being directed towards a connecting of Israeli gas fields and LNG facilities in Cyprus. Israel is keen on selling its natural gas to Cyprus. The Energean company, which is drilling in Israeli waters, has proposed the construction of a subsea pipeline from its Floating Production Storage and Offloading (FPSO) to Cyfield’s planned power generation facility in Cyprus. According to Reuters, the cost will be around $400 million, while the capacity of the new pipeline will be 1 billion cubic meters a year. Theoretically, Israel, Greece and Cyprus remain committed to the Great Sea Interconnector project, but the Cypriot government seems to be having second thoughts about its viability. Athens and Nicosia have openly disagreed on this matter over the past few weeks.
Last but not least, Israel, Greece, and Cyprus are expected to improve coordination in accessing EU Horizon programs and other external funding sources. When the European Commission proposed, in July 2025, to partially suspend Israel’s integration into the European Innovation Council, Greece and Cyprus were among the EU member states to oppose the idea.
The trilateral Jerusalem summit welcomed the Cypriot presidency of the Council of the EU for the first semester of 2026, and Greece will hold the EU presidency in the second semester of 2027. The next two years should be a good opportunity to recalibrate EU-Israel relations under the aegis of Cyprus and Greece as well as to intensify the European fight against antisemitism.
Dr. George N. Tzogopoulos is a BESA contributor, a lecturer at the European Institute of Nice (CIFE) and at the Democritus University of Thrace, and a Senior Fellow at the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy. A version of this article was originally published by The BESA Center.