Each week during the 1940s, Will Eisner drew 'The Spirit,’ a comic about a masked detective that earned him fans around the globe. He revolutionized comics a second time when, in 1978, he reached back to his own beginnings to produce the first 'graphic novel."

Set among 1930s Bronx tenements, these four stories capture the brutal, tender world of working-class Jews. In the title story, Frimme Hersh's daughter suddenly dies, sorely testing the “contract" this self-made man once entered into with God. In "Cookalein," Eisner casts a humorous eye on the amorous, social-climbing tendencies of young urbanites spending a summer in the Adirondacks. Wry, honest, and sad, these four stories showcase Eisner's unique ability to capture character with the quick strike of his pen.

The comic book transfigured, this graphic novel tells the story of Spiegelman's parents, Vladek and Anna, Jews reaching maturity in a Europe on the verge of Nazism, and their terrifying history and eventual survival in the concentration camps.

Spiegelman uses the broadest tools of the genre: Jews are drawn as mice, Nazis as cats, Poles as pigs. Frenchmen as frogs, and so on -- to make vivid the unimaginable, both to the reader and to himself, appearing as a character in the book listening to his father's story.

A triumph of storytelling in panels, Maus changed forever the way that readers, critics, and artists themselves thought about the graphic novel. In 1992 the Pulitzer Prize committee recognized Spiegelman's groundbreaking achievement by awarding him a special prize for Maus.

Steeped in a melancholy, gray-tinted world of elevated trains, luncheonettes, and gently decaying tenements. Katchor's perambulating photographer, Julius Knipl, documents a rapidly vanishing urban netherworld. Peopled by men who map the migration of hairstyles and those who belong to the Amalgamated Panty-Waist Fitters Union, his cityscape is a familiar one, albeit with the touch of a demented fairy tale.

After eating a parrot, an aged Algerian rabbi's cat develops the ability to speak and quickly declares his desire not only to be Jewish, but to have a bar mitzvah. The rabbi engages his pet in a spiraling debate, touching on topics such as spelling, parental love, and the very nature of-Jewish identity.

French graphic novelist Sfar's delightful, vibrantly illustrated story is set in Algeria and Paris in the 19305, where the encroaching modern world is rapidly shattering many long-held customs and assumptions. And like his human counterparts, the rabbi's cat has some tough choices to make: "Should I stay in this house of Jews, who are so elegant you'd swear they were French, with the beautiful rugs and the smell of fine cooking, or follow my master in the rain?”