quality:corruption, stylistic:tone
Graphic novels

Eisner credited the 1971 Comic Art Convention (CAC) for his return to comics. In a 1983 interview with CAC organizer Phil Seuling, he said, "I came back into the field because of you. I remember you calling me in New London, where I was sitting there as chairman of the board of Croft Publishing Co. My secretary said, 'There's a Mr. Seuling on the phone and he's talking about a comics convention. What is that?' She said, 'I didn't know you were a cartoonist, Mr. Eisner.' 'Oh, yes,' I said, 'secretly; I'm a closet cartoonist.' I came down and was stunned at the existence of the whole world.... That was a world that I had left, and I found it very exciting, very stimulating".

Eisner later elaborated about meeting underground comics creators and publishers, including Denis Kitchen:

I went down to the convention, which was being held in one of the hotels in New York, and there was a group of guys with long hair and scraggly beards, who had been turning out what spun as literature, really popular 'gutter' literature if you will, but pure literature. And they were taking on illegal subject matter that no comics had ever dealt with before.... I came away from that recognizing that a revolution had occurred then, a turning point in the history of this medium.... I reasoned that the 13-year-old kids that I'd been writing to back in the 1940s were no longer 13-year-old kids, they were now 30, 40 years old. They would want something more than two heroes, two supermen, crashing against each other. I began working on a book that dealt with a subject that I felt had never been tried by comics before, and that was man's relationship with God. That was the book A Contract with God....

In the late 1970s, Eisner turned his attention to longer storytelling forms. A Contract with God: and Other Tenement Stories (Baronet Books, October 1978) is an early example of an American graphic novel, combining thematically linked short stories into a single square-bound volume. Eisner continued with a string of graphic novels that tell the history of New York's immigrant communities, particularly Jews, including The Building, A Life Force, Dropsie Avenue and To the Heart of the Storm. He continued producing new books into his seventies and eighties, at an average rate of nearly one a year. Each of these books was done twice – once as a rough version to show editor Dave Schreiner, then as a second, finished version incorporating suggested changes.

Some of his last work was the retelling in sequential art of novels and myths, including Moby-Dick. In 2002, at the age of 85, he published Sundiata, based on the part-historical, part-mythical stories of a West African king, "The Lion of Mali ". Fagin the Jew is an account of the life of Dickens's character Fagin, in which Eisner tries to get past the stereotyped portrait of Fagin in Oliver Twist.

His last graphic novel, The Plot: The Secret Story of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an account of the making, and refutation, of the antisemitic hoax The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, was completed shortly before his death and published in 2005.

In 2008, Will Eisner's The Spirit: A Pop-Up Graphic Novel was published, with Bruce Foster as paper engineer.