Will Eisner’s A Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories (1978) marked the beginning of a second phase in the writer-artist’s career. It has been called the ‘first graphic novel’ and has been hailed as a central text in the emergence of the ‘graphic novel’ as a cultural phenomenon. This chapter presents and discusses formal aspects of Contract, elucidates its productive context, and discusses its reception. It shows how Contract was neither the first graphic novel nor the most important early one. Instead, it argues that the promotion of these ideas has contributed to a self-marginalizing discourse among a certain type of comics fans, and ends with the hope that Eisner scholarship can move beyond repeating common myths and engaging in uncritical celebration of the writer-artist, so as to better promote critical understanding of his work.