Titan has announced Will Eisner’s John Law will return to print in a new collection to be published March 4, 2025. The Collected Will Eisner’s John Law will be a 152-page hardcover collection featuring Eisner’s original work on the character alongside Gary Chaloner’s out-of-print reboot, a previously unpublished additional story, and a forward by long-time Eisner publisher Denis Kitchen. Published as part of Titan’s Hard Case Crime imprint, it will retail for $24.99.
John Law was created by legendary cartoonist Will Eisner in 1948 as part of a planned line of self published comics. The exploits of the eye-patch wearing police detective and his shoeshine boy sidekick had a full issue prepped that was shelved when the planned line didn’t get the go ahead. Parts of that story were later repurposed by Eisner for his more popular syndicated ongoing The Spirit in 1950. The unpublished issue was later discovered by Eclipse Comics editor Catherine Yronwode and got to see the light of day in 1983.
After the folding of Eclipse in 1994, the character re-emerged alongside new material by Australian cartoonist Gary Chaloner – who developed a reboot alongside Will Eisner, prior to his death. That now-long-out-of-print collection John Law: Dead Man Walking was published by IDW in 2004. Chaloner would receive a Ledger Award the following year.
The Titan solicit:
THE COLLECTED WILL EISNER’S JOHN LAW
Writer: Will Eisner
Artist: Gary Chaloner
Publisher: Hard Case Crime, Titan Comics imprint
HC, 152 pages, FC, $24.99
ISBN: 9781787745353
On sale March 4, 2025Wherever men live, be they nomads or city dwellers, there they must have law and a man to enforce it.
Meet Detective John Law of Crossroads City. Strong, decent, hardworking and hard-nosed. He’s a man who believes in the law and order. He’s the last of a dying breed.
In 1948, Will Eisner produced the first issue of “John Law Detective”, which he intended to add to a line of self-published comics. However, after Eisner’s “Baseball Comics”, “Kewpies”, and “Pirate Comics” failed to find an audience, John Law never made it to the newsstand and was quietly dropped, with much of the original artwork reworked in 1950 for his most famous creation, The Spirit.
Featuring original stories by Will Eisner, Gary Chaloner’s award-winning reboot from 2004, including a previously unpublished John Law Story, and a forward by long-time Eisner publisher Denis Kitchen, this is a must-have for not just Eisner fans but comic collectors of all ages.
The Collected Will Eisner’s John Law is on sale March 4, 2025 at bookstores, comic shops and digital.
Pre-order now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books A Million and Forbidden Planet for UK.
