A Brief History of Comics | Francoise Mouly | Big Think

A Brief History of Comics

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RAW co-founder Francoise Mouly has seen comic books evolve from kids’ pastime to titillating adult medium to high-gloss art form. Should they now return to their roots?

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Francoise Mouly:

Born in Paris, Françoise Mouly studied architecture at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts, and moved to New York in 1974. She founded Raw Books & Graphics in 1977 and for fifteen years published artists’ monographs and the annual “Streets of Soho and Tribeca Map & Guide.” Ms. Mouly was the founder, publisher, designer, and co-editor, along with her husband, cartoonist Art Spiegelman, of the pioneering avant-garde comics anthology “RAW,” which launched in 1980.

Françoise Mouly joined The New Yorker as art editor in April 1993, and has been responsible for over 800 covers in the years since. In 2000, she published “Covering The New Yorker: Cutting-Edge Covers from a Literary Institution” (Abbeville Press). Also in 2000, Ms. Mouly launched a RAW Junior division, publishing books of comics for kids by star writers, children's book artists, and cartoonists. In the spring of 2008, Ms. Mouly launched TOON Books, her own imprint of hardcover comics for emerging readers.

In 2001, Ms. Mouly was named chevalier in the order of Arts and Letters by the French Ministry of Culture and Communication. She and her husband live in Manhattan.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: How was the comics scene in the ‘70s different from the scene today?

Francoise Mouly: In 1980 when I started RAW Magazine it was the opposite of the way the world is today. Comics were seen as this lowbrow entertainment with no respectability whatsoever. They would pervert the mind of children or adults, and they certainly were not acknowledged as a medium for serious art or literature discussion, so I created a magazine with my husband Art Spiegelman, who was a cartoonist that was intending to change the perception for comics. Art came from **** in San Francisco of underground comics where Robert Crumb was leader of that field and a lot of the work was trying to break taboos about sex and drugs and different lifestyles. That’s not what RAW Magazine was trying to do. A lot of the underground comics were sold **** who are head shops together with hash pipes and all the other paraphernalia. With RAW Magazine we were doing something that I distributed in bookstores, legitimate bookstores for the most part and what we wanted… We chose a large size, well-printed magazine so that it would give a kind of frame of appreciation closer to that given to art and literature.

When I first got interested in comics at the time I was studying architecture and I discovered comics as a medium through listening to Art who was courting me by reading me Little Nemo and Krazy Kat by George Herriman. It was really very effective. It’s wonderful, but when we would go into a comic shop I really felt like it was a Times Square at the time. It was like a porno shop. It just reeked of like testosterone and adolescent male. A sensibility dominated by super hero comics with big busted woman being tied to like a ship’s mast, or whatever it was. I remember being in a comic shop with my son, with my ten year-old son and he put his hand over my eyes. He was embarrassed about me seeing the comics at Forbidden Planet. He didn’t know, poor kid, that I had been in many Forbidden Planets in my life.

Question: Do critics still misunderstand or misrepresent comics?

Francoise Mouly: Nowadays we are actually about to celebrate the 30th anniversary of RAW Magazine and it’s a world upside down. Comics are actually dubbed by euphemistic label of graphic novel, which became a big deal. When we published RAW we included chapters of Maus because there was no other way. Art was working on it at the time. It took 13 years for him to do the book and there was no way to publish this with a mainstream publisher, so we did it in our magazine. Eventually it came out as a book from Pantheon. There was no expectation of it ever reaching a mainstream audience and it exploded into an extraordinary like reception, Pulitzer Prize, museum shows, **** 1991. I mean all those things were unprecedented and they opened the field for a lot more serious comics. Many of the people that we had published in RAW, such as Chris Ware or Charles Burns or Sue Coe, became artists recognized on their own found publishers, and the reason it’s a world upside down now is that at the time we were saying comics are not just for kids anymore....

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