What Print Cartoons Still Do Best | Francoise Mouly | Big Think

What Print Cartoons Still Do Best

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As The New Yorker reaches its 85th anniversary, its art editor praises the advantages of still drawings over animation.

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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: What changes are you making to the New Yorker?

Francoise Mouly: So it’s [the] 85th anniversary for a magazine started in 1925 by Rea Irvin. The first image was, Eustace Tilley was a mascot where this image had became a mascot of The New Yorker, and even when I came in, I’ve been there 16 years, there was a tradition of running that image every year for February for the anniversary issue and now we’ve started playing with that and this year it’s very exciting because I got four different artists. We have four different covers on the magazine. What is really exciting to me is that once again using the means of mass reproduction, this is just a regular piece of paper printed as the cover of the magazine. The depths of ideas and content and allusions to each other’s image, and we worked all together as a kind of like rolling ball consortium exchanging ideas where each image is individually understandable, but they also when you see all of them you can make the connection between them. That is one of the things that I find very exciting about print as opposed to moviemaking or animation or any of the other visual mediums is that the reader has the time to spend with any one image and find the layers and layers. You can actually… It doesn’t just flash at 24 frames a second. It just is held there however long you want to spend on it. So many of the images that I work on have different layers of reading, even the children’s books can have… can be seen at first glance. You read them once and then you get the story, the story juice out of it, but then most children actually when they really get into books reread them and they are phenomenally apt readers. They really know how to read a book over and over again and they get all of the embedded like things in the background because it’s a laborious art to draw by hand and to be a cartoonist. You spend so many hours at your drawing table. You can’t help putting a lot of yourself into the image and when it’s printed the reader can spend hours getting it out.

Recorded on January 26, 2010

Interviewed by Austin Allen