TOON Books' very own Publisher and Editorial Director Françoise Mouly is the subject of a new book by Jeet Heer, In Love with Art, featured in the September 9 issue of Maclean's (Excerpt Below)
Within the graphic arts world, Mouly is venerated. “Françoise has been one of the most influential people in comics for 30 years,” says Peggy Burns, associate publisher at Montreal’s Drawn & Quarterly, a publishing house inspired by Raw. Mouly is a role model, Burns says: “She’s very generous, very committed to her artists.” Toronto illustrator and author Frank Viva, who is currently finishing his ninthNew Yorker cover, praises Mouly as singularly articulate and knowledgeable: “She knows more about comics, illustration and art than anyone I know.”
Yet beyond that orbit, Mouly is largely unknown, an imbalance soon to be remedied by Jeet Heer’s In Love with Art: Françoise Mouly’s Adventures in Comics with Art Spiegelman. Heer, a cultural critic and comic aficionado who describes himself as “intra-coastal,” commuting between Toronto and Regina, set out to write about the couple’s creative union before realizing Mouly was the untold story. He believes she’s been overlooked for two reasons: sexism in a traditionally male-dominated field and “wife of” syndrome, with Mouly’s career overshadowed by that of her Pulitzer Prize-winning husband, the author of the famed graphic novel Maus.
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Mouly is delighted to finally be a subject, she tells Maclean’s: “I was very well-hidden in plain sight.” Being a woman in the “testosterone-driven” world of cartoons was a mixed blessing, she says: “It was quite lonely, but it also worked for me, because I was an outsider—to the culture, to the language.” Being an “enforced observer of the American political system” has informed her work, she says, noting an early draft of the famed “fist-bump” cover showed Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity peering in a window. Mouly asked they be removed. “It focused blame on them,” she says, “but we were all at that window.” She speaks eloquently about the need for print books and magazines as cultural artifacts—they “fossilize the moment” in a way the web can’t. “They have permanence and authority,” she says; they “hold your fingerprints.” And now, finally, there’s a book that holds hers.
Read the entire article at Maclean's website
Yet beyond that orbit, Mouly is largely unknown, an imbalance soon to be remedied by Jeet Heer’s In Love with Art: Françoise Mouly’s Adventures in Comics with Art Spiegelman. Heer, a cultural critic and comic aficionado who describes himself as “intra-coastal,” commuting between Toronto and Regina, set out to write about the couple’s creative union before realizing Mouly was the untold story. He believes she’s been overlooked for two reasons: sexism in a traditionally male-dominated field and “wife of” syndrome, with Mouly’s career overshadowed by that of her Pulitzer Prize-winning husband, the author of the famed graphic novel Maus.
[...]
Mouly is delighted to finally be a subject, she tells Maclean’s: “I was very well-hidden in plain sight.” Being a woman in the “testosterone-driven” world of cartoons was a mixed blessing, she says: “It was quite lonely, but it also worked for me, because I was an outsider—to the culture, to the language.” Being an “enforced observer of the American political system” has informed her work, she says, noting an early draft of the famed “fist-bump” cover showed Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity peering in a window. Mouly asked they be removed. “It focused blame on them,” she says, “but we were all at that window.” She speaks eloquently about the need for print books and magazines as cultural artifacts—they “fossilize the moment” in a way the web can’t. “They have permanence and authority,” she says; they “hold your fingerprints.” And now, finally, there’s a book that holds hers.
Read the entire article at Maclean's website
Photo by Sarah Shatz
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