In Love with Art: Françoise Mouly's Adventures in Comics with Art Spiegelman (Exploded Views)

Whoever is passionate about Comics and Art, the one that lets you stare at it and leave you with astonishment because even if it is affordable it is priceless due to the extremely expressive impact of content and size and haptic experience, should buy this book about Mrs Françoise Mouly. She and Mr Spiegelman might have curated the graphic language of the Post?WorldWar World.You cannot imagine how lucky I feel to have received a signed copy.Thank You, Mrs Mouly, for inspiring and develloping my taste for everything drawn painted and printed, and Mr Heer for being that formidable Herold.This book made me remember the days where I was lucky to get some RAW in my hands in Berlin. That's only me.

Jeet Heer's biography of the Paris-born New Yorker Francoise Mouly is breezy, yet quite insightful. Heer argues that Mouly, like other woman in the underground/art comics scene, deserve more credit for their contributions to the field. While her husband Art Spiegelman was putting ink on individual sheets of paper, Francoise Mouly dragged an old Multilith printing press into their Soho loft to put ink on hundreds, thousands of sheets of printed matter.In the 1980's Mouly and Spiegleman were co-founders of RAW, the magazine, and RAW press, which published great graphic art by Sue Coe, Gary Panter, and Jerry Moriarty, among others. Today Francoise Mouly is art editor of The New Yorker and the publisher of Toon Books.Heer's book's is not a big coffee table book, but clearly a labor of love. It is handsomely printed and illustrated with selections from a wide variety of Mouly's projects, past and present.

More than her sex - her role at Raw and at the New Yorker (which currently does not even list its editorial staff in its issues) has kept the talented Francoise Mouly out of the sight of many fans of comics and art. This is a long overdue book and I only wish that it was longer and included an interview with Mouly. The strength of the book is its focus on how comics and art are produced. Comics are especially interesting media because of all of the different ways they can be created - especially the processes that are involved. They are often more collaborative than fine art (and this includes mainstream comics) with people providing editorial input outside of editors. The weakness of the book is not understanding where RAW within the larger comics community. The mainstream comics community has had long before RAW an interest in a wide range of comics not produced by major companies like DC and Marvel. I bought the first issue of RAW when it came out at my local comic book store - which was initially cobbled together literally from tables and fixtures pulled from the alleys. While a large portion of the store was Marvel and DC books - there were also undergrounds , small press, clipped comic strips , old Disney and EC comics etc.. RAW brought to the wider public a whole group of newer and often academically trained artists. But prior to that many comic book stores were accessing European graphic novels often with mimeoed translations and other non-traditional comics. The new generation of alternative weeklies were also running comics by Lynda Barry and others before RAW - RAW gave those artists visibility in a different way. RAW basically built on a lot of what had gone before and being New York based moved it to a whole other level. Review 920

Art and Francoise were just like the artists of the "Belle Epoch." They lived in a run down neighborhood, subsisted on odd jobs, and their apartment was a studio, factory, gallery, and performance space all rolled into one. Rather than deal with the printers, they bought their own mini-press and printed their magazine on their own. This may not seem like much to you, but these were the days before the cheap xerox machine, Quark Xpress, or InDesign (does anybody even use Quark anymore?)Those of you that read MAUS are probably familiar with Art Spiegelman's life, but Francoise Mouly's life is equally interesting. Her father was a rich doctor, a Legion D'Honor medal winning plastic surgeon, whose life was ruined because he had lots of daughters and no sons. Francoise ruined his life again by choosing architecture over medicine, then she quit school to travel, moved to the USA, and there you go. All along she preferred to work with her hands (a skill badly-needed in 1970's Soho) and became the neighborhood handyman.I think this book is a statement on what it takes to be a start-up. This was an era when people did their own repairs, never threw anything away, reused equipment and furniture, didn't use credit cards; in short, it was "austere" (Occupy Movement take note!) and you had to take care of yourself. The Success of Mouly and Spiegelman's RAW magazine was as much to do with their own hard work as was the content. There was no shortage of underground comix artist-Crumb, Burns, Griffin, Moscoso, Pekar-but you needed business sense to make a magazine for them. These people weren't hobbyists or profit-seekers; they were artists who worked hard. Today's startups in Brooklyn, they're always surprised at how much work they have to do and how little money they make. In the 1970's, the new magazines, stores, and restaurants were not a place to make mountains of money, and the people that started those businesses knew it and accepted it. A more apt title would be "They Had to Live For Their Art."The book is short and not well promoted, which is a shame. It has all the things that make New York's history interesting; artist communities, Soho lofts, weird publications, do-it-yourself startups. Like most famous New Yorkers (uh-oh, get ready for a repeat of every other New York book I ever reviewed) they were from outside the city; Paris, France, and Rego Park, Queens.Some more photos from the era would've been welcome, along with artwork from RAW magazine. I would also have like to learn a little more about Spiegelman's early career, and maybe have some photos of their old neighborhoods in Paris and Queens. But I'll forgive any shortfall in this book. After all, it's a low-budget book from a small press, and those of us who love zines and small presses appreciate the roughness, don't we?