Francoise Mouly

Francoise Mouly founded Raw Books & Graphics in 1977 and for 15 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.

In 2000, Ms. Mouly launched a RAW Junior division, publishing books of comics for kids by star writers, children's book artists and cartoonists such as Maurice Sendak, Paul Auster, Ian Falconer, David Sedaris, Jules Feiffer, Lemony Snicket, Gahan Wilson and Neil Gaiman. The Little Lit books: LITTLE LIT: FOLKLORE & FAIRY TALE FUNNIES (2000), and LITTLE LIT: STRANGE STORIES FOR STRANGE KIDS (2001) and LITTLE LIT: IT WAS A DARK AND SILLY NIGHT (2003) have been New York Times bestsellers. In the fall of 2006, Puffin Books released BIG FAT LITTLE LIT, a paperback anthology. In the spring of 2008, Ms. Mouly launched TOON Books, her own imprint of hardcover comics for emerging readers.

Click here to read more about Francoise Mouly.

Art Spiegelman

Art Spiegelman is best known for his masterful two-volume Holocaust narrative, MAUS, which in 1992 won a Pulitzer Prize. Born in Stockholm in 1948, Spiegelman rejected his parents' aspirations for him to become a dentist and he began to study cartooning in high school and drawing professionally at age 16. He was the cofounder/editor of RAW, the acclaimed magazine of avant-garde comics and graphics. His drawings and prints have been exhibited in museums and galleries here and abroad.

In addition to the Pulitzer, Spiegelman has been honored with a Guggenheim fellowship and nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His last book, IN THE SHADOW OF NO TOWERS, was selected by the New York Times as one of the 100 most notable books of 2004. In Fall 2008, he will be publishing the graphic novel BREAKDOWNS with Pantheon Books, and a children's comic storybook called JACK AND THE BOX with Toon Books. He lives in New York City with his wife and two children.

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INTERVIEW

April 11, 2008

New Yorker art editor Francoise Mouly and her husband, acclaimed cartoonist Art Spiegelman, recently launched TOON Books, a new line of comics designed for children ages four and up. Its inaugural titles, now available in stores, are BENNY AND PENNY IN JUST PRETEND, SILLY LILLY AND THE FOUR SEASONS and OTTO'S ORANGE DAY. In this interview with Contributing Editor John Hogan, Mouly describes how her son, a reluctant reader, inspired the idea for this line and explains the benefits of these comics over conventional picture books. She also discusses how the books will be incorporated into school reading programs, shares some of the feedback they've received from teachers and librarians, and muses on the constantly changing attitudes towards comics.

Bookreporter.com: Where did the idea for the TOON line come from?

Francoise Mouly: The TOON Books are the books I wish we had had when our kids were in first grade. Until that moment, my husband and I had both shared wonderful moments reading with our kids, but when the teacher started assigning “easy readers” for us to spend evenings with, the joy went out of reading for both the kids and us. It was then I felt I discovered some sort of magic bullet that could cure all the ills in the world: comic books! Fortunately, I had a lot of French comics at my disposal (I read in French with my children), and that really got us through the nightly readings, especially with our son, for whom it took much longer before the little “I CAN READ” light bulb went on. For months and months, we cuddled up with comics: there was something for him to look at and he loved them. My husband sacrificed a valuable collection of old comics to fatherhood. When I realized how few good kids' comics were being published in the U.S. anymore, I decided that it was where I had to turn my attention.

BRC: Why did you choose to start this line now?

FM: It took me 10 years to get here. Once I realized that getting good comics for kids was just as important as advocating for comics as art or literature had been decades before, the first step was to edit --- together with Art --- broadly aimed anthologies of comics for children of all ages, the Little Lit books, with contributions by the best cartoonists and children’s book authors we knew. Then five years ago, I started focusing more narrowly on comics for early readers --- the books that became the TOON Books --- but I couldn’t convince mainstream publishers to publish in a format that didn’t already exist. Finally last year, I decided to return to my roots and publish the books myself.

BRC: What are the characteristics that define TOON Books?

FM: To restore interest in the publishing of good comics for children is a vast endeavor, so it was important to keep what we wanted to accomplish with the TOON Books very focused: the goal was to develop a collection of high-quality comics specifically aimed at beginning readers. I worked very closely with artists on one hand and educators on the other to make sure the stories and the vocabulary were just right for children who are learning to read on their own.

BRC: How do you envision these books being different from illustrated children’s books?

FM: Of course both comics and picture books rely mightily on the art, but that’s about all they have in common. When doing books for early readers, I think comics have a very distinct advantage, which is that the reader can follow the narrative thread from the visual flow. All the conventions of comics --- the dialogue in speech balloons, the passage of time made manifest, the facial expressions and gestures, the varying size of the panels and of the lettering --- contribute to propel the reader along.

BRC: What kinds of stories are you hoping to tell?

FM: That is the first and most important step: to work with artists who have great stories to tell, stories that will enchant young readers. Fortunately, first from my work with RAW and then from my work as the Art Editor of The New Yorker, I’m in touch with most of the best narrative visual storytellers working nowadays, so it was a matter of choosing the artists interested in this project and willing to put themselves through the difficult discipline of working for a young audience.

BRC: The books are beautifully printed. How did you determine what the look and feel of the physical products were going to be?

FM: I had my own ideas of what the design of the books should be, and have always known how important the feel of a book as an object is in making you fall in love with it. I wanted books that a child would perceive as a treasured gift and that would make him or her want to go back to it over and over again. I was very fortunate to get the help of a terrific designer, Jonathan Bennett, who is also a cartoonist himself. Jon immediately embraced the central idea, which was to make the books feel like instant classics. The design evokes classic children books of the ’40s and ’50s or even Little Golden Books with their spine designs, but is also eminently modern. We all agreed it was important to produce beautiful book objects, because well-produced, treasured children’s books were the point of entry for all of us and for most book lovers we know.

BRC: What makes comics a good forum to use to teach kids to read?

FM: As Art puts it, comics are a "gateway drug" to literacy. They are a perfect point of entry to make kids enjoy reading, because reading a well-told comics story is intensely pleasurable. Visual literacy is far more intuitive for young children than word literacy. When a visual narrative is clearly told, the child will get a big part of the story through the pictures. In a conventional easy reader, to make any story accessible to an emerging reader is a high wire act: if the words are too easy, the child will get bored, but if they are too hard, he or she might get discouraged. Educators say the ideal match is when a child is comfortable with 85% of the words, but can work out or guess the remaining 15%. This is where comics have such a big edge over conventional books whose story is told in meager paragraphs of simplified words. When comics are done well, the author can tell a very rich story using the words, the pictures and all the other narrative conventions of comics in what Barbara Tversky, a psychology professor at Stanford University, calls a multi-modal mode of communication.

BRC: Have you gotten any pushback from teachers or librarians who didn’t want to accept comics?

FM: Yes, there’s a lot of resistance to the idea of comics for young children. It’s not that long ago that teachers and parents ripped comic books out of children’s hands and threw them in the trash, when not on bonfires. Many teachers or librarians still think that comics can only be the “comic book version,” meaning the dumbed-down version of “real” books. This is similar to someone dismissing Abstract Art by saying that a child of three could have painted that. Such a critic may not have encountered a Pollock, a De Kooning or a Rauschenberg. But, fortunately, a lot of the a-priori prejudices against comics have tended to evaporate once the would-be detractor sees our books. At a recent convention, a librarian who had stopped by at our distributor’s --- Diamond Book Distributors --- booth, picked up a TOON Book and exclaimed: “Oh! I didn’t know you also had real books!”

BRC: Do you expect more, or do you feel attitudes are changing?

FM: Both are in the offing I think. On one hand, many educators feel threatened by a medium that they are not familiar with and that can seem unpenetrable to them. And frankly, it’s also true that it’s a vastly expanded universe now, and that there are many comics or graphic novels that are absolutely NOT appropriate for children. So, it does scare the uninitiated. On the other hand, the landscape has entirely changed from the days when we did RAW and certainly since MAUS was first published, over 20 years ago. Comics --- or, as they are now dubbed, “graphic novels” --- have become respectable: they are shown in museums, taught in universities, eligible for literary prizes and stocked in most bookstores. Until very recently, the only area of comics that wasn’t thriving was comics for children. Let’s hope that with the TOON Books, we are now only seconds ahead of our times.

BRC: What positive responses have you gotten?

FM: Almost all the librarians and teachers we have been in touch with have been hugely supportive. As far as they are concerned, the TOON Books fill a very pressing need in children’s book publishing. While there are great picture books to read to young children, and rich literature for children eight or nine and up who are fluent readers, there are actually very few good books for the child at the stage he or she is discovering reading. Many of the adults who are in contact with kids every day, especially librarians and teachers, are eager to get them comics because they know it is something that the kids love. They are confident enough to believe that if the kids are enjoying reading, they’ll become lifelong readers. There are few studies on reading comics and literacy, but the few that exist show a correlation between highly literate readers and readers of comics. So the small cohort of enlightened librarians and teachers out there is definitely opening new worlds of possibilities.

BRC: You’re working with several people who have had a long history in the industry, yet the books’ contents are new and fresh. How have you chosen the writers and artists you’re working with?

FM: Good stories; artists willing to go through the process.

BRC: What are your goals for the Toon Books line?

FM: We are hoping it will contribute to many more good comics for kids being published.

BRC: How are these books going to be used in schools?

FM: We are absolutely thrilled about the enthusiastic and immediate response we have gotten from so many educators. They are quite a few individual teachers taking the initiative and bringing our books and other comics in the classroom. School Library Journal, admittedly the most influential publication for school libraries, recently had a cover article about kids’ comics where they featured our books. The TOON Books have also been accepted in Renaissance Learning’s Accelerated Reader program, which is used in over 60% of schools. And the Maryland State Superintendent of Schools, Dr. Nancy M. Grasmick, has adopted the TOON Books in her pioneering Comics in the Classroom initiative for grades K-2. Selected Maryland teachers will read our books with their class and contribute students’ comments as well as their own suggested lesson plans, the best of which we will post on our website, www.TOON-Books.com.

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