In a follow up to his short Q & A with Françoise Mouly and her partner Art Spiegelman for the National Post, David Balzer has a fascinating full-length interview with Mouly, publisher of Toon Books and art editor of the New Yorker, at Hazlitt:
I think that if you set out with a scripted outcome, you don’t succeed. I’m acting out things that work on me. I spent most of my terribly unhappy childhood years immersed in books. I found early on that it was a great way to escape any kind of arguments with my parents or emotional upheaval. I loved reading and being lost in a book. I trained as an architect. As an architect you’re part of a team and no architect can build a house by themselves. But a bookmaker can make a book all by themselves. And an author: look at my husband’s book, or Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis—she manages to convey a very rich world, and her personality is very well expressed in a book that shows her handwriting, that has a sense of her.
In a way I got a very classical education growing up in France in the sixties, and learning Latin, Greek, French and English. But I’m well versed in the technological part of the 21st century. The common denominator for me is stories, narrative structure. That’s how I understand things. I find them, books, the right recipient for something that is both complex and nourishing. I watch movies and enjoy them; I watch, you know, The Wire and TV shows, but still, the stories I read in books inhabit my brain in a special way. Those characters are very present in my thinking. And children’s books are a very real part of how I think. So I find it a privilege to actually be in communication, to leave a trace of something that’s actually going to be read.