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Françoise Mouly: In Love With Art

Jeet Heer discusses the work Françoise Mouly and his new book, In Love With Art: Françoise Mouly’s Adventures in Comics with Art Spiegelmanwith Dave Berry at The National Post:

She’s open to the wider world in a way that was very rare for North American comics, which was a very provincial scene. But combined with that is not just the European comics themselves, but the European fine art tradition, which she had been educated in and made her very responsive to certain types of art. That’s very distinct from North America, even in the undergrounds, which were much more rooted in satire and lowbrow comedy and pulpishness. The other thing that she brought to the table is a sense of design, which is very rare in comics to that point. There was no one designing magazines and books in that format. Even people who believed in mature comics, they didn’t have that. Fantagraphics, their comics in the ’80s, even though the content is great, when they put it together in a book, they have no idea how to design that kind of product.

In a lot of ways, that sense of design really made the whole idea of the graphic novel possible. The distinguishing thing of the graphic novel isn’t just the length, but that it’s conceived of as a book. In the ’70s and ’80s, people thought that if you had a 64-page Hulk story, that’s a graphic novel – better paper, but all the same design elements as the regular comic… what made Maus and the other books that she did seem like bookstore material, library material was her book design sensibility. Everybody who’s doing interesting comics since then has learned from that.

Earlier this week, The Atlantic ran an excerpt from the book about the now iconic 9/11 New Yorker cover created by Mouly and Spiegelman:

It was a true example of collaborative art. Many of the hallmarks of Mouly’s tenure as New Yorker art editor can be seen in the 9/11 cover, including a direct engagement with current events—an enormous tonal shift in New Yorker cover history. But the cover doesn’t deal with this tragedy in the didactic manner of, say, a political cartoon, but rather through artful means: using subtlety and ambiguity, strong design, a compelling use of color (or in this case, a memorable absence of color) and the distillation of experience (rather than ideas or ideologies) into an iconic image. The dialogue between Mouly and Spiegelman was also typical of the strongly collaborative way she always has worked with, and continues to work with, her artists.

In Love With Art: Françoise Mouly’s Adventures in Comics with Art Spiegelman is published by Toronto’s Coach House Press, and if you are in Toronto this evening, Françoise Mouly and Sean Rogers will be in conversation Jeet Heer at Revival on College Street, starting at 7:30pm

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