Skip to content

Tag: toon books

A Cocoon Over There!

‘A Cocoon Over There!’ is a lovely cartoon about going back to school by Argentinian cartoonist Liniers for the New York Times Book Review:

Liniers has a new kids book out this fall from Toon Books called Goodnight, Planet.

1 Comment

Liniers in New York

CoverStory-Hipster-Stole-Liniers-876-1200-06183144

The New York Times profiles Argentinian cartoonist Ricardo Siri, better known as Liniers:

“When I started the comic everything was horrible,” Liniers, 41, said in a recent interview at his publisher’s office in SoHo at the start of an East Coast book tour. “The towers fell here,” he said, “and in Argentina there was a huge economic tailspin and we had five presidents in a week. So I wanted to create something optimistic as an act of resistance, like a positive revolution.”

In “Macanudo,” plotlines usually do not extend past the punch line, if one exists at all, and the characters and type of humor can change daily. Penguins, gnomes and an olive named Oliverio are only a handful of the creatures that float in and out of “Macanudo.”

“I like to surprise,” Liniers said. “When readers open up the paper, I don’t want them to know what to expect.”

35361-1

Liniers has two new books out this fall — Macanudo #3, a collection of his newspaper strips published by Enchanted Lion, and Written and Drawn by Henrietta, an original kid’s book published by TOON.

Comments closed

Françoise Mouly on Voice

francoise-mouly-photo-sarah-shatz.

Grace Bello interviews the always interesting Françoise Mouly, art director of The New Yorker and founder of Toon Books, for Guernica:

I know what I respond to is a voice. A voice is not just a stylistic thing, but it means someone who really has something to say. I think a lot of what I get from books—whether they be books of comics or books of literature—is a window into somebody’s mind and their way of thinking. I love it when it’s so specific. It’s a new way to look at the world. It’s as if I could get in and see it through their eyes. It also reaches a level of universality because, somehow, I can recognize some of my feelings in seeing somebody who is actually expressing their own inner reality. Even though Flaubert has not been in Madame Bovary’s skin, you do get a sense of what it’s like to be that person. It’s a kind of empathic response when you’re reading it.

Comments closed

Françoise Mouly on TOON Books

trip-to-the-bottom-of-the-world

At Mutha Magazine, Meg Lemke talks to Françoise Mouly, Art Editor of The New Yorker and co-founder of RAW magazine, about TOON Books, her line of comics for kids:

When I go to schools, even in very impoverished school districts, and I say that I’m here to read a book—it’s fantastic to see how kindergarteners and first graders love story time. They love being read to. I go to schools to see the actual response from the kids, not what I think they will say. Reading is a canvas that they use to construct their understanding of the world. Comics are great that way, even better than illustrated stories, because, in comics, the story is told sequentially in pictures, and you, the reader, make connections between the panels. It’s a truly interactive medium, where the story itself stays on the page but you are the one making up what happens between the panels, making it move in space and in time.

When you talk to teachers, you will hear words such as making inferences and connecting and finding the context. It’s elaborate thought but it’s congenial to kids—they do it naturally. They’re always trying to make sense of the world around them. Nobody has ever had to teach a child how to find Waldo—they intuitively get it, and they find Waldo far quicker than most literate adults. Comics take advantage of the thing that children know how to do, of what their strength is, and puts them in the driver’s seat of reading.

Comments closed

Françoise Mouly: In the Service of What the Artist is Saying

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.

Hazlitt

Comments closed