Françoise Mouly
Françoise Mouly (French: [muli]; born 24 October 1955) is a French-born American designer, editor and publisher.[1] She is best known as co-founder, co-editor, and publisher of the comics and graphics magazine Raw (1980–1991), as the publisher of Raw Books and Toon Books, and since 1993 as the art editor of The New Yorker. Mouly is married to cartoonist Art Spiegelman, and is the mother of writer Nadja Spiegelman.
Françoise Mouly
- Publisher
- editor
- designer
- colorist
Art Spiegelman (m. 1977)
- Nadja Spiegelman
- Dashiell Spiegelman
French Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters (2001)
French Knight of the Legion of Honour (2011)
Harvey Awards (2x)
As editor and publisher, Mouly has had considerable influence on the rise in production values in the English-language comics world since the early 1980s. She has played a role in providing outlets to new and foreign cartoonists, and in promoting comics as a serious artform and as an educational tool. The French government decorated Mouly as a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters in 2001, and as Knight of the Legion of Honour in 2011.
Biography[edit]
Early life[edit]
Mouly was born in 1955 in Paris, France, the second of three daughters to Josée and Roger Mouly. She grew up in the 17th arrondissement of Paris.[2] Her father was a plastic surgeon[3] who in 1951 developed, with Charles Dufourmentel, the Dufourmentel-Mouly method of breast reduction.[4]
From a young age Mouly had a love of reading, including novels, illustrated fairytale collections, comics magazines such as Pilote, and comics albums such as Tintin.[5] She excelled as a student, and her parents planned to have her study medicine and follow her father into plastic surgery. She spent vacation time assisting and observing her father at work.[6] She was troubled with the ethics of plastic surgery, though, which she said "exploits insecurity to such a high degree".[7]
At thirteen, Mouly witnessed the May 1968 events in France. The events led to Mouly's mother and sisters fleeing Paris. Her father stayed to be available to his patients, and Mouly stayed as his assistant. She developed sympathies with the anarchists, and read the weekly radical Hara-Kiri Hebdo.[2] She brought her radical leftist politics with her when her parents sent her in 1970 to the Lycée Jeanne D'Arc in central France, where she has said she was expelled "twenty-four or twenty-five times because [she] was trying to drag everyone to demonstrations".[8]
Mouly's father was disappointed when, upon Mouly's return to Paris, she chose to forgo medicine to study architecture at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts. She lived with a boyfriend in the Latin Quarter and traveled widely in Europe, took a two-and-a-half-month van trip with friends in 1972 that reached Afghanistan, and made a solo trip to Algeria in 1974 to study the vernacular architecture, during which she was robbed of her passport and money.[9]
Mouly grew disenchanted with the lack of creative freedom a career in architecture would present her. Her family life had grown stressful, and her parents divorced in 1974. The same year, she broke off her studies and worked as a cleaner in a hotel to save money for traveling to New York.[9]
Move to New York[edit]
With no concrete plans, Mouly arrived in New York September 2, 1974, with $200 in the midst of a severe economic downturn. She familiarized herself with the New York avant-garde art and film worlds, and had a part in Richard Foreman's 1975 play Pandering to the Masses.[10] She settled into a loft in SoHo in 1975[11] and worked at odd jobs, including selling cigarettes and magazines in Grand Central Station and assembling models for a Japanese architectural company, while struggling to improve her English.[12]
While looking for comics from which to practice reading English, she came across Arcade, an underground comix magazine from San Francisco co-published by New Yorker Art Spiegelman. Avant-garde filmmaker friend Ken Jacobs introduced Mouly and Spiegelman when Spiegelman was visiting, but they did not immediately develop a mutual interest. Spiegelman moved permanently back to New York later in the year. Occasionally the two ran across each other. After reading Spiegelman's 1973 strip "Prisoner on the Hell Planet", about his mother's suicide, Mouly felt the urge to contact him. An eight-hour phone call led to a deepening of their relationship. Spiegelman followed her to France when she had to return to fulfill obligations in her architecture course.[13] After returning to the United States, when Mouly ran into visa problems in 1977, the couple solved them by getting married, first at City Hall, and then again after Mouly converted to Judaism to please Spiegelman's father.[14] Beginning in 1978 Mouly and Spiegelman made yearly trips to Europe to explore the comics scene, and brought back European comics to show to their circle of friends.[15]
Mouly became immersed in Spiegelman's personal theories of comics, and helped him prepare the lecture "Language of the Comics" delivered at the Collective for Living Cinema.[16] She assisted in the putting together the lavish collection of Spiegelman's experimental strips Breakdowns. The printer botched the printing of the book—30% of the print run was unusable. The remaining copies had poor distribution and sales. The experience motivated Mouly to gain control over the printing process, and to find a way to get such marginal material to sympathetic readers.[17] She took courses in offset printing in Bedford–Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, and bought an Addressograph-Multigraph Multilith printing press for her loft.[18] During this period, she also worked as a colourist for Marvel Comics, coloring more than 50 issues of various titles.[19]
Recognition[edit]
Mouly has had a deep impact on the publishing practices of the comics world, though her name is not well known due to the behind-the-scenes nature of her work and the prominence of her Pulitzer Prize-winning husband. To comics critic and historian Jeet Heer, sexism has also played a role in minimizing the acknowledgment she receives.[50] In 2013, Drawn & Quarterly associate publisher Peggy Burns called Mouly "one of the most influential people in comics for 30 years."[50]
In 1989 Mouly and Spiegelman were recognized for their design work on Charles Burns' Hardboiled Defective Stories, which was given the Harvey Awards' Special Award for Excellence in Presentation. In 1991, Mouly and Spiegelman were recognized for their work on Raw when they were given the Harvey Award for Best Anthology. Mouly and Spiegelman's The TOON Treasury of Classic Children's Comics was nominated for the 2010 Eisner Award for Best Publication for Kids.
In 2011, the French government recognized Mouly as a Knight of the Legion of Honour (as her father had been),[48] and the Society of Illustrators bestowed on her the Richard Gangel Art Director Award.[54] At the ninth Carle Honors Awards in 2014 the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art granted Mouly the Bridge Award for promoting children's literature.[55]
Jeet Heer published a biography of Mouly in 2013 titled In Love with Art: Françoise Mouly's Adventures in Comics with Art Spiegelman.[56] Mouly's daughter Nadja interviewed her and Mouly's mother Josée for the memoir I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This.[57] In 2015, Mouly was the recipient of Smithsonian Magazine's American Ingenuity Award for Education.[58]