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Françoise Mouly, longtime art editor for The New Yorker, is developing a new genre with the debut this month of TOON Books, a boutique line of hardcover graphic novels for beginning readers. Mouly describes launching the project as getting “back to my roots,” a chance to combine a lifelong love of comics with the DIY aesthetic she absorbed in 1980s New York as coeditor (with her husband, graphic novelist Art Spiegelman) of the groundbreaking comics magazine RAW.
Mouly moved to New York City from Paris in 1975; her struggles with English and her search for the sophisticated comics she’d known in France led her to Spiegelman’s early work and their eventual collaboration on RAW. But it was their children who inspired Mouly to return to comics five years into her post at The New Yorker. In 1998, when her son, then in the first grade, was having trouble learning to read, she used comic books to help him along. Her passion for the genre led her to create Little Lit, a rollicking series of anthologies for elementary school–age readers; contributors included big-name artists and writers such as Neil Gaiman and Lemony Snicket.
