IN LOVE WITH ART

FRANÇOISE MOULY’S ADVENTURES IN COMICS WITH ART SPIEGELMAN

By JEET HEER

COACH HOUSE BOOKS

Copyright © 2013 Jeet Heer
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-55245-278-3

CHAPTER 1

The Invisible Woman

One afternoon in March 1993 in Manhattan, two powerhousesof the magazine world, Tina Brown and Françoise Mouly,met to discuss remaking the New Yorker, probably the most venerableperiodical in America. They came from strikingly differentbackgrounds and had, arguably, entirely different ambitions, butthey had in common an ability to generate controversy and bringvisionary change to their medium. Born and raised in the U.K.,the contentious and flamboyant Brown, then thirty-nine, hadpreviously reinvigorated both Tatler and Vanity Fair, and she hadbeen hired in July 1992 to similarly inject some life into the NewYorker, which had become somewhat stagnant and self-satisfiedunder her predecessors. The then-thirty-seven-year-old Mouly,for her part, was running her own publishing company, RAWBooks and Graphics, and for the decade previous to this meeting,had been the co-editor, along with her husband, cartoonist ArtSpiegelman, of RAW, a magazine that had revolutionized theworld of comics by bringing to the form a new level of graphicintensity and artistic seriousness without losing popular appeal.Not least among its achievements, RAW serialized Spiegelman’sMaus, a long-form comic-book story that played a pivotal role increating the new genre popularly known as ‘the graphic novel.’

Brown had already introduced several controversial newfeatures to the New Yorker: photography, more celebrity- andnews-driven pieces, and topical covers that were a far cry fromthe tasteful, quiet illustrations the magazine had been favouring.Even more than book jackets, magazine covers serve as both thepublic face of a publication and its most effective marketing tool;captivating, even scandalous, covers were a clear signal of Brown’sintentions. Art Spiegelman created the most provocative of thoseearly covers for the 1993 Valentine’s Day issue: an illustration of aHasidic man kissing a black woman, a sly comment on ethnictensions that had been erupting in Brooklyn’s Crown Heightsneighbourhood. The cover, predictably, sparked outrage, but italso made people talk about the New Yorker in a way they hadn’tbeen doing for years. For Brown, the key to successful publishingwas generating buzz: she wanted the New Yorker to be the talk ofthe town, and the Spiegelman cover certainly achieved that goal.

Brown asked Spiegelman to recommend art directors whocould help her come up with covers that would keep up the buzz.He provided a list. Brown was also bouncing around ideas withLawrence Weschler, who had profiled Spiegelman for Rolling Stonein 1986 and served as Brown’s informal advisor. She askedWeschler why he thought Spiegelman hadn’t included his ownwife; Mouly and Brown had met once before at the office of RAWBooks and Graphics, when Spiegelman was working on the interracialkiss cover, and Brown had been very impressed by the issuesof RAW she saw there. It hadn’t occurred to either Spiegelman orMouly that they’d be interested in someone with Mouly’s unconventionalbackground. Weschler told Mouly Brown was consideringhiring her.

A staff position at the New Yorker is a dream for many writers,artists and editors, but Mouly didn’t initially leap at the opportunity;she had mixed feelings about both Brown and the magazine.As Mouly says, ‘I heard Tina was brought in to the New Yorker ata dinner party in the summer of 1992, and I couldn’t understandwhy everyone was so excited and opinionated about it. The NewYorker meant nothing to me except for being the place I sentartists I thought were too staid for RAW.’

Nor was Mouly impressed by the fact that Brown, as editor ofVanity Fair, had published a photo on the June 1985 cover showingan elegant Ronald and Nancy Reagan dancing during the presidentialinaugural ball, accompanied by a gushing essay celebratingthe couple penned by William F. Buckley, Jr. In RAW, Mouly andSpiegelman had frequently published comics that abrasively challengedthe right-wing turn of American culture under Reagan. ‘Ihated Brown’s Vanity Fair cover that had the Reagans dancing,’Mouly recalls. ‘That was the enemy speaking, glamorizing a rearguardreactionary who was starting a grand squeeze of the middleclass for the benefit of the super rich.’

But despite her political reservations, Mouly liked Brownpersonally. ‘I was impressed by her when she came down to theoffice,’ Mouly remembers. ‘She’s very charismatic, quick-witted,full of energy.’ And like Brown herself, Mouly was thrilled by thefirestorm of controversy Spiegelman’s cover ignited. Both womenhad a strong visual sense and appreciated the power of images tostir debate. Nor was a love of inflammatory imagery the only thingthe women had in common: both were dynamos, famous for pushingboth themselves and the artists they worked with. Spiegelmandescribes Mouly as a ‘whirling dervish,’ someone always feverishlyworking on many projects at once. It was a good match.

Yet a New Yorker job would mean becoming an employee.Accustomed to being her own boss, and more at home withsubversive art than subservient work, Mouly didn’t want to bejust an employee at a mass-market magazine trying to pleasesubscribers: ‘It really was visceral,’ she explains. ‘Why would Iwant to be somebody’s secretary?’ As she thought it over anddiscussed the possible job with friends, her feelings changed.Brown wasn’t seeking just assistance, she realized, but ratherMouly’s singular expertise. ‘If Tina Brown knew what she wanted,she wouldn’t be asking me,’ Mouly said.

Mouly set about studying the magazine’s visual history (aidedby the fact that Weschler gave her access to the magazine’s library).No admirer of its recent covers, which tended to the pastoral anddecorative, she was delighted to discover that during its first fewdecades the front of the magazine had been dominated by flashy,poster-like images of New York life obviously inspired by one ofthe great French cartoon magazines of the early twentieth century,L’Assiette au Beurre. (Harold Ross, the New Yorker‘s founder, hadbeen a soldier in France in World War I, where he likely encounteredthe country’s rich graphic culture, just as he had been influencedby American humour magazines such as Judge and Life.)To reshape the front of the New Yorker as a contemporary, Americanversion of L’Assiette au Beurre, with each cover an exuberantcartoon commentary on the world? That was an ambition thatMouly could put her heart into. ‘Harold Ross and Tina Brownwere both visual editors,’ Mouly concluded.

Spontaneously, she drew up a proposal that argued the NewYorker should return to having artists as featured contributors,with not just more daring covers but also an increased use ofphotos and illustrations inside the magazine to be integrated withthe prose and poetry. Soon after sending in the proposal, Moulygot a call to meet Brown for lunch.

That auspicious meal took place at the Royalton, a boutiquehotel and Brown haunt close to the headquarters of Condé Nast,which owned the New Yorker. ‘I knew what I wanted to do andwas in a take-it-or-leave-it mode,’ Mouly says. ‘If it didn’t workfor Tina, that was fine with me. If she took it, I knew it would bea challenge, but it was an exciting one.’ Mouly’s main concernwas how she would reconcile a high-powered job with raisingher two kids, a daughter almost five and a son who had justturned one. Mouly thought about asking if the job could bedelayed for a year, but knew the request would be rejected.

Mouly’s proposal was barely discussed during the lunch;Brown had clearly made up her mind. Like Mouly, she was amother of two and, at one point in their conversation, she lookedat Mouly and asked, ‘Do you have a good babysitter?’ Mouly tookthe job.

The move from RAW to the New Yorker followed a pattern thathad governed her life and career: a semi-steady course from themargins of culture to its centres of power. When Mouly firststarted publishing comics, they were a fringe and sometimesderided medium. Her tenure at RAW changed that, bringing attentionand credibility to the form. Working at the New Yorker allowedher to further pursue her aesthetic agenda on one of the mostprestigious stages in the world.

Even before taking on that challenge, Mouly was, by any estimation,an exceedingly illustrious and talented editor. She’s hadas massive and transformative an impact on comics as Ezra Poundhad on modernist literature, Max Perkins on early-twentieth-centuryAmerican novels or Gordon Lish on contemporary fiction.At RAW, she brought to comics the stringent and demandingconceptualism of modern art while remaining true to the form’sdemocratic appeal as a mass art. She infused a staid New Yorkerwith an eye-catching, often eye-popping, cartoon aesthetic andadded a whole new stratum of narrative meaning. More recently,and concurrent with her New Yorker work, Mouly founded TOONBooks, a publishing outfit that is likewise revitalizing the formerlymoribund field of children’s comics.

If Mouly is so impressive a figure in the world of of comicsand magazine editing, why have her achievements so rarelyreceived the attention they deserve? Sexism is undeniably a factor.All too many journalistic and critical accounts speak of ‘Art Spiegelman’sRAW magazine’ as if he did the editorial heavy lifting all byhimself. This sexism exists in the culture at large but is particularlyintense in the comics world, a subculture notorious, at least untilrecent years, for its nerdy ‘no girls allowed’ attitude. As Moulynotes, during her first few decades in comics she would routinelygo to conventions that were more than 90 percent male andwhere she was often brushed off as an unwelcome interloper.

Another factor is simply the nature of her work. Mouly is aneditor. A cartoonist or writer makes visible marks for all to see.Part of an editor’s job is to disappear, to let the artist speak forhimself or herself; editing has, in fact, been called ‘the invisibleart.’ This book will try to make the invisible visible to show howMouly’s editorial fingerprints can be seen on every project sheworks on. She brings rigour and imagination to the craft of editing,and in doing so proves that editing can be more than a craft – itis, at its best, an art.

CHAPTER 2

A Surgeon’s Daughter

Françoise Mouly was born to disappoint her parents. She wasparticularly a bitter pill for her formidable father, Dr. RogerMouly. A pioneer in popularizing plastic surgery in France, Dr.Mouly had made a name for himself not just as a much sought-afterpractitioner but also as a theorist and advocate of surgicallymodifying and improving the human body. With a colleague, hedeveloped the Dufourmentel-Mouly method of breast reduction,which uses a lateral incision that leaves a smaller scar than earlierprocedures. An expert whose wisdom was sought by both highlyspecialized medical journals and newspapers like Le Monde, acharismatic and flashy Parisian who managed to charm bothconservative politicians such as Jacques Chirac and the studentradicals who took to the streets in rzwy, a venerated professionalwho served as the vice-president of the Société internationale dechirurgie esthétique and was inducted as a Chevalier de la Légiond’honneur, Dr. Mouly thought he lacked only one thing to makehis life complete and meaningful: a son who could inherit hispractice and continue to make the Mouly name synonymous withFrench plastic surgery.

Françoise Mouly, the second of three daughters, made herunwelcome entrance into the world in rzvv. ‘Both my parentshad a very explicit complaint which they kept bringing up overand over again: that the worst thing that ever happened to themwas to have three daughters,’ Mouly recalls somewhat sarcastically.’They only wanted to have a son. They put up with myolder sister, but by the time I was born my father was so disappointedhe nearly did not declare me at the town hall. A fewyears later my little sister was born, and shame again. My parentswere crushed.’ (Mouly is one year younger than her sister Laurenceand six years older than Marie-Pierre, whose name is a memorialto the desire for a son who would have been named Pierre).

That heavy burden of parental discontent aside, Mouly’sparents provided her with particular kinds of inspiration. Prior toher marriage to Dr. Mouly, Josée Giron had been a stewardess atTWA. It was a chic and sexy profession at the time (but onereserved for single women), and Mouly says now that her appreciationof beauty is very much tied to her sense of her mother asa ‘truly beautiful, graceful, elegant and glamorous person.’ Evenas a child, Mouly wanted to create art beautiful enough to suitGiron: ‘A lot of my early memories as a kid have to do withmaking objects and paintings for her.’

If her mother’s elegance and grace kindled Mouly’s aestheticawareness, her early education gave shape to these intereststhrough a holistic curriculum that combined writing, drawing andreciting. At the beginning of each class, as their homeroom teacherrecited a poem, students using crow quill pens copied it out incalligraphic writing on the right side of their notebooks. On theleft side, they illustrated the poem. Finally, at the bottom of thepage, they were instructed to draw a geometric frieze. The lessonconcluded with the students memorizing the poem – not just byrote, but with the passion and emotion of elocutionists.

‘It was really great,’ she says now. ‘It combined the beauty ofthe words and the calligraphy with images, including the frieze,which had to be in keeping with the mood of the poetry. It broughttogether literature, memorization and acting out. That’s all goodtraining for a very full experience of the power of art and literature.’While this artistic education had broader purposes, it’s hard tothink of better training for a future editor of comics and illustration.

Aside from newspapers and magazines, neither Roger Moulynor Josée Giron read much. The only books young Françoise everreceived from her family were hand-me-down Jules Verne andAlexandre Dumas volumes from her mother’s childhood library.But as a child Mouly loved to read – it was ‘the one activity thatprotected me from my family and from anything in school,’ shesays – and she craved books, particularly the lavishly illustratedfairy-tale treasuries offered as prizes for top students. ‘Frenchschooling is very consistent in never giving you anything but negativereinforcement,’ Mouly explains. ‘You get threatened all thetime. Everyone is always ceaselessly ranked. You have examsevery single day.’ Ferociously competitive, Mouly’s goal everyyear was to earn the large hardcover that was first prize. ‘It wassomething I treasured,’ she says. ‘I read the stories and reread thestories and looked at the illustrations for hours.’

Illustrated fairy tales were a precursor to the comics she discovereda few years later. As a preteen, she loved to accompany herfather to the newsstand, where he would buy Mouly the latestissue of Pilote, a weekly anthology best known for featuring thesquat, quick-witted Gaul Astérix, whose rollicking adventures inthe ancient world were then at the height of their popularity.René Goscinny, co-creator of Astérix and editor-in-chief of Pilote,was much influenced by Harvey Kurtzman – the mastermindbehind the early Mad comics and Mad magazine – and Moulyloved the satirical, Mad-inspired sections of Pilote, which alsoincluded the Kurtzman-inflected work of Marcel Gotlib, whosestrip La Rubrique-à-Brac she especially cherished. (She read dutifully,but with little pleasure, the melodramatic adventure seriesfound on adjoining pages, notably Jean Giraud’s solidly drawnbut clichéd Wild West strip Blueberry.)
(Continues…)Excerpted from IN LOVE WITH ART by JEET HEER. Copyright © 2013 Jeet Heer. Excerpted by permission of COACH HOUSE BOOKS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.