RAW^137
Françoise Mouly and Art SpiegelmanFrançoise Mouly (b. 1955 ) and Art
Spiegelman (b. 1948 ) were married in 1982.
Within a few months they gave birth to a
publishing business which they named
Raw Books and Graphics. It was
consigned to a corner of their loft in Man-
hattan’s SoHo district, where it quickly
grew into a healthy concern. Mouly, a
native of Paris, had been an architecture
student at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and
worked as a colorist for Marvel Comics in
New York; Spiegelman, a native New
Yorker, was an underground comic strip
editor and artist with a unique analytical
approach to comic page construction. The
comics brought them together; and
because they agreed that viable outlets did
not exist in America for the kind of
experimental work that interested them,
they decided to fill the void left by the demise of underground comix in the
mid- 1970 s by starting a publishing venture that would somehow provide a
forum for new and radical forms. This entrepreneurial commitment thrust
them into the roles of publisher and editor, and more reluctantly into being
the virtual foster parents to a group of artists whose unconventional styles
and approaches were given little encouragement in mainstream publishing
circles. Within a few years RAWmagazine, the flagship of Raw Books and
Graphics, had enlivened a moribund field.
The reasons for starting Raw Books and Graphics were compel-
ling. “There was no place worth appearing in,” Spiegelman said. “There
were magazines interested in me, but they wanted me to bend myself out of
shape to do comics that would be fitting for them.” Mouly had already single-
handedly published The SoHo Map and Guide,an ambitious first project
that sold advertising space to SoHo merchants. Now she wanted to learn
printing, so they bought a used multilith press and rebuilt it in their loft.
“The real genesis of RAW,” admitted Spiegelman, “was Françoise’s
goading it into existence, because it had a certain logic after she began