getting involved in publishing. That meant setting up a makeshift
distribution system so that things she printed could get around, which she
did. And then her being ready to take on something more ambitious. For a
while it seemed that might be books rather than the magazine, but the
advantage after we did the first issue of RAW(which we swore we would
never do again) was that we’d already set up something we could build on.
A book is always another book and requires a whole new constituency to be
gathered each time. The magazine gave us a core of readers.”The SoHo
Map and Guideprovided enough capital to publish a first issue, and the
makeshift distribution Mouly had set up eventually paid them enough to
keep going without further infusions of outside capital.
In a way,RAWevolved from Spiegelman’s anthology Breakdowns,
at least in adapting the book’s expansive dimensions (eleven by fourteen
inches), which enabled him to print his strips at almost their original size.
There were other reasons for the new magazine’s format, too. “RAWstarted
at a time when there were a number of large-size cultural tabloids, such as
We t,Fetish,Skyline,and Interview,” recalled Spiegelman. “The only thing
they had in common was the fact that they were ‘new wave,’ with a large
size and a new sensibility. So whether it was fashion, architecture, art, or
politics, they sat next to each other on the newsstand. Whatever vestigial
marketing sense I had said that if we did comics as a large-size thing, they
could sit next to the architecture magazines and nobody would say ‘where
should the comic book go?’”
From the outset, Spiegelman and Mouly wanted a three-letter
title in the tradition of MAD. They went through many ideas before
settling on RAW, which for them meant “having vital juices intact” rather
than untamed or aggressive. To this they added a new, enigmatic subtitle
with each issue, among them, “The Graphix Magazine for Damned
Intellectuals,” “The Graphix Magazine of Abstract Depressionism,” “The
Graphic Aspirin for War Fever,” and “The Graphix Magazine that Over-
estimates the Taste of the American Public.” By comic book standards,
RAW’s premiere issue was tame: every element was purposefully designed.
But in the beginning RAW’s design was a disquieting mix of what seemed
like trendy new wave detailing, and, by modernist graphic design standards,
a comic book heavy-handedness. Every page had an obtrusive running
head, an inelegant rule with a panel in which the artist’s name appeared,
and a page number dropped out of a circle. Although this became RAW’s
signature design element, when it was first introduced it appeared a
distracting conceit. Each contents page was an artwork in its own right,
with overprints, drop-outs, and other design details that echoed the punk
graphic aesthetic of the time.
tuis.
(Tuis.)
#1