“Françoise Mouly is the publisher and Editorial Director of TOON Books, which she launched in 2008. She joined The New Yorker as art editor in 1993. Ms. Mouly has been responsible for over 1,000 covers over her tenure at The New Yorker. The American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME) has chosen many of Ms. Mouly’s images as “best cover of the year.” In 2012, for the publication of “Les Dessous du New Yorker” by Éditions de La Martinière, Galerie Martel in Paris presented “New Yorker Covers,” an exhibit of artwork by Mouly and seventeen other artists.
Starting in 1980, Ms. Mouly was the founder, publisher, designer and co-editor with her collaborator and husband, cartoonist Art Spiegelman, of the pioneering comics anthology “RAW,”” where Spiegelman’s MAUS was first published. In 1998, after looking for material to help her two children become readers, Ms. Mouly established a RAW Junior division, to publish first the Little Lit collection of comics with HarperCollins, then the TOON Treasury of Classic Children’s Comics with Abrams, and launched the TOON Books imprint.
In 2012, Ms. Mouly released Blown Covers, about the creative process behind New Yorker covers with Abrams, Postcards from the New Yorker, A Hundred Postcards from Ten Decades with Penguin, and was the editor of Houghton Mifflin’s 2012 Best American Comics. In 2013, Coach House Press released In Love With Art, a biography of Ms. Mouly by esteemed critic Jeet Heer. In 2014, she was featured with Lynda Barry, Alison Bechdel, Charles Burns, Daniel Clowes and others in Professor Hillary Chute’s Outside the Box, Interviews with Contemporary Cartoonists, published by the University of Chicago Press.
Born in Paris, Françoise moved to New York in 1974. She was named Chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters by the French Ministry of Culture and Communication. Among the many honors she has received are an honorary Doctorate from Pratt Institute, Gold and Silver medals as well as the Richard Gangel Art Director Award from the Society of Illustrators, and France’s highest honor, the Legion of Honour. In the Fall of 2014, she’s slated to receive the Eric Carle Musuem’s Bridge Award, which goes to “”an individual whose work has been instrumental in extending the boundaries of the illustrated book for young people and in helping to bring such books to new audiences.””
She and her husband live in Manhattan. Her favorite TOON Book is Jack and the Box, because “”it’s a great metaphor for a book as well as a great book.”” “