Cultural journalist/critic Jeet Heer launches his new book, In Love With Art: François Mouly’s Adventures In Comics With Art Spiegelman at Chapters tonight. Maybe you should go. Why? First, Jeet Heer is a big deal — he’s a brilliant writer who has penned articles for The Guardian, The Walrus, The Globe And Mail, The National Post and other notable outlets. He’s supercool, he lives in Regina and this is your chance to meet him. Second, his subject, François Mouly is an even bigger deal. Mouly, along with her husband Art Spiegelman (author of the Pulitzer prize-winning comic Maus) is the founder of Raw, the seminal 1980s New York-based anthology of art comics. Raw introduced readers to alternative cartoonists including Chris Ware, Charles Burns, Julie Doucet, Lynda Barry and Spiegelman (along with household-ish names like Robert Crumb and Alan Moore).
There was a segment on Raw in Ron Mann’s eeexcellent 1988 documentary Comic Book Confidential, which some noble pirate had kindly uploaded to YouTube for me to share, here:
(The whole documentary’s worth seeing, and it’s at the library.)
Mouly is also The New Yorker’s longtime art director, and she’s responsible for more than a few of that mag’s iconic covers, like this and this and this.
Vanda interviewed Jeet for this issue and you can read that here. The fun starts at 7:00 tonight. Maybe see you there!