Drawing Power

COMIC STRIP

The Adventures of Prose Guy

Prose Guy can no longer ignore a growing force in the publishing universe. It's his day of reckoning with graphic novels' ... drawing power!

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The numbers bear him out.

In 2001, the first year it started tracking them, the pop culture business Web site ICv2 reported a total of $75 million in graphic novel sales in the United States and Canada. By 2007, that total had quintupled, to $375 million, and graphic novels had gained their reputation as one of the few growth areas in publishing. As a result, every publisher in New York -- they may be late adapters, but they're not blind -- seemed to be scrambling for a piece of the action.

What happened?

A lot of things, I will discover. Best-selling ideamonger Malcolm Gladwell famously argued that you can often find a single, crucial "tipping point" to explain such a change. But "SPLAT!" panelist Bob Mecoy -- a New York literary agent who has found himself selling more and more graphic novels over the past few years -- says that a better image, in this case, would be "a whole lot of little seesaws" tipping one after another.

"Maus" was an early one, Mecoy says. Few would disagree.

A few days after "SPLAT!" I find myself splashing through the rainy streets of SoHo toward the place that particular seesaw began to tip. I've got an appointment to meet Art Spiegelman's wife and collaborator, Francoise Mouly, in the same building where, 28 years ago, they launched the influential cartoon journal Raw, in which Spiegelman's masterpiece first appeared.

Mouly is a voluble woman in her early 50s who, despite having left France for New York in 1974, retains much of the charming accent she arrived with. She mostly wants to tell me about her new publishing venture, Toon Books, a series of elegantly produced comic tales aimed at beginning readers. But her crowded studio feels like a museum of avant-garde cartooning -- a blown-up cover of a Raw anthology dominates the back wall; a lovely old oak case holds "mechanicals" and color separations used eons ago to prepare work by the likes of Robert Crumb and Charles Burns for publication -- and inevitably, the conversation slips into the past.

"There's a generation that grew up with Raw, which is strange for me," Mouly says, "because I'm like the old lady of comics!" As the art editor of the New Yorker, she is now in a position to pay her artists well. But she can recall a time when "the rewards were too few for anybody but insane people to actually want to be cartoonists."

Raw was created in large part to give these cartoonists, Spiegelman included, a place their work could be seen. "Maus" was first published as a series of small booklets hand-glued into the magazine.

For those who haven't encountered the finished version, I can only urge you to check it out yourself. Attempts at description -- "father and son angst," "Holocaust survival," "Jews as mice and Nazis as cats" -- can't begin to convey the uncannily moving effect of Spiegelman's blend of words, pictures, intense themes and self-deflating humor. Published in two volumes by Pantheon, in 1986 and 1991, "Maus" made bestseller lists, won a 1992 Pulitzer Prize and established that a graphic novel could qualify as great literature.

What it did not immediately do, however, was help other graphic novels achieve similar commercial and literary prominence. As Mouly points out, some 15 years would pass between the publication of the first "Maus" volume and the beginning of the graphic-novel boom.

In the meantime, she and Spiegelman had a daughter and a son. And as the parents watched their children's very different progress toward reading, the seeds of Toon Books were sown.