Francoise Mouly's Recommended Comics

It’s a great time to discover comics, graphic novel, because there are so many really good books.
Joe Sacco’s book just got published. It got published at the end of the year, so it hasn’t quite
gotten the full recognition that it deserves. Last year "Asterios Polyp" by David Mazzucchelli,
who we published in RAW many years ago, but also spent like 10 or 15 years working on that
book and now, has it out and that’s terrific. Bob Sikoryak or R. Sikoryak who used to be one of
our assistant editors at RAW Magazine just published "Masterpiece Comics," also I think from
Drawn & Quarterly. That’s a beautiful book.

In a month or two Drawn & Quarterly will release a new book by Dan Clowes that’s fantastic.
Art published a re-edition of "Breakdowns" with some new material that’s really interesting. I
think, totally objectively even though I’m married to the man, but it’s both the experimental
strips that he did in the ‘70s and strips that he just did that actually looks back on both growing
up and little anecdotes about his childhood and the kind of thinking that was breakthrough
thinking then, was the what unlocked the possibilities for Maus and now being recombined for
narrative.

Those moments are very exciting because Maus was a memoir and it was black and white,
completely different from anything that had existed since then. It gave way to books such as
Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, an Iranian young woman who came to Vienna and then to France
and did a memoir about growing up in Iran and that got turned into a movie. All of those books
are books that have taken a long time to mature. I think Joe Sacco spent like five years only on
his Gaza, "Footnotes in Gaza" book, so now they are coming out one at a time and they each
deserve a lot of—they’re great. For somebody who is coming into comics now, those volumes
are so rich in visual ideas, in storytelling and they’re very mature works.