A perennial hobby horse of mine is that Françoise Mouly doesn’t get enough public credit for being one of the key postwar figures in graphic fiction and comics; she’s heavily responsible for the introduction to America of numerous international artists in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as for physically printing and distributing the brilliant and influential Raw magazine. She’s best known now for her design, and for being art editor at The New Yorker, but she did produce one short single-page, seventeen-panel comic, Industry News and Review No6, which depicts a frustrated printer, barely visible in the margins of the images of the printing plant, wondering if she will ever be able to focus on her own art. At the climax of the page, the art she has been working on is revealed to be the cover of issue 6 of Industry News and Review, which has been drawn from the images of her life we’ve seen previously, and which forms a semi-closed metatextual loop from which her art emerges. It’s such a brilliant conceit, and I think it’s the only comic to which she ever put her own name.
In Raw Issue 1, 1980. Available to view here
A Personal Anthology 