Calvin Reid at Publisher’s Weekly spoke with Françoise Mouly about Toon Books, the new imprint she’s started that’s “designed to nurture basic reading skills and encourage a love of visual storytelling.” It’s aimed at really young kids, as she explains:
“Comics are the gateway to literacy for young kids,” said Mouly who expects Toon Books to transform books for early readers the same way RAW influenced indie comics. “RAW showed that comics can be taken seriously,” she said. Little Lit, a comics line for older kids launched by Mouly and Spiegelman in 2000, “was an intermediate step using the RAW model. Now there are more comics for kids 10–12 years old but not for very young kids.”
The line launches next spring with three books — Benny and Penny by Geoffrey Hayes, Silly Lilly by Agnes Rosenstiehl and Otto’s Orange Day by Frank Cammuso and Jay Lynch. Three more should follow in the fall, including Dean Haspiel and Jay Lynch’s Mo and Jo – Fighting Together Forever, which Haspiel talks about on his blog, and Jack and the Box by art spiegelman.
More details on the line can be found at the Toon Books website.
