Chris Mautner has a great interview up on his personal blog with Francoise Mouly, art editor for The New Yorker and co-founder of Raw, about her new line of comics for young kids, Toon Books:
Q: Why take on all this by yourself? Why not go with one of the other big publishers?
A: Good question. (laughs)
I did go to every single publisher in town with this simple idea: comics for kids, although it’s focused. I just felt the best way to make my point was to actually make something that hasn’t actually been done, which was to make comics at the point where the child is learning to read, where the vocabulary would be looked at and controlled and the story would be appropriate for a six year old.
It’s a very hinge age, because you’re too big for picture books and you’re not fluent enough for Harry Potter. When you actually have kids you realize there aren’t that many books published for that moment because kids are not into books. They don’t know how to read. They’re a little too big to be read to so there’s a kind of giving up on this.
I wanted to do that specifically and I kept getting the same answer from every publisher that I went to: “Gee, that’s a wonderful idea. It’s beautifully executed” — which was all very flattering — “I wish we could do it but we can’t.”
Why? “Because it doesn’t exist.” There’s no slot for it, there’s no section for it in the bookstore. There’s no section in the library. The CEO of one of the major publishing companies explained to me, to create a new category in the book store, it’s not that it can’t be done but it takes hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars to create a new kind of format. They weren’t willing in 2003-5 to invest that kind of money.
The first three books — Benny and Penny in Just Pretend, Otto’s Orange Day and Silly Lilly and the Four Seasons — are due this week.
