cover image In Love With Art: Fran%C3%A7oise Mouly's Adventures in Comics with Art Spiegelman

In Love With Art: Fran%C3%A7oise Mouly's Adventures in Comics with Art Spiegelman

Jeet Heer. Coach House Books (PGC, Canadian dist.; Consortium, U.S. dist.), $13.95 trade paper (136p) ISBN 978-1-55245-278-3

Having previously discounted Mouly's contributions to art to more effectively highlight those of her husband Spiegelman, journalist and academic Heer attempts to address this snub with this short biography of the influential editor. From her French beginnings to American success, Mouly has spent almost four decades reshaping the American graphic arts, both with her husband and on her own. From her days at RAW Books and Graphics to her more than 20 years as art editor of The New Yorker, Mouly has often been controversial, but her work is undeniably influential. One of the grand figures of modern art, her role as editor is one too easily overlooked, and it is both just and right that someone should write a detailed biography drawing the public eye to Mouly. Unfortunately, this is not the biography Mouly deserves. At 136 pages, there simply is not room to do Mouly's career justice, and beginning with the subtitle, Heer cannot resist the urge to spend too many of the few pages he has on discussions of Spiegelman. The result is intensely frustrating, a flawed work embodying the very sins its author hoped to expiate. (Oct.)