INTRODUCTION

MY LOVE AFFAIR WITH FUNNY PICTURES goes back a long way. As a young woman in
the early seventies, I studied architecture at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. I quickly
became frustrated by what I saw as a nearly unbridgeable gap between what an architect
can do on paper and the reality of what she will see built in her lifetime. I thought I
would sidestep my frustrations by coming to New York for a short stay, but I fell in love
and could never go back. First I fell in love with the endless possibilities of the anarchic,
chaotic, delirious New York of the seventies, but within a couple of years I had met an
underground cartoonist, Art Spiegelman, and then I was hooked on far more than that.

Comics and cartoons were at a low point at that time—they were almost universally
regarded as trash culture. But Art is a passionate advocate for his chosen medium. He
seduced me by reading me the lavish newspaper comic pages of the early twentieth
century, Little Nemo and Krazy Kat. Then he showed me the America he grew up in,
giving me Harvey Kurtzman’s MAD magazine and patiently explaining the jokes. (If
anything is love, that is!) After experiencing the limits reality imposes on architects, I
was dumbstruck by the impact and freedom that cartoonists have, building not just
buildings, but whole worlds on paper that can survive for centuries. It began my lifelong
love affair with art for reproduction. I enrolled in a vocational school to learn printing,
and then bought a small offset press (which we had to hoist onto the roof and then
lower into our fourth-floor walk-up SoHo loft). Within a couple of years, in 1980, we
launched our own magazine of avant-garde comics, graphics, and cartoons—RAW.

FOR TEN YEARS, I PUBLISHED, DESIGNED, AND COEDITED with Art a magazine whose core
mission was to give voice to artists who had something to say. In RAW, we also published
installments of the long comic work that Art had been laboring over all those years: the
story of his parents’ ordeal in World War II. The first volume of Maus came out in book
form in 1986, the second in 1991, both garnering critical acclaim. Still, the magnitude
of the recognition took us by surprise. Maus received a special Pulitzer Prize in 1992,
and, in the fall, Tina Brown, who had just been named editor of The New Yorker and
was looking to reinvigorate the visuals by inviting new artists, came to the RAW office to
meet us.

Brown was only the magazine’s fourth editor, inheriting mostly the legacy of William
Shawn, whose tenure lasted from 1952 to 1987. Shawn’s New Yorker had been recognized
for journalistic excellence, but for an editor with such broad interests, he had a unique
approach to covers, which he summed up in the following fashion:

We have fewer covers today that have humor than we did years ago.
They tend to be more aesthetic and the subject for the most part is
New York City or the country around New York City. The suburbs,
the countryside. Sometimes it’s just a still life of flowers or a plant.
It’s not supposed to be spectacular. When it appears on a newsstand,
it’s not supposed to stand out. It’s a restful change from all the other
covers, I’d say.

Cover of RAW 3: The Graphix Magazine That Lost
Its Faith in Nihilism, by Gary Panter, July 1981.

In 1946, the cover of the groundbreaking “Hiroshima”
issue, devoted entirely to John Hersey’s eye-opening
report, was a charming scene of vacationers in New
England.

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