TOON Books
| Predecessor | Little Lit |
|---|---|
| Founded | 2008 |
| Founder | Françoise Mouly |
| Headquarters location | New York City |
| Key people | Francoise Mouly, Art Spiegelman, Geoffrey Hayes, Philippe Coudray, Fred_(cartoonist) |
| Official website | toon-books.com |
Toon Books is a publisher of hardcover comic book early readers founded by Françoise Mouly. With titles by such creators as Geoffrey Hayes, Jay Lynch, Dean Haspiel, Eleanor Davis, and Mouly's collaborator and husband, Art Spiegelman, Toon Books promotes its line as "the first high-quality comics designed for children ages four and up."
Upon Toon's debut, Publishers Weekly characterized the line as having the potential to revitalize the field of comics for kids: "Françoise Mouly is at it again. After transforming American comics with the seminal 1980s comics anthology RAW, Mouly is now out to teach kids to read by using comics." 2008 saw the launch of eight titles, each of which received glowing reviews and multiple awards, prizes, and distinctions.
When it first launched, Toon Books was distributed by Diamond Books, a unit of Diamond Comic Distributors dedicated to getting comics and graphic novels into the book trade. In 2010, Toon Books entered into a distribution partnership with Candlewick Press. In late summer/early Fall of 2014, Toon Books launched a new line of TOON Graphics, an imprint for readers 8 and up and announced it'll be distributed after Jan. 1, 2015 by Consortium, a unit of Perseus, a move that reflects Toon's true status as a small but expanding independent publisher.
The concept for Toon Books came to Mouly when her son Dash was learning to read, and his first-grade teacher assigned him "easy readers". Appalled by the lack of appeal of the educational material, Mouly instead spent time with her child and armloads of French comic books. In fact, one of the first releases in the Toon Books collection was Silly Lilly, a.k.a. Mimi Cracra, a comic-book character familiar to millions of French toddlers.
After proposing the Toon Books idea to major children books publishers from 2004 to 2007, and being rejected because the proposed books didn't fit existing categories, Mouly returned to her roots as a self-publisher. (She had founded her small press, RAW Books & Graphics, in 1977, and RAW Junior in 1999.) As she had done for the avant-garde comics and graphics magazine RAW, or the kids comics anthology Little Lit, both of which she co-edited, or for the covers of The New Yorker, Mouly gathered an array of talent for Toon Books. She published star authors (such as Harry Bliss, Art Spiegelman or Jeff Smith), veteran children's book authors (Geoffrey Hayes) as well as novice cartoonists (Eleanor Davis, the author of Stinky, was still in art school when Mouly contacted her).
...
Wikipedia