History
Françoise Mouly, the art editor for The New Yorker, founded Toon Books in 2008, a decade after she had become an apologist for children's comics, first with RAW Junior, a spinoff of her RAW Books & Graphics, and then its anthology title Little Lit. With Toon Books, Mouly wanted to harness the medium to help children learn how, and why, to read. She recruited both authors and cartoonists to her cause and published six books in 2008. All were acclaimed.
In 2010, Toon Books became an imprint of Candlewick Press, which took on its sales, promotion, and distribution (this, through Random House Publisher Services). Since then, it has published more than a dozen books and has broken into the Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards, with five nominations in Best Publication for Early Readers.
In Education
To help children learn how to read, Toon Books presents its level-ed readers as comics, with balloons and panels to demonstrate dialogue and structure. They're double-checked by educators and test-driven by children until they're right for libraries and schools, where librarians and teachers may draw from ready-made lessons and worksheets, free of charge. That Toon Books is so thorough in the development and support of its readers says something for their caliber. If "Comics are a gateway drug to literacy" (as its Web site quotes Mouly's spouse, author Art Spiegelman), then the more educationally sound, and the more enjoyable, the comics, the better the trip.
Links
Log in to comment