RAW

A few weeks ago I was standing in one of the dim hallways that house thousands of single copy comic books. Rows and rows of plain white cardboard boxes sat holding the secrets of super heroes and the etchings of artists gone but not forgotten. A Fantagraphics employee passed by as I was being given the run down on filing. He stopped and offered up a book, saying he had bought it without realizing he already had this issue.

This was how I came into possession of my first issue of RAW. This 1990 issue, “Required Reading for the Post-Literate” was the second to last issue of the series published by Art Spiegelman (of Maus fame) and Francoise Mouly. This issue was printed (by Penguin) as a perfect bound book with full color pages (except for some b & w comics) with some differing paper stocks. A beautiful book, especially considering most previous issues were printed in black and white with stapled binding.

But what is RAW? It’s a literary journal for comics, to say it simply. A portion of Spiegelman’s Maus appears in this issue along with comics from Lynda Barry, Jacques Tardi, and a rather strange comic by Boody Rogers about a blonde beauty who is treated like a horse by centaurs, originally published in 1949.

What I really loved about this issue of RAW was the opportunity to try out so many different comics in one sitting. It’s easy to get a real taste for a cartoonist’s style and genre through the snippets in this book.