As editor and publisher, Mouly has had considerable influence on the rise in production values in the English-language comics world since the early 1980s.
[2] She brought her radical leftist politics with her when her parents sent her in 1970 to the Lycée Jeanne D'Arc in central France, where she has said she was expelled "twenty-four or twenty-five times because [she] was trying to drag everyone to demonstrations".
She familiarized herself with New York's avant-garde art and film worlds, and had a part in Richard Foreman's 1975 play Pandering to the Masses.
[10] She settled into a loft in SoHo in 1975[11] and worked at odd jobs, including selling cigarettes and magazines in Grand Central Station and assembling models for a Japanese architectural company, all while struggling to improve her English.
[12] While looking for comics from which to practice reading English, she came across Arcade, an underground comix magazine from San Francisco co-published by New Yorker Art Spiegelman.
After reading Spiegelman's 1973 strip "Prisoner on the Hell Planet", about his mother's suicide, Mouly felt the urge to contact him.
The experience motivated Mouly to gain control over the printing process, and to find a way to get such marginal material to sympathetic readers.
[19] In 1978, Mouly founded Raw Books & Graphics, a name settled on in part because of its small-operation feel, and because it was reminiscent of Mad magazine.
Mouly worked from an aesthetic inspired in part by the Russian Constructivists, who brought a design sense to everyday objects.
[21] More ambitious projects included art objects such as the Zippy-Scope, a cardboard device with to watch a comic strip rolled up on a film spool, featuring Griffth's character Zippy the Pinhead.
[27] Each issue contained a broad variety of styles linked by a common theme, be it urban despair, suicide, or a vision of America through foreign eyes.
[28] The best-known work to run in Raw was a serialization of Spiegelman's graphic novel Maus,[29] which ran as an insert for the duration of the magazine[30] from the December 1980 second issue.
[32] Mouly was also hands-on when dealing with contributors, suggesting ideas and changes—an approach anathema to the editor-adverse underground spirit, but artists welcomed her input as in the end she did not interfere with their autonomy.
[36] Pioneer underground cartoonist Robert Crumb responded in 1981 with the magazine Weirdo, intended to remain free of editorial intrusion and stay true to comics' lowbrow roots.
[44] Mouly brought a large number of cartoonists and artists to the periodical's interiors, including Raw contributors such as Coe, Crumb, Lorenzo Mattotti, and Chris Ware.
[53] Mouly has had a deep impact on the publishing practices of the comics world, though her name is not well known due to the behind-the-scenes nature of her work and the prominence of her Pulitzer Prize-winning husband.
[50] In 2013, Drawn & Quarterly associate publisher Peggy Burns called Mouly "one of the most influential people in comics for 30 years.
Mouly and Spiegelman's The TOON Treasury of Classic Children's Comics was nominated for the 2010 Eisner Award for Best Publication for Kids.
In 2011, the French government recognized Mouly as a Knight of the Legion of Honour (as her father had been),[48] and the Society of Illustrators bestowed on her the Richard Gangel Art Director Award.