Flashback February: Posy Simmonds

♦2016 is an anniversary for Tripwire. It marks the 24th anniversary of the magazine, which began back in February 1992. So for the rest of February, we shall be representing some of our classic moments over the past 23 years. Today it is the turn of our interview with British satirical cartoonist Posy Simmonds who Robert Cave spoke to back in Tripwire Annual 2008, out back in in July of that year…

AN EYE FOR DETAIL

POSY SIMMONDS, that quintessentially British satirical cartoonist, spoke to ROBERT CAVE about her career, observing society and her attraction to Superman’s hair…

It wasn’t until the collection of Gemma Bovery, a graphic novel about the lives and loves of an unhappy middle class woman, in 1999 that Rosemary Elizabeth “Posy” Simmonds reached a whole new wider audience in comic shops and book shops across the globe. However, in the UK, Simmonds had already established a long career for herself as a cartoonist, creating comic strips and spot illustrations for various UK national newspapers since the 1970s, winning two prestigious Cartoonist of the Year awards, and has seen her work turned into an animated feature (Famous Fred, 1996). Since 1999, she has become a Fellow of that most august of institutions, The Royal Society of Literature and has even been awarded an MBE (Member of The British Empire, one of Britain’s top honours) in recognition for her “services to the newspaper industry”. I recently had the opportunity to ask Posy a few questions and to look back at her career; starting with the comics and cartoon strips she read when she was young.
“As a child I read a lot of comics,” she reveals “Beano, Dandy, Topper, Eagle, Girl, Roxy. And bundles of comics passed on by American friends: Superman, Dagwood and Blondie, Sad Sack, Disney stuff and Caspar the Ghost, one or two horror comics and some Classics Illustrated. At home there were bound copies of Punch, some from the 1880s, some from the 1930s.” It’s a far richer and more varied haul than the comics I was able to read when I was young and I was immediately envious.
While telling me about her youthful reading habits, Simmonds also let something else slip: “I always liked the blue highlights on Superman’s hair,” she confessed. Obviously her keen eye for detail was something that asserted itself at a very young age. But I was intrigued; what would an affectionate chronicler of the mores and morals of the English middle classes make of the last son of Krypton, such a colourful, larger-than-life character? I had to ask the obvious question, even though it seemed somehow impertinent. In contrast to her artwork, her reply was the briefest of sketches, but it was nonetheless powerfully evocative and left me grinning as I imagined how it might look and read. Wouldn’t you be curious to read a story entitled “When Supermarkets Ate the World”? Superman Vs Walmart! Or perhaps, if he were to leap the pond in a single bound, Superman might do battle with Waitrose, that most up-market and middle-class of all British Supermarkets.
Of course, this vision probably wouldn’t be so enticing if it wasn’t for Simmonds’ own detailed style. Unlike many comic creators in the North American tradition, influenced by Jack Kirby’s dynamic art or Robert Crumb’s neurotically revealing linework, Simmonds draws her influence away from comic shops and more from cartoonists of a richer vintage “I was most influenced by Ronald Searle, creator of the St Trinian’s girls, [Ronald] Giles and Pont (Graham Laidler).” She confides, reflecting that “Other cartoonists whose work was important when I was a student were Saul Steinberg, [James] Thurber, [David] Low, [George] Grosz, [William] Hogarth, [Thomas] Rowlandson, [Max] Beerbohm and Grandville (Jean-Ignace-Isidore Gérard).” Something that all these artists have in common is that they didn’t get 32 pages to convey their meaning — most only had one shot and had to fit everything into one rich and dense package. No space is wasted and this is something that is apparent in every panel of Simmond’s work.
I then asked her how she’d got started in newspapers.
“I spent months going round news-papers, magazines and publishers with my portfolio. This produced zero results, until one day a Times [of London] women’s page needed some small illustrations in a hurry, by four o’clock. From then on and from time to time I’d be asked for an /illustration in various publications (Reader’s Digest, Observer, Woman’s Own, New Society, Radio Times, etc). I was also working as a cleaner, child minder and dog walker.“ Simmonds even turned her hand to illustrating textbooks for teaching English as a Foreign language, crafting little mini strips to accompany a variety of oral exercises and “hundreds of tiny panels illustrating things, from Big Ben to toothache.”
Her first regular strip for The Guardian, a newspaper once renowned for its woolly liberal readership, was commissioned to appear in its women’s section with an eye on a female readership that was increasingly demanding to be heard. It started out as a spin on The Silent Three strips from School Friend, an old British girls’ comic. The Silent Three were girls who would don masks and sort out all kinds of problems. After a period of experimentation, Simmond’s strip eventually metamorphasized into a chronicle of the life, family and decidedly middle class milieu of Wendy Weber, an archetypal Guardian woman; a self-confessed liberal with split ends and Laura Ashley skirts. Her eye for detail, and ear for dialogue served Simmonds well as she depicted concerns and the foibles of the middle classes, gently poking fun at them for the Guardian’s readership to enjoy and, occasionally wince at.
But despite having The Guardian’s woolly liberal audience in her sights, her influences were always more diverse. She explains “my experience has been in newspapers. But class has always featured in cartoons from Rowlandson to Steve Bell. Wendy Weber was the result of a brief to create a strip in the late 1970s. She is a middle-class Guardian-reading woolly liberal, married to George, an ex-working class, red-brick university graduate and socialist. Both typical of the era.”
The first collection of Wendy Weber strips was published in 1979. It was successful enough to be reprinted several times that year and spawn subsequent collections. The strip continued in The Guardian for around a decade. In addition to this, Simmonds also used characters for the Weber strips to help her craft an early British original graphic novel, told in black and white with the spot colour of Magenta. True Love, published in 1981, focused on Janice Brady, a minor character in The Guardian strips, and her quest for a grand romance with her philandering but not entirely unsympathetic boss, the creative director of the advertising agency Beazley & Buffin, Stanhope Wright.
After moving on from the Webers in the late 1980s Simmonds tried her hand at strips and illustrations for the US market, as well as crafting some fine illustrated books for children. She returned to The Guardian for a regular strip during the late 1990s, with Gemma Bovery, an intricate layered tale full of Simmond’s hallmark telling observations and artwork.
Like The Silent Three, Gemma Bovery follows a middle class heroine, but one who is in an unhappy marriage, trying to construct a new life for herself with or without her partner. Another significant difference was how it borrowed its inspiration from Gustav Flaubert’s literary classic Madame Bovary about a doctor’s wife, Emma Bovary, who has adulterous affairs and lives beyond her means in order to escape the banalities and emptiness of provincial life, a mundane domestic theme that might be a staple in other branches of literature but has seldom been explored much in graphic novels.
Of course, while Flaubert might be the starting point, this is no slavish adaptation any more than it is a simple comic strip. It juxtaposes text in larger and more lyrical chunks than those typically found in the terse, spare prose usually seen in comic books, where 25 words per speech balloon is the norm. This textual richness echoes Simmonds own painstakingly researched and detailed artwork and, more importantly, her use of type.
Aside from the handwritten fonts used for speech, there are various forms of handwriting, letters and diaries too as well as more formal fonts harking back to the look and feel of standard text literature. It should come as little surprise to learn that Simmonds studied typography.
A considerable success in its serialized form, Bovery really came into its own when it was finally collected. As Simmonds herself notes “My readership used to stem from The Guardian but has become wider based since Gemma Bovery.” And it’s certainly true that she has reached out of the transitory world of newspapers to claim some of the expanded shelf space given over to the growing graphic novels market in bookshops and comic shops.
Her next project for The Guardian was less of a single coherent narrative though no less intensive, and more of a series of vivid sketches of various aspects of the book trade with pastiches of independent booksellers, large book chains, literary festivals and writers dilemma’s, dubbed Literary Life. Despite being no stranger to the literary scene she so lovingly critiques, Simmonds insists that it was her own experiences as a cartoonist and authoress together with her ample imagination that help her craft these sketches.
Her most recent graphic novel, Tamara Drewe, also borrowed from a literary classic, this time Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd, adding a writers’ retreat to its plot of a strong independent woman in search of a suitable partner. As with Gemma Bovery, Simmonds again employs mixed typography, a different font for each narrator, and even gets her own back on the newspaper that is hosting her strip to some extent, typesetting and writing Tamara’s own fictional newspaper column. Moreover, she adds further to the depth and texture of the piece through the use of colour, often in soft washed-out tones to make the sense of boredom and mundanity suffered by many of the characters even more cloying and tangible. In the rare moments when bright and garish colours are used, their impact is even more prominent. Some bright four-colour comics could learn a lot. And, of course, there is Simmond’s ear for dialogue and sense for details. From her depictions, I can see that Casey has the exact same model of phone as me and, as a reader, I’m left with the distinct impression that Simmond’s not only knows exactly what tariff she’s on, but also what phone she is planning on getting when her contract runs out too.
And this really is the key attraction of Simmonds’s work. Her characters are brought to life in the details of their lives. Andy’s recounting of his own explicit, but not overly graphic, description of how he kills poultry, cleans it and packages it up for people to cook communicates everything we need to know about him. He’s connected to the country and the realities of life there, regardless of how unpleasant they might be. Of course that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for a little indulgence too. One character, an American writer called Glen Larson bears more than a passing resemblance to the baker Raymond Joubert from Gemma Bovery. What’s more, when interrupted on the toilet, Glen can be seen holding a collection of Giles cartoons! When pressed about the similarity between Raymond and Glen, Simmonds jokes that the two characters were, in fact, “distant cousins” before revealing that she “really like[s] drawing facial hair.” Indeed, when asked the question of what she would choose to draw if she could only draw one thing for the rest of her days, Simmonds chooses the human face.
But despite her own attention to detail, Simmonds remains pragmatic with regards to the attentiveness of her audience. “I try to emphasise important details but you can’t count on how people read a page. Some people focus on the balloons.”
Even though much of her recent adult-orientated work has been serialized in newspapers first before eventually being collected, Simmonds doesn’t rule out the possibility of creating original graphic novels again at some point. Certainly, she has witnessed tremendous change in Britain’s national newspapers over the thirty plus years of her career, reflecting that “[the newspapers] are much less tribal, more interchangeable, less serious, [with] more pics, more comment, less news, more trivia.” And, she adds “Fewer readers.”
And what will her next project be? What form will it take? Will we see Superman doing battle with Supermarkets? There is some fun to be had in speculation. If it is going to be inspired by another literary classic, I’m hoping for Elizabeth Gaskell and not Dickens or Austen. She did provide the illustrations for the opening titles for the recent BBC adaptation of Gaskell’s Cranford. Unfortunately, when it comes to talk of upcoming projects, Simmonds remains tight-lipped, explaining that “Talking about things before they’re done lets the air out, sort of deflates them.” I’m not sure I agree with that. With Posy Simmonds, the story is not as important as the telling, it’s all in the details and with her work, what intricate, well-observed and evocative details she gives us. ROBERT CAVE

Posy Simmonds www.tripwiremagazine.co.uk

Gemma Bovery Tamara Drewe Mrs Weber’s Omnibus