Here, Posy Simmonds (Berkshire, 1945) is known for works with literary references such as Gemma Bovery – which follows Flauvert’s Madame Bovary – or Tamara Drew – from Far from the World, by Thomas Hardy – or the last, Cassandra Darke – a black satire set in the world of art with connections to Dickens’ A Christmas Carol – all three published by Salamandra, but his career has been built in the English press, particularly at The Guardian, where he has worked as an illustrator and author of comic strips, many of which would later end up gathered in a book, such as Vidas literarias. It has passed through the 42nd Comic Barcelona.
He has always drawn, but for years he devoted himself more to illustration than to comics…
I had always liked comics, and I keep one that I made when I was 8 years old. We were five brothers at home and there were many comedians. My Proustian cupcake would be lying on the grass with a comic on my face, smelling the ink.
He didn’t make it any bigger…
When I left graphic arts school, where I mostly did typography, I didn’t know what I was going to work on, I just really liked drawing, and I took a lot of samples to as many places as I could, and one day the phone rang and it was The Times: an illustrator had failed them and they urgently needed five cartoons that he should do on the spot. And I did it. In newspapers, when you have to close at one o’clock, sometimes you don’t know how you do it, but you close.
And at The Guardian he started doing comic strips…
He illustrated everything, literature, sports, politics… One day I met the editor in the elevator. He was a man of few words, and he said to me: “Posy, have you ever done a strip?”. I stood still.
He confused strip (comic strip) with stript (striptease)!
I didn’t know what face to put on. He explained himself well and offered me half a page, because the man who was doing it was going to the United States.
And later he incorporated literary motifs.
I had been doing comic strips with balloons and little text for years, and I wanted to do something different. My publisher proposed a series with 100 chapters, daily, in three columns from top to bottom. I didn’t start with Flaubert in mind, but in Italy I saw a woman who reminded me of Madame Bovary and gave me the idea. I reread Flaubert and closed the book in the drawer.
I didn’t want to make a calculation, either.
No, just the spine, and even if some readers may recognize the literary features, it’s not important either.
And he insisted on literature…
It’s that Tamara Drewe was supposed to appear in the newspaper’s literary supplement, and my editor asked me to, although I wasn’t clear about it. Writing an advertisement for a writer’s residence that appears in the book, he said that it is not far from the highway and is a beautiful landscape “away from the hustle and bustle of the world”, a phrase that made me think of the novel by Thomas Hardy .
Today comics are already considered culture.
It’s just that it’s a very rich narrative, beyond whether there’s text or not! It is such an agile medium that can be used to touch all kinds of subjects, and I think of Joe Sacco, Art Spiegelman, Marjane Satrapi…
The sector has gained weight.
Yes, although in the UK it’s not like France or Belgium, where you can find comics all the way to the supermarket, but it’s growing and many young women are getting into it, although there are also many complaints about precariousness.
You made a living at it.
I was lucky to work in the press, yes, but it has also changed, this now, and young people don’t read the paper newspaper. But I’ve given up, I’ve had enough of deadlines, and when I turned 75 I thought maybe I could afford to relax… and I left the press to concentrate on books.
It’s been a few years since the last…
Yes, but I am working on a new one, although I had a delay with covid and my husband was not well, so I have not made much progress on the book, but I hope to do it this year.
