Illustrator Posy Simmonds: 'Women in comics weren't characters, they were just characteristics - that’s changing now'

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Posy Simmonds is explaining the difference between English and French legs. We’re leafing through old sketchbooks in her basement studio at her Islington house, and have reached the page where she came up with Gemma Bovery, the eponymous heroine of her 1999 graphic novel, adapted into a film starring Gemma Arterton (who also starred in film of another of her creations, Tamara Drewe).

“I knew she’d be rather English and scruffy and not shave her legs,” says Simmonds, 73. She points at a prototype for Bovery with sunburned, mottled legs labelled as being distinctively from the UK. We’re also told that she weighs 70kg and that she’s going to transform herself with a French polish and “sexy underwear”. Simmonds adds: “The sketchbooks are a way of asking questions about setting and characters.”

Simmonds doesn’t usually show anyone her sketches. “A French journalist recently asked me what my motivation was,” she says, amused. “I just do it.” But she has recently returned to her archives in the lead-up to a retrospective of her work at the House of Illustration in King’s Cross. It will include her childhood creations, cartoon strips for The Guardian and illustrations from her children’s books such The Chocolate Wedding and Fred, which became an Oscar-nominated film.

She shows me how Bovery evolved from photos of Princess Diana, who Simmonds drew from all angles “to bring her to life”. Simmonds double-checked that all movements were realistic by looking in the mirror. “I rather liked the way Princess Di looked under her fringe, that gave me the idea for Gemma’s face,” she says.

Her sketchbooks are full of observational vignettes, there are galumphing loafers labelled “Cornish Pasty shoes” and a Smart car captioned “it looks like a trainer, I wouldn’t dream of getting into it”. Then there’s the hamburger and chips that was used in Simmonds’s most recent novel, Cassandra Darke, which came out last year and is a commentary on inequality in London.

Simmonds is still analogue, with bulging pots of brushes and pencils lining one wall of the studio. “Students tell me they can’t find my colour programme and ask what software I use,” she laughs. “They are never impressed because they can do it quicker on a tablet.”

“I am interested in how people use technology,” she continues, her MacBook lying untouched on the table. “I used to do all my correspondence on postcards in an hour. Now it takes a whole day. You come out of the cinema and everyone has their head down on their phone.” Cassandra Darke deals with trolling and she had “someone young tell me all about that and getting sent dick pics.” She grins naughtily.

Posy Simmonds' work, in pictures

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Simmonds grew up on her parents’ dairy farm in Cookham, Berkshire, which she has drawn as the background in books. Posy is short for Rosemary — she says she never took to the Posy in the book Ballet Shoes and is used to dogs having the same name as her. As well as being a farmer, her father had a sales room for auctions; her mother had worked in the City before she married, using her French and Spanish.

From a young age, Simmonds drew “all the time”. The exhibition includes an early cartoon called Marilyn Monroe Goes Shooting and a pastiche of Woman’s Own, with the coverline “he only married you for your money”.

“Drawing was the best thing,” she says. “There was an artist in the village who was incredibly kind and taught children at her home. She treated us like proper artists, gave us nice paper and proper paint. It made one think, ‘I want to be an artist.’” She once hid behind a tombstone to watch local painter Stanley Spencer at work until he bribed her with sweets to go away.

Her drawings always incorporated stories — she learned to read from her parents’ collection of Punch magazines (“it was on a shelf I could reach”) and she built her own collection of comics. They lived near an American airbase and the American children at her school gave her their old comics. “I had Superman, Spider-Man, one called Sad Sack — they must be worth a lot now. The women were never that interesting, though. They weren’t characters they were just characteristics,” she mimes a pair of pneumatic breasts. “That’s changing now.”

“I was fascinated by the American children — they wore trousers, unlike the boys I knew, who wore shorts. Every Saturday they’d go off to an airbase in enormous cars and return with Coke.”

At 18 she decided she would study graphics, “because I wasn’t going to be a painter” and went to Central Saint Martins. The first drawing she sold was for the book jacket of the novel The Grass Beneath the Wire by John Pollock in 1966, when she was 20. She didn’t have a bank account when she was paid so: “I went straight to Holborn and opened an account to cash my £25 cheque. That felt like riches.”

The cartoonist Mel Calman came to her degree show and introduced her to the Guardian journalist Jill Tweedie. She became Tweedie’s lodger and eventually started working for the Guardian’s women’s page. “It was good fun. Swearing was rather frowned upon, though, back then. Now there is free rein.”

She was outnumbered by male cartoonists but the newspaper industry was generally supportive, despite the number of “jollies in dreadful pubs and men in the office putting their arms around me and calling me ‘dear’”.

Lessons on equal pay came early. “I worked at Harrods selling Pyrex and remember a boy exactly my age doing the same job was paid more. I thought that was very unfair.” She also had to endure a culture where groping was widespread and not discussed. “I didn’t know anyone who hadn’t been groped,” she says. “It happened on the Tube, in lifts, in the cinema. When you’re older you know how to deal with it, say, ‘Stop it’, or slap their hand. But when you’re younger you think it’s your fault. I was really upset by it. It happened all the time on the Paris Métro. I always had paint in my bag and I’d take it out and squeeze it to make men stop — they were terrified of getting it on their shirts.”

Her observations are gleaned from everywhere — the neighbours’ cats are good to draw “because their features are on the front of their faces unlike dogs with their big noses, except pugs like poor Corker in Cassandra Darke.”

Ideas for drawings come from walking around the city. “In the last 15 years two Londons have emerged,” she says. “The rich are getting richer and the poor getting poorer. I’m seeing so many beggars and food banks and people can’t afford to live anywhere. It is bad. I’m angry for young students. Where will the nurses and firemen live?”

“It’s a weird time. No one knows what is going to happen and people are being so rude to each other and just angry. I don’t think the Government has done anything about uniting the country.”

Simmonds has done political cartoons and does a chilling Margaret Thatcher impression. She recounts the time she went on the road with the former prime minister during William Hague’s 2001 election campaign and then switches into Maggie, putting on a husky baritone. “She spoke about ‘Labour in its shrivelled heart’,” says Simmonds, showing that her skill for satire extends to performance.

Drawing takes longer now but she isn’t going to stop — at the moment she is drawing Middle Eastern children. She isn’t sure what she will do with them yet. Simmonds shows me the weights she keeps in her studio to do her back exercises and stay active — it is painful after a fall down the stairs to her studio in the Nineties, “I’d say it was a stupid accident but I don’t think there are many intelligent accidents.” Her husband, graphic designer Richard Hollis, is still writing too. She’s drawn him but not often because he doesn’t like it.

It’s Simmonds who brings up the question — as she puts it — “whither cartooning?” “There’s going to be more of it, because of the internet. It’s a democratic medium, you only need a pencil and a piece of paper. And there’s plenty to satirise.”

Posy Simmonds is at the House of Illustration, N1 (houseofillustration.org.uk) May 24-Sep 15

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