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Simmonds, Posy

Posy Simmonds studied Graphic Design at the Central School of Art in London. She is renowned for her light, witty satire, and social observation. In 1972, she moved to The Guardian as illustrator, where she created a popular cartoon strip about middle-class couple, George and Wendy Weber. During this time she also produced graphic novels, including True Love (1981), and Gemma Bovery (1999), an adult reworking of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary.

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20211015094004 Foxed Pod Episode 36 | Graphic Novels: A Comic Turn with Posy Simmonds & Paul Gravett

Episode 36: Graphic Novels: A Comic Turn with Posy Simmonds & Paul Gravett

The Slightly Foxed Podcast

The cartoonist, writer and illustrator Posy Simmonds brilliantly captures the ambitions and pretensions of the literary world, and the journalist and curator Paul Gravett has worked in comics publishing for decades. Together they bring graphic novels and comic books to the foreground with the Slightly Foxed team. We draw moral lessons from the Ally Sloper cartoons of the 1870s, glimpse Frans Masereel’s wordless woodcut stories of the 1920s, view the pictorial politics of Citizen 13660 by Miné Okubo in the 1940s and revisit Art Spiegelman’s 1992 Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus before taking a closer look at more contemporary works. The discussion moves through panels, frames, splashes and spreads to Posy Simmonds’s own methods in bringing literature to life, including crosshatching to Vivaldi. Originally serialized in the Guardian, Posy’s Gemma Bovery builds on the bones of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Tamara Drewe draws from Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd, while Cassandra Darke takes inspiration from Dickens’s A Christmas Carol . . .
20070901120702 Underwear Was Important - Hazel Wood, Posy Simmonds - Slightly Foxed Issue 15

Underwear Was Important

Hazel Wood on the cartoons of Posy Simmonds

Posy’s dialogue is as good as her draughtsmanship, and she has a talent for names (an area in which so many writers fall down) which is as good as that of Evelyn Waugh or Anthony Powell. What enchants and convinces in all her work is the brilliantly observed detail. If Posy draws a French coffee pot it is a completely authentic French coffee pot. The appearance of her characters – toddlers, sulky teenagers, pushy mothers, angst-ridden authors, pretentious publishing types – is always spot on. This kind of texture, she says, is the equivalent of verbal description in a novel . . .

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