Posy Simmonds is a mainstay comic book creator in England most famous for her strip The Webers printed in The Guardian. She is now attempting to break into the American book market with her wonderful book Gemma Bovery.
Gemma Bovery uses Flauberts Madame Bovary as a jumping off point and is about Gemma who is the pretty second wife of Charlie Bovery, the reluctant stepmother of his children, and the bane of his ex-wife. A sudden windfall and Gemmas distaste for London take them across the Channel to Normandy, where the charms of French country living soon wear off.
Check out the official website for Gemma Bovery
Daniel Robert Epstein: How are you today?
Posy Simmonds: Its teaming with rain here and Im cold, otherwise Im fine.
DRE: Its pretty horrible here in New York as well.
PS: Youve had a lot of snow.
DRE: Yeah its been nice.
Is Gemma Bovery your first full length book?
PS: In comics yes. I did one about 1991 that wasnt this long so it could hardly be called a graphic novel. Gemma was serialized originally in The Guardian and each page was an episode.
DRE: Did you have to change anything when you decided to collect it?
PS: It was almost the way it was because it went pretty much straight from when it ended in the paper to the publisher.
DRE: What made you decide to use Madame Bovary as a jumping off point?
PS: I first read it when I was 13 or 14 and Ive read it twice since then. I decided to use it because I saw a woman in Italy when I was on holiday, she reminded me of Madame Bovary, she was young and really pretty. She was giving this guy such a hard time by yawning and she looked really desperate. She was surrounded by Prada shoe bags so I looked at her and thought of Madame Bovary.
DRE: I read quite a bit about your long running comic strip, The Webers.
PS: Yes that was again in The Guardian. It started in 1977 and ran for about 11 years. It stopped and now Ive done things on and off for The Guardian ever since. It was a strip that made a joke about Guardian readers who are good woolly liberal or left of center whale saving lentil eating people especially in the late 70s. Now Guardian readers make tons of money and wear Prada.
DRE: So in a way Gemma is a continuation of those kinds of people.
PS: Yes it is. I think Gemmas husband Charlie would be a Guardian reader.
DRE: That doesnt say too much about the modern Guardian reader.
PS: [laughs] They are kind of everything now. They can be woolly liberals but they are also people who earn tons of money in technology so its kind of changed.
DRE: Gemma Bovery is depressing at times and often hysterical, sometimes on the very same page.
PS: I suppose it was because each page was an episode. So everyday I had to pack it all in and at bottom of every page there had to be a cliffhanger to make them buy the paper the next day. I suppose that gives it a certain kind of pace that might not have come about if I had written it as a book. I might have done some landscapes but since it was excerpts I didnt have that kind of space or luxury. Thats why something gloomy happens and then I hope something light happens.
DRE: Has your work always been heavy with text with art alongside?
PS: No its usually had mostly balloons with a tiny bit of narrative as an establishing thing. The strips I usually did in The Guardian were kind of a half page and were kind of horizontal so they were more like comic strips. The size I was given for Gemma is really three columns of a newspaper so it is more like a comic. There is one page in the book that is many layers and is kind of frenetic. I thought that apart from the limitations of space I should chop it up in various ways and make the pictures do a lot of the narrative description and have the words tell us how time was moving.
I also think that balloons are quite tiring to read and if there are a lot of them you sometimes dont take enough in. When you have a bit of narrative it acts as a bit of a break and slows things down. I discovered that the more I did it and I think thats what makes it read much more easily.
DRE: The book seems highly personal, is it autobiographical at all?
PS: [laughs] No I would say it was not at all. Ive never had cottage in France. The most autobiographical it gets is that I have an old leather handbag like Gemma does. I once lived in a house in London a bit like hers but all the other stuff I either invented or I had the bones of the story from Flaubert.
DRE: I did read that the book may have been personal to you because you had someone very close to you commit suicide.
PS: Yes but I didnt really draw on that at all. In Gemma she doesnt commit suicide but the narrator thinks she will. When I was writing I thought that she would commit suicide like Madame Bovary does. But the minute I got to the end Gemma the character refused to do it. I said, Youre going to die here and do it. But she wouldnt. The character I had created would have simply reinvented herself because things hadnt gone bad enough. So I had to kill her with the bread.
DRE: Do the characters often start dictating to you what they will and will not do?
PS: Yes they do. You start out with quite a fixed idea of what will happen but the more you know them the more they refuse to do things. Gemma just wouldnt die! I had once seen someone in restaurant nearly choke to death on bread so that was useful to me. Choking is quite frightening because no one noticed her except for the waiter who did the Heimlich maneuver.
DRE: How much do you know about the American comic book industry?
PS: Ive seen Maus and things by Daniel Clowes, Chris Ware and Joe Sacco. When I was a kid there were American soldiers stationed at an air base near the village where I lived in England. They used to give me all their old comics so I grew up knowing about Superman, Sad Sack, Casper Friendly the Ghost and a lot of Marvel. I adored them. There were quite a few things I didnt get because theyre American but I simply loved Dagwood and Blondie, they probably dont mean much to you.
DRE: Dagwood and Blondie are still in the paper.
PS: Really! How wonderful.
DRE: Dagwood loves sandwiches and likes to sleep.
PS: Yes and there were those Classics Illustrated as well so you could tell your grandmother that you read Oliver Twist. I know American comics a bit but Im not so good on all the superhero stuff.
DRE: When did you first put pen to paper and make a comic?
PS: I suppose I was about six.
DRE: How were they?
PS: I thought they were gone but my mother gave them to me when I was growing up and they were charming and grown up. When I was eight I wrote one called How to make love and be loved in five easy lessons. I didnt know that much so it seemed to be about dropping handkerchiefs.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
Gemma Bovery uses Flauberts Madame Bovary as a jumping off point and is about Gemma who is the pretty second wife of Charlie Bovery, the reluctant stepmother of his children, and the bane of his ex-wife. A sudden windfall and Gemmas distaste for London take them across the Channel to Normandy, where the charms of French country living soon wear off.
Check out the official website for Gemma Bovery
Daniel Robert Epstein: How are you today?
Posy Simmonds: Its teaming with rain here and Im cold, otherwise Im fine.
DRE: Its pretty horrible here in New York as well.
PS: Youve had a lot of snow.
DRE: Yeah its been nice.
Is Gemma Bovery your first full length book?
PS: In comics yes. I did one about 1991 that wasnt this long so it could hardly be called a graphic novel. Gemma was serialized originally in The Guardian and each page was an episode.
DRE: Did you have to change anything when you decided to collect it?
PS: It was almost the way it was because it went pretty much straight from when it ended in the paper to the publisher.
DRE: What made you decide to use Madame Bovary as a jumping off point?
PS: I first read it when I was 13 or 14 and Ive read it twice since then. I decided to use it because I saw a woman in Italy when I was on holiday, she reminded me of Madame Bovary, she was young and really pretty. She was giving this guy such a hard time by yawning and she looked really desperate. She was surrounded by Prada shoe bags so I looked at her and thought of Madame Bovary.
DRE: I read quite a bit about your long running comic strip, The Webers.
PS: Yes that was again in The Guardian. It started in 1977 and ran for about 11 years. It stopped and now Ive done things on and off for The Guardian ever since. It was a strip that made a joke about Guardian readers who are good woolly liberal or left of center whale saving lentil eating people especially in the late 70s. Now Guardian readers make tons of money and wear Prada.
DRE: So in a way Gemma is a continuation of those kinds of people.
PS: Yes it is. I think Gemmas husband Charlie would be a Guardian reader.
DRE: That doesnt say too much about the modern Guardian reader.
PS: [laughs] They are kind of everything now. They can be woolly liberals but they are also people who earn tons of money in technology so its kind of changed.
DRE: Gemma Bovery is depressing at times and often hysterical, sometimes on the very same page.
PS: I suppose it was because each page was an episode. So everyday I had to pack it all in and at bottom of every page there had to be a cliffhanger to make them buy the paper the next day. I suppose that gives it a certain kind of pace that might not have come about if I had written it as a book. I might have done some landscapes but since it was excerpts I didnt have that kind of space or luxury. Thats why something gloomy happens and then I hope something light happens.
DRE: Has your work always been heavy with text with art alongside?
PS: No its usually had mostly balloons with a tiny bit of narrative as an establishing thing. The strips I usually did in The Guardian were kind of a half page and were kind of horizontal so they were more like comic strips. The size I was given for Gemma is really three columns of a newspaper so it is more like a comic. There is one page in the book that is many layers and is kind of frenetic. I thought that apart from the limitations of space I should chop it up in various ways and make the pictures do a lot of the narrative description and have the words tell us how time was moving.
I also think that balloons are quite tiring to read and if there are a lot of them you sometimes dont take enough in. When you have a bit of narrative it acts as a bit of a break and slows things down. I discovered that the more I did it and I think thats what makes it read much more easily.
DRE: The book seems highly personal, is it autobiographical at all?
PS: [laughs] No I would say it was not at all. Ive never had cottage in France. The most autobiographical it gets is that I have an old leather handbag like Gemma does. I once lived in a house in London a bit like hers but all the other stuff I either invented or I had the bones of the story from Flaubert.
DRE: I did read that the book may have been personal to you because you had someone very close to you commit suicide.
PS: Yes but I didnt really draw on that at all. In Gemma she doesnt commit suicide but the narrator thinks she will. When I was writing I thought that she would commit suicide like Madame Bovary does. But the minute I got to the end Gemma the character refused to do it. I said, Youre going to die here and do it. But she wouldnt. The character I had created would have simply reinvented herself because things hadnt gone bad enough. So I had to kill her with the bread.
DRE: Do the characters often start dictating to you what they will and will not do?
PS: Yes they do. You start out with quite a fixed idea of what will happen but the more you know them the more they refuse to do things. Gemma just wouldnt die! I had once seen someone in restaurant nearly choke to death on bread so that was useful to me. Choking is quite frightening because no one noticed her except for the waiter who did the Heimlich maneuver.
DRE: How much do you know about the American comic book industry?
PS: Ive seen Maus and things by Daniel Clowes, Chris Ware and Joe Sacco. When I was a kid there were American soldiers stationed at an air base near the village where I lived in England. They used to give me all their old comics so I grew up knowing about Superman, Sad Sack, Casper Friendly the Ghost and a lot of Marvel. I adored them. There were quite a few things I didnt get because theyre American but I simply loved Dagwood and Blondie, they probably dont mean much to you.
DRE: Dagwood and Blondie are still in the paper.
PS: Really! How wonderful.
DRE: Dagwood loves sandwiches and likes to sleep.
PS: Yes and there were those Classics Illustrated as well so you could tell your grandmother that you read Oliver Twist. I know American comics a bit but Im not so good on all the superhero stuff.
DRE: When did you first put pen to paper and make a comic?
PS: I suppose I was about six.
DRE: How were they?
PS: I thought they were gone but my mother gave them to me when I was growing up and they were charming and grown up. When I was eight I wrote one called How to make love and be loved in five easy lessons. I didnt know that much so it seemed to be about dropping handkerchiefs.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
missy:
Posy Simmonds is a mainstay comic book creator in England most famous for her strip The Webers printed in The Guardian. She is now attempting to break into the American book market with her wonderful book Gemma Bovery....