Posted in: Comics | Tagged: Comics, german, museum, posy simmonds, switzerland

Posy Simmonds Gets Her First Gallery Exhibition In German

Published Mon, 16 Aug 2021 08:57:11 -0500

Posy Simmonds is one of my favourite comic book creators of all time. A PG Wodehouse for England'smiddle classes, her self-satirical takes on the whimsies of polite and impolite society, liberal guilt and pressures of family, I first found her in my parents' (and then my own) copies of The Guardian, and have followed her into graphic novels, including the movie adaptation of her Gemma Bovary comic. What the Swiss would make of someone quite so quintessentially English I don't know, but the French took her to their hearts, winning and being appointed president of the Grand Jury at the Angoulême International Comics Festival. And now it seems that Paul Gravett, the legendary Man At The Crossroads of British comics has curated a new exhibition of Posy Simmonds work for Switzerland's Cartoonmuseum, in the city of Basel.

British cartoonist, comics artist and children's book author Posy Simmonds (b. 1945) has attracted attention internationally with the three graphic novels Gemma Bovery (1999), Tamara Drewe (2007) and Cassandra Darke (2018), and their headstrong titular female characters. She fascinates with precise psychological portraits, mocks the shortcomings of the middle class and cultural scene, caricatures staidness, and criticises social developments. Relatively long text passages alternate with traditional comic sequences, while references to classics by writers such as Gustave Flaubert and Charles Dickens add further layers to the stories. Posy Simmonds became famous nationwide for her strip "The Silent Three of St. Botolph's", which started appearing in "The Guardian" in 1977 and was about three long-time female friends. She later published it in books and developed it further to create her first graphic novel, "True Love". Other publications of hers also started as strips in "The Guardian". In the 1980s, she published several highly successful children's books. An elegant, clear and corporeal drawing style, profoundly developed characters, unerring humour and the alert mind of a great storyteller characterise all of Posy Simmonds's works. Her graphic novels have been translated into several languages and some of her books have been made into films. Cartoonmuseum Basel presents the most comprehensive retrospective on this major British artist yet seen in Switzerland, with original drawings from all graphic novels and from her children's books, as well as illustrations and cartoons for newspapers and magazines, plus unpublished preliminary work. This is also the first ever exhibition of originals by Posy Simmonds in the German-speaking world.