The British monarchy doesn't just have one queen. While Camilla, wife of Charles III, is the kingdom's sovereign queen consort, Posy Simmonds is the undisputed queen of the graphic novel. For four decades, her cartoons have delighted readers of The Sun, The Times and above all The Guardian, with whom she began a rich collaboration in 1972 that continued until 2008. It was in the pages of this center-left daily paper, that her two greatest successes – Gemma Bovery and Tamara Drewe – were first published at a rate of one panel per week, and then compiled in albums published in 1999 and 2007 respectively.
Since 2002, Simmonds has been a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE). This distinction honors a woman who has spent much of her career railing against her country's bourgeoisie.
The latest tribute to her work is that the Public Information Library (BPI) in Paris, has devoted an extensive retrospective to her until April 1, 2024. Dubbed "Dessiner la Littérature" ("Drawing Literature"), the exhibit invites visitors to discover this great illustrator's world through over a hundred drawings, sketches and notebooks, as well as excerpts from film adaptations of her works. For the author, "it's extraordinary to be exhibited at the BPI, because it was there, in the Beaubourg bookshops, in the 1960s, that [she] understood just how important comics were in France."
When Her Majesty of the Speech Bubbles met with Le Monde in early November in her central London apartment, the grey and drizzly weather was, as expected, omnipresent in foggy old London. Over Earl Grey tea and Ginger Snaps (clichés die hard), 78-year-old Simmonds' conversations were luminous, even dazzling at times. One could have listened for hours as she recounted her life, speaking as delightfully in English as in French. "I’ve always liked French, it’s a poetic and dramatic language," she said, apologizing for having forgotten the essentials. In fact, she would switch from one language to the other with disconcerting ease, humorously referring to the Guardian's readers as "a bit 'cashmere left,' social-liberal and self-righteous."
She has vivid and moving memories of her years as a newspaper illustrator. "Because I was freelance, I didn’t work at the newspaper, so in some ways I escaped all the intrigues of people who have to work together," she confided. The press, which solicited her work until very recently, has thanked her well: In 2021, the Guardian entrusted her with illustrating the front page for the paper's 200th anniversary.
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