artist John Glashan (1927-1999) drew a complicated and unique weekly cartoon in the UK’s Observer magazine titled Genius between 1978 and ’83. In the introduction to the collection John Glashan's World published in 1991 he wrote “It occurred to me that the cartoon form had the potential for something wider-ranging than the three patterns in current usage: the political cartoon, the single joke, the strip cartoon.” I like this because he apparently saw the American comic book and its ambition to become the 'graphic novel' as a separate and unrelated event, a different medium even (as I do). Alternatively it had not impinged on his consciousness at all, which would be difficult to imagine of a cartoonist in the UK in 1991 as the newspapers were full of it, but I prefer to think that he simply wasn't impressed.

The problem with this book is that it doesn't do his higher concept justice, arranged as it is in the manner of conventional cartoon books under thematic headings such as 'money,' 'guilt,' 'love,' fame.' Any reader attuned to the bigger idea would have preferred the pages run in the order the artist made them, and with the goddamn dates attached. But book publishers have never been good at understanding bigger ideas, at least in relation to cartoons, and they still (with few exceptions) do not get them, as I have found in my recent forays into the book world.

But most of my readers are probably not familiar with Glashan and his work. His wikipedia entry will bring you up to scratch, and since i am not being paid to write this blog, I will simply steal it without paraphrase: " Scottish cartoonist, illustrator, and playwright, creator of "Genius". Glashan's cartoons typically included small pen-and-ink figures drawn over a fabulous backdrop often featuring fantastic (Gothic/imaginary) architecture, surreal landscapes, or gloriously impractical ingenious-looking machines. Born in Glasgow and the son of a portrait painter, McGlashan studied painting at the Glasgow School of Art after national service in the army. He moved to London with the intention of making a living from painting portraits, but was unable to do so. Switching to cartooning and illustrating, he curtailed his name to "Glashan". Glashan's cartoons appeared in Lilliput, Harpers & Queen, Private Eye, Punch, and various London newspapers, as well as Holiday and the New Yorker. A series of humorous guidebooks created with Jonathan Routh in the late 1960s allowed extensive expression of Glashan's graffiti-like style, combining small figures (often bearded men) with scrawled text -- but even here, often with elaborate backdrops. In 1978 he took over Jules Feiffer's spot on The Observer magazine and began his strip cartoon Genius featuring Anode Enzyme (IQ 12,794) and his patron Lord Doberman, the richest man in the world. 'Genius' won him the Glen Grant Strip Cartoon award in 1981. This ran until 1983 when he returned to landscape and portrait painting, and from 1988 to 1998 he also contributed weekly cartoons to The Spectator."

Here are a couple of examples of the weekly series, featuring the aforementioned characters Anode Enzyme and Lord Doberman (dates as I said irritably, are unknown to me, though I imagine there must be somebody who collected the stuff as it came out). Another problem with the book is that the things are printed too damn small, two to a page. As I recall, the Observer didn't do them any favours either. They clearly come from the tradition of the gag a day strip cartoon; once the set-up had been established, with a minimum of narrative introduction, the work was an ongoing series of self-contained variations and elaborations. Glashan's sense of a bigger kind of strip cartoon was all about scale. Each of his pieces wants at the very least a full magazine sized page. There's one place in the book where a single painted gag cartoon, not involving any regular characters, is given a double page spread and the watercolours are a joyful ocular experience. Why couldn't it all have been thus? It's no wonder he got out of the business and made a living from his painting. The larger end of his scalar contrast was usually a baronial hall or some baroque improbability:


But in this one he switches it around and an easel painting of a fish is dwarfing his cast of characters:


There is much aesthetic pleasure to be had in looking at the contrast of the typical big painterly image with the sensitive tiny pen drawings. here's a zoom on one of the latter:


The grand scale was also reflected in the characters and the relationships between them. "Anode Enzyme is a genius with an IQ of 12,794. Master of all trades, Jack of none; his impeccable psychic architecture is marred by a single flaw- he has no money." He becomes employed by Lord Doberman, richest man in the world. In a sequence running over several weeks, the first task that is given to the genius is to invent a machine that will fire portable television sets into the sea. "What rate of fire?" asks the genius without hesitation. "Twenty sets per minute," responds Doberman, equally without hesitation.

there's a website

Where kin I git me one'a them shirts?

The Cisco Kid had killed six men in more or less fair scrimmages, had murdered twice as many (mostly Mexicans), and had winged a larger number whom he modestly forbore to count. Therefore a woman loved him.
The Kid was twenty-five, looked twenty; and a careful insurance company would have estimated the probable time of his demise at, say, twenty-six. His habitat was anywhere between the Frio and the Rio Grande. He killed for the love of it—because he was quick-tempered—to avoid arrest—for his own amusement—any reason that came to his mind would suffice. He had escaped capture because he could shoot five-sixths of a second sooner than any sheriff or ranger in the service, and because he rode a speckled roan horse that knew every cowpath in the mesquite and pear thickets from San Antonio to Matamoras.
Tonia Perez, the girl who loved the Cisco Kid, was half Carmen, half Madonna, and the rest—oh, yes, a woman who is half Carmen and half Madonna can always be something more—the rest, let us say, was humming-bird...

The above represents the opening couple of paragraphs of The Caballero's Way by O. Henry, first published in 1907. The complete story can be read at The Nostalgia league, where it is filed under 'SHORT FICTION THAT BECAME MOVIES'. The story was first filmed in 1914, and at least twice per decade after that. Ceasar Romero played the Kid in 1939. It was a comic book as early as 1944; It ran on television between 1950 and 1956 and it was a daily comic strip syndicated by King features between 1951 and 1967.

The daily strip was a remarkable piece of work, drawn by Jose Luis Salinas. Ruben Espinoza is showing off his collection of original art by Salinas from the series. The most special thing about this special strip for me has always been the Kid's shirt. I've never watched the movies, so I have always presumed that the shirt comes from there, because it is difficult otherwise to imagine an artist setting himself the task of drawing this imaculately elegant detail every day of the week for sixteen years:

It is to be hoped that one of the publishers giving us reprints of the old comic strips will one day get around to giving us a few stories from this one.

update: mr j just sent this



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After my post on the boat regatta on the dry riverbed, I've been reading about fish in the Australian desert (from Larapinta Trail By John and Monica Chapman.)

"Ten species of fish survive in the major waterholes. Finke River Hardyhead and Desert Rainbow Fish are very tolerant, being able to survive in water of poor quality. They are believed to bury themselves in mud to survive when waterholes dry up. The Spangled Grunter is able to move across land between waterholes by dragging itself with its fins."

the photorealist style of daily strips had its heyday in the newspapers between 1947 and the late 1960s. Prof Mendez gives a first rate introduction to the subject. Alas it is a subject which tends to be given short shrift by the canon-making pedants of latter day comic strip scholarship, who draw an expressive artistic line from Feininger down to Panter, following the lead of the Masters of American Comics exhibition and book. (eg. Ed Howard's list of sept 17 is perhaps more conservative than that outline suggests, but it's true that he includes NO examples of the photorealist school).

The contrary neatly inked line traced by the other camp, which tends at its worst to be reactionary in its cultural taste,  tapers to a point at Dave Sim's latest offerings. Critic Douglas Wolk in his review of Sim's Judenhass of this weekend, seems almost incredulous that the once-popular school of comic strip art existed not just in Dave Sim's imagination: "Sim, in recent years, has been fascinated with the sort of “photorealism”—his word—practiced by a handful of comic strip artists of the 1950s and 60s, who were essentially trying to reproduce photographs as line drawings."

Elsewhere, Domingos Isabelhino draws my attention to recent additions to a site devoted to the English daily strip Carol Day by David Wright (1912-1967) which ran in the London daily Mail from 1956 until the artist's death. Domingos is describing the story which has been given the title, for the sake of orderliness I presume, 'Jack Slingsby': Can you imagine an American newspaper comic in which "the hero" (to speak children's comics lingo) is engaged to one character while she's having an affair with another character who's married (a slacker, no less!)? Can you imagine Mary Perkins following her heart against social conventions and doing that? I can't. No newspaper or syndicate editor would allow it. But that's exactly what happens in this masterpiece of the comics form.

Here are a couple of sample panels (go look at the rest):




Wright was of an earlier generation than most of the artists working in the photorealist style, (though having said that I have to remind myself he was only two years older than I am now when he cashed in his chips.) and his design sense belongs to an earlier time. He tends to want to fill every nook and cranny of his drawings with noodling.
There's a story at the end of the series where Wright is mixing the hatching with dot-tones, the latter being effective in suggesting an attractive suntan on the heroine:


The Carol Day site is run by Roger Clark and contains a huge inventory of material that is worth a moment or two of your time.

age 53 and still retrieving books from my parents attic. This is one of the great transformative works in the development of the concept that great books might be written using the simple elements of the strip cartoon (an idea that is not to be confused with the corrupted and now irretrievable idea of 'the graphic novel'.) Walt Kelly's intro is dated Feb 1970, so presumably the material comes from 1969 (Jan -Aug, reading from data in the strips...) But such nitpicking seems to me to belittle Kelly's achievement here; continuity strips wouldn't normally expect readers to keep track of narrative ideas for eight weeks let alone months. Of all the books collecting the Pogo daily strip, this work stands out for being through-composed and cunningly structured. With the chapter titles in place it is difficult to think other than that the author saw the book in his head while he was turning out these dailies, though there are presumably many tangents and stops, restarts and nods to topical occurences that have been pruned out of the 1969 catalogue to boil it down to such essential perfection.
And what chapter titles: Looking ahead behind by a nose; A Head in a hole and vice versa; The drive-in self service mortuary; Justice is blind, deaf and stoned; All's well that ends.(the last has long been my favourite Kelly-ism)


"One of the great stumbling blocks in history is that one day follows another".
It starts with the New Year's Day gathering of the intimate cast of characters who in their inventive and sprightly conversation arrive at a plan to rearrange the calendar.
"I don't want no month with a thirteenth day in it." says Churchy la Femme, the turtle.
"What folks gonna do from the 12th to the 14th, hold their breath?"
"When you suggests people stops breathin' for one day a month you little recks with innocent pleasures."
"But it would help fight pollution."
And by this simple means we arrive at the theme of the book.
If everybody holds their breath we can reduce pollution. The logic proceeds apace as only in Walt Kelly...
"You take a fella what's a fish, he don't breathe."
"But he do... for centuries he's been breathin' water what's contaminated with old ruubber boots, tin cans, old bedsprings, garbage delicacies an' unfrocked umbrellas."

Inevitably the business of non-breathing leads us to the cemetery:
"The way I figger it, if we get all the non-breathers to endorse not breathin' on our seance tv show..."


The look of the thing starts getting elaborate, with the specially lettered typefaces for the dialogue of Deacon Muskrat and Sarcophagus MacAbre. The villainy of this pair starts to look ineffectual after the introduction of Kelly's caricature of Spiro Agnew as a hyena (pictured on the book's cover, above), who finds it easier to try and convict Churchy after putting a long haired wig on his bald pate. Kelly's grasp of the political situation has proven to be spot-on at a time when so many other cartoonists of his generation were embarrassingly out of step, such as Al Capp and Milt Caniff. If memory serves, I had only just read this book when Kelly died in 1973, aged sixty.

The book ends after 128 pages where it started with our beloved cast back around the table, and with Kelly's greatest catchphrase of all:


I feel an enormous warmth in being reunited with this masterpiece after twenty five years of separation. I'm also curious about the atmospherics of my parents' attic, which have preserved this and other artefacts in completely perfect condition.

time to have a look at the books I brought home with me from my travels. The first event out of San Diego was that I had to take them all out of my case, as it was overweight, and make them my hand luggage. All twenty lbs of them.



First up, The Mammoth Book of best Crime Comics, edited by my dear old pal Paul Gravett, so you'll get no unprejudiced view from me. In fact I just found, and am stealing, this handsome photo of the wee chap.
Best Crime Comics: I don't enjoy having comics broken up into genres like this, though if I was in Paul's shoes I certainly wouldn't hesitate to get a gig contributing to the 'mammoth book series.' I would say that comic books as a subject in itself is the genre, and anything else is a subdivision of that. In the world of popular fiction it makes more sense to categrorise things by genre, where you have writers devoting entire careers to one idiom, whether it's fantasy or crime or science fiction etc. and you can trace clear lines through time. There isn't as much mixing it up in that domain as there is in our comic book world.

The most notable things: the book is in black and white and Paul had access to some crisp black and white British reprints of a lot of American stuff, for instance the 30 page cockeyed 87th Precinct story that Krigstein illustrated in 1962,

There's a 120 day run of Secret Agent X-9 from near the beginning in 1934 when Hammett was still writing it. One appeal of this selection is to show what action strip cartoons looked like before cinematic style was introduced. Everything is staged at medium distance. It's good tough stuff, though lacking the invention of Hammett's best short stories.

While the book overall is of the type that I usually feel tempted to cut up and rearrange according to my own principles, one other thing I found exciting. A sixteen week run of Mike Hammer Sunday pages from 1953/54. The page for Jan 31 has piqued my curiosity. In his introductory note Paul tells us that the bound and gagged girl in the negligee, being tortured with cigarettes to the feet, attracted moral indignation that led to the title's cancellation. The page he reproduces is different from the version of the same page that appeared in The Comic Century (KSP 1995). I show the upper halves of both (The lower parts are identical). In Paul's version, the black and white, the panel seen in the colour version has been replaced by an enlargement of the final panel of the previous week's instalment and the torture is hidden behind the title box. I would tend to think that an individual newspaper had taken the liberty of making the change except that panel 4 in the altered version (the b&W) doesn't appear at all in the other. Could the syndicate have asked the artist to supply two different versions of the page? Can anybody shed light on the matter?



Paul tells us that a diappointed artist, Ed Robbins, quit the comic strip business. His Hammer boldly anticipates the graphic style and permissiveness of the hard-edged British strips of the sixties, of Holdaway on Modesy Blaise and Horak on James Bond .

the fourth volume of my current favourite reprint project has just arrived. It's bigger than usual, at 260 pages over the previous 196, and the price tag is only up three bucks to 25. That's the first time I recall looking at the price. This series I just signed up for sight and price unseen. Indeed I volunteered myself to write a short three page intro to this volume, in which I briefly analyse a Sunday page from 1968. There's also a 40 page interview with Leonard Starr from around 1980. And there are seven complete stories.


The first attractive feature about leonard Starr's On Stage is that it's a time capsule of its period, 1960-61 in this volume. Look at the lovely sense of early sixties style here in the headscarf and nifty little sportscar.


Another pleasing touch about the old soap opera style is the way the characters would be groomimg themselves while discussing important stuff, such as the plot that's just about to unfold:


One of the stories has Pete Fletcher and recurring secondary character Johnny Q. in a boat in a hurricane off the Florida Keys with the task of looking after a baby they've just saved. Two men and a baby.


The stories overall have a lightness of touch, no great melodrama usually, with the resolution hingeing on perhaps simply a character trait half concealed until the crucial moment. This gives the proceedings a lifelike quality. Then there are moments with a hint of gothic, which would later be a bigger element in the romance fiction generally, but at this early stage sinister overtones always turn out to have prosaic explanations.
The final story in the set revolves around a movie cowboy actor obviously based on John Wayne. Around about 1961 I think I wanted to BE him.


Charles Pelto at Classic Comics Press tells me he's just about got that other great human interest strip, Stan Drake's Juliette Jones, to start running soon in reprint. I can't wait.

This is a cartoon by R F Outcault (1863-1928) that Bill Blackbeard showed in his big book on The Yellow Kid that Kitchen Sink press published. The reproduction measured a mere two inches by three there, so I've blown it up here so you can see it properly (click to enlarge). It's surreal in its violence and I felt that BB gave it short shrift by not showing it properly (though that's a minor quibble about a magnificent book, now alas out of print).


That single image, when compared with a random sampling of more or less contemporary cartoons from Punch, says so much about the shift from the staid Victorian era to the explosive twentieth century.

E

verybody is linking to Steven Stwalley's Crumbling Paper Index where he has been posting an unending stream of grand old newspaper funnies. Last April he wrote an introductory note that stuck in my noodle. It is of particular interest to me as one of my grand failed projects of recent times was The History of Humour. I was attempting to recreate the humour of past times in such a way that the reader could enter into a moment in which that humor lived again, albeit through a screen of irony, rather than to present it in the detached scientific manner of the sociologist. One of the problems I found was that I could not always depend on my reader to share my intelligent benevolence, let alone my sense of what is funny. (I have even heard that there are some who think that this blog is not the most amusing thing in the world.)
Thus one is duty bound to frame everything in the health and safety warnings of our own times, which I'm sure will provoke hilarity for a later generation. I rather like the panache with which Steven dealt with the issue:

...my impression from reading stuff from early in the last century, I don’t think that most people even had heard of the concept of racism. Race and ethnicity was not only viewed as a ripe source of humor… it was one of the most popular sources of humor.
Today’s newspaper comics (which I should note are incredibly tame in comparison to the early comics in almost every way imaginable) have their genres… domestic humor, office humor, funny animals, etc. If you were to divide up the major genres of the early (pre-1920) comics, it would have been something like: racial and ethnic humor, devil children humor, unstable marriage humor, dim-witted woman humor, homelessness and poverty humor, violence and misfortune humor, and wacky surrealism. So that all said, here are the deeply offensive Chocolate Drops, by E. W. Kemble, circa July 23, 1911 from the American Examiner. I can’t imagine a strip in a modern paper depicting young kids stealing a car for a joyride and laughing when they get some adults arrested, can you? Anyone who says the past was a more innocent time is talking out of their ass.

Lew Sayre Schwartz

Last week, blogger 'Sivercat17' (found via JLRoberson at the TCJ board) did us the favour of scanning a whole 1953 Batman story (minus the title page) from Detective #193, March 1953: The Joker's Journal

It's one of some 120 Batman stories ghosted for Bob Kane by Lew Sayre Schwartz, one of my favourite artists from way back long before I ever knew his name. I've been fond of his work since when I was ten or eleven and used to colour it with crayons in some black and white reprints that i still keep. I wrote a long essay on the subject, though note that the crayon coloured pages shown there are by Moldoff. In 2001 I interviewed Lew for the first issue of my magazine Egomania (still avalable for five bucks) and he identified The Joker's Journal as his, recalling that he put himself in one panel (see left smoking pipe).
The most recent volume (#6, 2005) of Batman Archives, reprinting all the Batman stories from Detective Comics, have the first ones (six of them) that Schwartz drew (always uncredited), but in my opinion have failed to correctly identify the very first (#122, April 1947):


Both DC and the Grand Comicbook Database give the art to Kane, but that would be the default position anyway. The work is too good to possibly have been drawn by Kane; i'm particularly enamored of this charming circus scene:


The trouble is that the job also looks superior to the immediately subsequent stories that Schwartz drew. The first time I saw this cinematic sweep of the Statue of Liberty I was baffled as to who the artist could possibly be and as late as ten years ago I still had it filed it under 'not yet identifiable'.


But don't we all try much harder on the first outing, in the hope of securing regular employment?

"the caboose was last seen heading onto the siding with the rest of the fond hopes."

The only 'comics' I have found worth reading in the last two or three weeks is the selection of Otto Soglow in the November Comics Journal #286. There are 37 colour sundays from 1933/34 with 5 pages of text intro. This is Otto Soglow's The Ambassador, a title and character used for contractual reasons until the much more famous Little King could be freed from The New Yorker's lease. I'm working through it a page or two at a time, rationing it. Every page gives me a laugh out loud, and it's good to have a couple to look forward to tomorrow. The Ambassador is a man of humble pleasures. After being shown around his lavish new estate he sneaks out to the back garden to paddle in the birdbath:


Update, to add. After I posted the above, my pal mr j sent me a couple of jpegs, being the cover and a page (on the subject of London fog- click to enlarge) from Soglow's 1939 book, Confidential History of Modern England


coincidentally, Allan Holtz just posted a photo with Soglow in it, nov 7
*********

In the same issue of the Comics Journal, R. Fiore: "Back in the '80s, when I was working for Fantagraphics, the great dream was that if comics could only break into the mainstream bookstores they would find themselves on a level playing field where the tastes of the CBG's ('Comic book guys' in his thesis, what I've been calling 'comic book culture') would not hold sway. While the front end of the dream came true, the caboose was last seen heading onto the siding with the rest of the fond hopes."

It's foolish of me to be wasting my time on the likes of the following, but it has become a morbid fascination. Comic books get literary treatment at library By MATT CASEY -- Evening Sun - 11/08/2007

Whether you call them comic books or graphic novels, it's not all about men in spandex. So the Dillsburg Area Public Library's winter session of lectures will teach you just that. Library director Jean Pelletiere said she's running this lecture series so she can find out what graphic novels are "all about." "I've just discovered that it's called a format, not a genre," she said.

Keep feeding that to the media, you idiots; comics still have much to contribute to the great dumbing down of culture.

Bottle green Betty

Seeing Craig Yoe's post last week about Nell Brinkley reminded me of Trina Robbins' 2001 book on the artist. We don't have enough monographs on the great cartoonists that we should allow one to slip from our attention. Apart from being a great little book, though the publisher allowed a smaller format than would be ideal, it is of special interest to me because it contains a handful of cartoons by one of my favourites, Tad Dorgan and also involves some courtroom sketching. During the first year of her career on the Hearst-owned New York Journal, Brinkley was assigned by editor Arthur Brisbane to cover the famous Thaw murder trial, for the womens' interest that it provoked. It was a crime of passion at the the center of which was the beautiful chorus girl Evelyn Nesbit. Brinkley accompanied her drawings with lavish sentimental prose in the style of the period. Where it gets really interesting is when Tad, in his regular spot in the sports pages, starts lampooning Brinkley's work. Tad was ten years older than Brinkley and by this time both an influential cartoonist and a friend of many famous sporting figures. Robbins showed and discussed four instances of this jollity and described a fifth which occured during the weeks after the trial. I wrote to Trina at the time in the hope that while obtaining images from the old microfilm she had acquired more than she needed for her book. This turned out to be the case and she was able to send me photocopies of the unseen cartoons that she had only described as well as large copies of the others in their newpaper settings. Unused by Trina, here is Brinkley, in the women's pages, in one of a series matching types of young lady (Betties), distinguished by colours, to young fellows (Billies), likewise. Thus she matches the 'Billy of opal and change' to the 'Betty of brown.'


(click these for very large versions)
In his usual manner of using dogs as stand-ins for people, Tad in the sports section matches the 'bottle green Betty' to the 'lavender Billy', and 'salmon pink Betty' to the 'heart-of lettuce-green Billy' etc.


There's an untypical boldness to the piece by Brinkley, who can often get lost in the frills, and the Tad is just deliciously uncouth. (both from 1908)
********

Following my post about beer yesterday, Mick Evans sends this link to Bestadsontv.dom:
George Patterson Y&R, Melbourne has created a new spot for Victoria Bitter, featuring members of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and Orchestra Victoria playing the VB tune with nothing but VB bottles. Says art director Ben Couzens: "At first we weren't even sure it was possible, but with renowned conductor/composer Cezary Skubiszewski's help and after a few early tests we knew we were onto something quite amazing. The result speaks for itself." (see the whole video.)

When did you last see your tutor?

A couple of different things recently brought this book to mind, apart from reading that great interview with Posy Simmonds this week. Firstly, Bryan Talbot in what was very much his own version of the history of 'comics' recently in the Guardian, credited himself along with Raymond Briggs with introducing the 'graphic novel' to Britain in 1982. Even allowing for the existence of such a thing, that would of course be complete bollocks. Posy's True Love came out in 1981. I'm not putting up a different candidate for primacy, because you know I have no time for that race-to-the-patents-office mentality, but we can't let faulty facts end up in Wikipedia (Hell, it's already been in the Weekend Australian, and THEY gave him a four-year start).


The other thing that reminded me of this book was my argument over the last few days about the need to step outside of comicbook culture to view our subject ('that thing of ours'). You see, Posy is a good example of an artist who has worked entirely outside of that all her life (the reason indeed perhaps why she might be overlooked by Mr T, whose artistic ideas exist entirely within it). Her cartooning career started in 1969 (she'd have been twenty four) when she drew a regular panel cartoon titled Bear in the British newspaper The Sun. I can't find a single example of it online, but I think I just scored a copy of the 1969 book of the series (there was a second in 1975). More on that when it arrives. She went on to illustrate for the Guardian and started her series The Silent Three of St. Botolph's there in 1979. Later she did some great childrens books; her Lulu and The Flying Babies was a favourite around this house, and also the Famous Fred animated film, based on her book Fred, with Lenny Henry doing the voice. I had a lady friend in 1981, just before the book under discussion appeared, who followed Posy in the Guardian (as she checked in on Feiffer in the Observer Sunday magazine and Claire Bretecher in the Times Sunday magazine whenever those other papers fell within reach) who had no idea what the hell I was talking about when I showed her the cartoon novel I was working upon. She saw no possible connect between what Posy was doing and what I intended. I mention this to show how far outside of comic book culture Posy is and was. I thought my own thing (The King Canute Crowd) had no whiff of it whatsoever and I was anxious that it shouldn't. But there you go.


True Love, as I understand, was drawn specially as a story-book, as opposed to using material from the Guardian as her other two or three books around the time did, though it still used characters from the Silent Three. You can see the density of the work in the spread above, and also that it was printed in black, with one colour. The sequence you can glimpse that is predominantly pink is taking place in the memory of one of the characters.


The story is a satirical little piece about office girl Janice Brady who thinks the boss has an eye for her. Posy could, and still can, compose kinetic sequences as well as anybody in the strip biz.


I like the way she references other idioms, such as the boldly designed graphics of the soap opera strips. Sometimes the pseudo-heroine in these sequences looks deliberately badly drawn, somewhat crosseyed under a weight of mascara, as though Posy wants us to know that she is alluding to the idiom in its most ordinary generalisations rather than to the best it can offer;


Here she evokes a pastoral mood with delicate traceries of flexible pen:


A couple of pages where we lose sight of the characters:


And a pastiche of the painting by William Yeames, 'When did you last see your Father,' which was a subject of much hilarity with a certain generation in Britain, so that I was amused to find, quite late in the day, that my late and much missed Auntie Ella thought the original painting was intended as a joke.


My records show the book was published in hardback in Oct 1981, soft cover in '83 and has been gone since then. Worth noting is Posy's date on the pastiche, '1979', which appears quite late in the piece, so that we might assume she started it in '78 and it may even have preceded the start of the Silent Three in the Guardian. In other words, was she thinking of a book-length story before the self-contained, once-a -week version? Somebody should ask her about that one day.

In a better world, you'd read my affectionate recollection and immediately go out and buy a copy.

As we say in our house

Posy Simmonds: the invisible woman -London Telegraph- 21/10/2007

The characters in her stories of middle-class life are known – and loved – by millions. But what of Posy Simmonds herself? Sabine Durrant meets a cartoonist who is never happier than when eavesdropping on the bus
Posy Simmonds, the writer and cartoonist, lives in a quiet Georgian square between King's Cross and Islington in London.
Having male siblings, she says, may well have influenced her sense of humour. 'I think we were all rather lavatorial. My grandmother had a way of changing the subject whenever the talk got a bit salty. She'd say things like, "Oh, there's a squirrel." And this became a family joke. If somebody says anything a little bit… one of us still says, "Oh, there's a squirrel."

The three page article ends with a witty rejoinder to that phrase and I'm reminded of a book on my shelf, As we say in Our house compiled by Nigel Rees, presenter of the BBC4 radio show Quote...unquote. I see he was doing a live presentation of the same kind of thing earlier this month in Warwick.
I've never heard the show, but I enthusiatically picked up the book (published 2001) as it's a theme I've used a great deal in my autobiographical blatherings. Indeed I am always excited by the degree to which the members of close families occasionally share a private lexicon that can be close to being a whole other language. When I first visted the family of the wife of my bosom, I noticed that if one of them was heading out and another asked where they were going, it was customary to say "up on the roof to mow the lawn."
There's one we picked up from the Rees book that has become a favourite. If Anne accidentally overbuys a foodstuff, say marmalade, and we find that we have three identical jars all at once, it is now customary to say: "It's a good thing you went to the store before the hoarders got there."