Guardian cartoonist Posy Simmonds published True Love in 1981. It used characters from her established weekly strip cartoon in the Guardian to create an extended meditation on the nature of love, sex, marriage and adultery in a world saturated by media clichés and, in particular, through the prism of the women’s romance comics read by the book’s young protagonist.
Frontispiece to True Love by Posy Simmonds (1981)
In True Love the plain and mousy young Janice Brady is working in a male-dominated advertising company and mistakenly imagines that tall, handsome, suave Stanhope Wright is in love with her. In reality he is juggling at least two other love affairs which he is trying to keep hidden from his long-suffering wife – but in her naive innocence, Janice dreams that she is trembling on the brink of a Grand Passion.
True Love is often acknowledged to be Britain’s first ‘graphic novel’, although it reads now more as a series of loosely related episodes, and includes interludes with other characters from her established ‘Posy’ strip which are only tangentially related to the plot, such as it is.
Incidents
The fifty or so-page-long book is divided into fourteen or so self-contained strips, each with its own title.
Love (Janice) It is a few days before Christmas and Janice is mooning about the Creative Director of Beazeley and Buffin Advertising, Stanhope Wright, who gave her a tin of stilton cheese at the office party that afternoon. She had gone upstairs to fetch her coat and nearly caught Stanhope in a clinch with a secretary. To cover his confusion, Stanhope reached for the nearest thing – the incongruous tin of stilton – and gave it to her with a dapper flourish. Foolish Janice imagines he was waiting there in the dark for her and her alone. He loves her!
True Love (Janice) That night Janice fantasises about her next meeting with Stanhope and how, if she applies enough make-up and wears the right glamour clothes, she will be transformed into a stereotypical dolly bird and Mr Wright can be hers!
True Love by Posy Simmonds (1981)
She imagines becoming so irresistible that Stanhope embraces her, kisses her and they sink onto the shagpile carpet in his office but, wait! No! He will not go all the way. He will respect her purity! His love will remain a pure flame burning in the cathedral of his heart! And dreaming all this, Janice falls asleep with a smile on her face.
Romance (no Janice) Down the Brass Monk pub Stanhope is chatting up a pretty young thing from the Creative Department. She makes her excuses and leaves Stanhope to daydream an amusing series of images done in an 18th century Rococo manner of him seducing her in a bosquey glade… except that the rude leering comments of the middle-aged codgers at the bar (led by the awful alcoholic Edmund Heep) burst his bubble.
Jealousy (Janice) Janice is waiting in the office after work to talk to Stanhope but hears him coming out of a meeting with a young woman creative director, Vicky. Stanhope is, as usual, leering all over Vicky, pawing her and insinuating at her, while on the surface making plans for the shooting of an advert. The bit Janice hears is Stanhope saying, ‘Let’s do it in the country… we can save money by doing it at my place…’ instantly misinterpreting the conversation to be about them having a date for a shag. But she is then shocked and appalled to hear them discussing the need for sheep. Sheep! This is because they’re talking about hiring suitably farmy animals to be in the background of the shoot, but Janice waits till they’ve left and then goes sadly home, appalled by what she’s heard. Sheep!
Rêves d’amour (Janice) In an extended sequence Janice fantasises about dressing up and being escorted by the tallest, handsomest man in the world to a glittering social occasion when all heads turn to marvel at her and her handsome companion, including Stanhope who comes grovellingly apologising to her.
From True Love by Posy Simmonds (1981)
But then Janice’s fantasy continues on to find her way out in the country where she comes across Stanhope and Vicky in mid-snog on some Lake District hillside when all of a sudden they are set upon by a herd of sheep. Janice scares the attacking sheep off by opening a jar of mint sauce (which they’re scared of because of its associations with Sunday roasts) but in the ensuing stampede Janice is herself stampeded over and killed – prompting Stanhope to fall to his knees in lamentation and to apologise for all the rude things he’d ever said to her and to admit how much he LOVED HER, before the handsomest man in the world Cliff Duff, sweeps her mangled body up in her arms and carries her down off the mountain, tears streaming from her face. All of which Janice imagines, tucked up warm in bed.
A Climate of Implicit Trust (No Janice) shows us Stanhope at home, cleaning teeth, putting on pyjamas and getting into bed with his long-suffering wife Vicky. They have an open marriage which appears to mean he can have as many affairs as he wants so long as he tells her about them. But in practice this makes him feel like a shit or, when Trish complaisantly forgives him, he finds oddly frustrating or, if she gets cross with him, he regrets opening his mouth. The scene is complicated when Trish says one of his secretaries (Janice) rang up blabbering something about sheep. Stanhope explains that just refers to the sheep they’re going to hire for the shoot. Maybe this whole sheep theme is meant to be hilarious, though I found it silly and laboured.
Lovers’ Tryst (no Janice) Stanhope drives out to the country where he has a rendezvous with Vicky and they have sex in the open air. He kind of ruins this by fussing on about what his wife thinks and fretting about when they can meet again. The whole thing is counterpointed by the lyrics of the Elizabethan song, It was a lover and his lass – which is spelt out in a curly old-fashioned font along the top of the strip, in ironic counterpoint. It’s clever, it wears its learning on its sleeve, but…. I struggled to find it funny. I thought, Oh yes, I see what she’s doing. very clever. Very funny. Without a smile actually crossing my lips.
Cautionary Tales (no Janice) An extended strip: Stanhope is having an argument with Vicky in the street: she’s got fed up of their whole life rotating about when he can get away from his wife, it’s all starting to feel squalid. When along come George and Wendy Weber and a friend of theirs, Nick. they invite a very embarrassed Stanhope to the pub but he and Vicky make their excuses. George and Wendy realise the woman is Stanhope’s latest fling and it prompts them to talk about what it would be like to have an affair with a younger women, which prompts Nick to remember a little comic sequence in which he actually did have an affair with a woman 25 years his junior, and went on a diet and lost weight to be in shape for her, becoming a vegetarian and eating lots of bran and green salad which leads up to the punchline scene where he’s on the sofa with the little popsy when… his stomach begins making epic gurgling noises. Oops. That is quite funny. For his part, George tells them about a spot of bother at the poly where a student, Gabby, is about to be expelled for doing bad work, not attending tutorials etc… but has told George this is because she is having an affair with her tutor who has made her furious by saying he’s not going to support her application to stay at the poly. All this leads up to one of those scenes where Simmonds parodies a famous painting, in this case the famous painting ‘And When Did You Last See Your Father?’ by Victorian artist William Frederick Yeames – a parody in which all the figures are arranged in the same positions and the lead questioner of the polytechnic board is asking poor Gabby – ‘And when did you last see your tutor?’ Ho ho. Very clever.
Married Love (no Janice) Wendy Weber is at the cinema with George watching one of the arty Italian movies he likes when she suddenly realises she is 40, she is never going to have an affair, never have sex with a different man, those days are gone for good. But slowly she talks herself round with by remembering all the drawbacks and inconveniences and ends up snuggling up closer to dear old George.
From True Love by Posy Simmonds (1981)
Tunnel of Love (Janice) On the tube to work Janice gets squashed up against Dave from the office. She’s reading a True Romance magazine and so interprets being squashed up against tall Dave in the crassest true love clichés. Dave, meanwhile, is reading a book titled ‘Exposures of a Beach Photographer’ and is full of tacky double-entendres, so he has something rather more graphic and sexual on his mind. A meeting of two discourses.
True Romance by Posy Simmonds (1981)
Caveat emptor (Janice) Meeting of all the creatives and execs of Beazeley and Buffin advertising to discuss an upcoming commercial for tinned soup. Janice features as the secretary. The only woman exec, Vicky, objects because she finds the whole conception sexist. Chair of the meeting Stanhope gets Janice to read out the minutes. These are very wordy but are designed to show how the seven men in the room do all share sexist stereotypes and preconceptions, in that all of them just see it as right and fitting that the advert shows a man taking his son for a manly trek across the hills, while the wife and mother remains in the kitchen cooking the soup the ad is designed to promote. The final comment Janice reads out was from a Mr Morton-Berry:
‘At the end of the day, when all’s said and done, a kitchen looks an unnatural sort of place without a MOTHER in it, I think we’d all agree’.
By that stage all the men’s faces are red because they have realised what a sexist lot they actually are, and Vicky the Creative Director has a broad smile on her face, having been vindicated.
L’après-midi d’un Fawn Raincoat (Janice) The day of the shoot, which is taking place in the grounds of Stanhope’s 16th century cottage in the country (a location which has featured in earlier Weber strip cartoons). Stanhope has wandered off somewhere and the director of the piece asks Janice to go and find him. Janice discovers Stanhope and Vicky sharing a glass of wine in a bosky glad. In fact they’re having a fight because Vicky is fed up of being squeezed into the gaps in Stanhope’s busy schedule. Stanhope tries to mollify her by opening th eluxury picnic hamper he’s brought with him. Improbably, he exclaims with frustration when he discovers the hamper contains no cheese! This is the farfetched link to Janice rummaging about in her backpack to find the tin of stilton cheese which Stanhope gave her right back at the start of the narrative. Eve more improbably Janice rolls it down the hillside towards the picnicking couple, but it hits a root, bounces into the air and cracks Stanhope on the back of the head knocking him unconscious. Janice runs down the hillside to comfort Vicky who yells, ‘Why the hell did you do that?’ and then, in a neat ironic touch – ‘I was just about to tell him what a swine he is.’ Which is quite funny.
Home Truths (no Janice) Stanhope is at home on the couch recovering from his concussion and a trip to the hospital, trying to forget the sniggers of the camera crew and the rest of the agency as he was driven off. Now he confesses to his wife Trisha, that he was not hit on the head by a piece of camera equipment as he initially told her; in fact, one of his secretaries threw a cheese at him. Trish puts her hand over her mouth in order not to burst out laughing and says, ‘OK Stanhope… I’ll buy that.’
A Many Splendoured Thing (Janice) It ends oddly. Next morning Stanhope comes into work to find Janice chatting amiably with Dave about what was on TV last night – it is pretty obvious that he is more her ‘level’ – when Stanhope walks in and Janice gushes her apologies. Stanhope sees a true romance magazine on her desk, picks it up and leafs through it, and the last words belong not to Janice but to the middle-aged philanderer:
‘One is never too old for ROMANCE Janice… Older people have their DREAMS of happiness too, you know…’
And the book ends with Stanhope having a reverie of a True Romance mag for the middle aged (‘Romantic picture stories for MIDDLE-AGED MARRIEDS’) in which an ageing Lothario tells an ageing glamorous woman that he’s not in love with her, doesn’t want to have a heavy affair with her, but just wants to have no-strings, no complications slap and tickle every now and then. And she (Gemma) expresses her relief and thinks: Here at last was the casual fling she had always dreamed of.’
I couldn’t tell if this ending was meant to be satire or mockery or making a feminist point or general social point. Like so many of Simmonds’s strips, I found it attractively drawn, and intelligently expressed, and obviously witty and learnèd and yet somehow, strangely… inconsequential.
A few thoughts
Loose structure
I counted 14 strips or sequences. The ostensible heroine, Janice, is completely absent from six of them, making my point that the thing is not a consecutive novel, but more a string of episodes held together by a very loose narrative about Janice mistakenly falling for Stanhope and, almost on the same day, realising she is deluded – but the loose structure allows Simmonds to give comic or wry meditations on the theme of adultery, open marriages, older men and younger women, and so on, using other, secondary characters.
In other words, contrary to various summaries that I’ve read, this little book is not a sustained parody or pastiche of True Love romance comics. That element is only present in three or four of the strips. It’s about a bit more than that.
The visual style i.e. pink
From a visual point of view, Simmonds enjoys counterpointing the freckly, bong-nosed young heroine with impossibly glamorous images of gorgeous pouting dollybirds from 1950s and 60s romance comics although, as mentioned, this only happens in four or five of the strips.
But the entire book mimics the romance genre’s exaggerated glamour, overblown prose, capital letter fonts, and the liberal use of its tell-tale colour – pink – in a variety of shades from soft lush pink to torrid scarlet.
Intelligence… wasted?
The point is that, even though some of the drawing is actually quite crude (especially seen in hindsight, in the light of how sophisticated Simmonds’s later drawing would become) there is no doubting that a great deal of thought and intelligence have gone into the book’s conception. It shows great ‘learnèd wit’ in the parodies of 18th century rococo nymphs and shepherds, in the parody of the Yeames painting, in the sequence whose main raison d’etre is to counterpoint the Elizabethan song ‘It was a lover and his lass’ with the crude shagging of Stanhope and Vicky on the wet grass of some muddy field.
If you wanted to be critical, you might say that there is an excess of intelligence, sophistication and literary and artistic knowledge on display – expended on a set of pretty trivial subjects (silly office girl gets crush on her boss, boss is having affair with pretty junior, long-suffering wife, tittering friends).
That, although True Love is without doubt clever, wry, amused and mocking – it is rarely actually funny. And I think this is because it all felt too predictable. Middle-aged advertising exec is having an affair while fending off the schoolgirl crush of some secretary, trying to keep his wife onside, and rising above the mockery of his middle-aged friends. The subject matter is not… it’s not very original is it? Maybe the novelty, back in 1981, was treating it in this comic-book style. But that novelty has disappeared over the past 40 years as graphic novels have risen to become commonplace, capable of treating almost any subject, leaving True Love looking more like a historical oddity than a spectacular innovation.
Credit
All images are copyright Posy Simmonds. All images are used under fair play legislation for the purpose of analysis and criticism.
Books & Boots 