All posts tagged Pure Posy

Pure Posy by Posy Simmonds (1987)

From 1977 to 1987 Posy Simmonds drew a regular cartoon strip in the Guardian newspaper gently mocking the middle-class lifestyles and liberal concerns of a regular cast of a dozen or so fictional characters, centred on:

Wendy Weber, a former nurse, married to verbose polytechnic sociology lecturer George Weber, trying to attend night school while being mother of a brood of six children, ranging from little Benji to teenage glamour-puss Belinda
Jo Heep, married to tedious alcoholic whisky salesman Edmund Heep, and mum to two rebellious teenagers who’ve adopted the punk look
Trish Wright, married to philandering advertising executive Stanhope Wright, and mother of a young baby

Throughout the period the cartoons were periodically gathered together into books, namely:

Mrs Weber’s Diary (1979)
True Love (1981)
Pick of Posy (1982)
Very Posy (1985)
Pure Posy (1987)

And these books were themselves gathered together into a huge compendium volume, Mrs Weber’s Omnibus, which was published in 2012 and now appears to be the only way to get hold of the cartoons.

Pure Posy is the fourth and final in the series of collections (given that 1981’s True Love wasn’t a collection but a one-off ‘graphic novel’, following the schoolgirl crush of a naive young woman, Janice Brady, for a regular cast member, tall, suave, philandering advertising executive Stanhope Wright).

Historical context

Pure Posy brings together 75 Posy cartoon strips from 1985 through to 1987, a period of great historical change. In Britain the Miner’s Strike of 1984-5 tore the country apart and polarised political and social opinion, while Mrs Thatcher’s harsh monetarist economic policies saw unemployment continuing at record highs in many parts of the country. And yet those who had jobs, especially nice jobs in the City and service sector, had never had it so good, and thrilled to all sorts of new fashions, big shoulder pads, big hair, jogging, health food etc.

On the international scene the arrival of Mikhail Gorbachev as leader of the Soviet Union in 1985 was soon followed by the launch of his new policies of glasnost and perestroika which, although nobody suspected it at the time, would lead to the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990, and the collapse of socialist ideology all around the world.

But for the first few years, the ones covered by this strip, all most of us saw was a continuation of the worsening relations between the world’s superpowers and the escalation of tensions which terrified everyone that there might be actually a nuclear war, and which was symbolised, in England, by the ongoing protests by thousands of women at the Greenham Common airbase.

Pure Posy

In general the Posy strip formed a haven away from politics and the hurly-burly of events reported elsewhere in the Guardian newspaper, focusing, as it does, on the domestic concerns and foibles of the Weber, Wright and Heep households, with occasional forays off to meet new, unnamed characters to make other points about middle-class, white, heterosexual, well-meaning liberal Londoners.

As in the previous books the strips are deliberately not placed in the chronological order of their publishing but arranged to create a sort of seasonal progression through one notional year, opening with Christmas-themed strips, and in-between progressing through spring, summer holidays, autumn, and back to Christmas again.

The triumph of Thatcherism

That said the general cultural spirit of the times does hang heavy over many of the strips, depicting the extinction of the old 1960s values of caring and concern, in a welter of greed and materialism.

This is epitomised by a very telling strip from 1986 which depicts a local working-class couple commenting on the changes they’ve seen in their neighbourhood, namely that, in the later 1970s/early 1980s, posh middle-class nobs moved in, all called Gemma and holding dinner parties and hiring au pairs but… they spoke as if they were genuinely concerned about unemployment and the need to invest in infrastructure and the NHS and so on. They were nobs, but they were also ‘sort of middle-class socialists’.

Nowadays a new breed of nobs are moving in, who show all the signs of middle-class gentility i.e. obsession with wine, interior furnishings, hiring au pairs and nannies and having a pretty little place down in the country, BUT… they have abandoned their soft-left scruples: Now they say we’ve got to be realistic about unemployment, they choose private medicine over the NHS, they unashamedly send their children to private school.

In other words, this strip epitomises the success of Thatcherism in making middle-class people across the country feel unembarrassed about making money and spending it selfishly.

This one strip shows how the cosy, rather smugly liberal, soft socialist and feminist and environmentalist worldview of George and Wendy Weber became old hat, old fashioned, musty, irrelevant, marginalised, swept away by a new generation of thrusting young entrepreneurs and money-makers.

This theme is further demonstrated by the ‘Ox and Tiger’ strip in which the Webers are at a dinner table – but no longer accompanied by other bearded sociologists and dungareed feminists – now it’s being hosted by a coiffured chap in stripey shirt and red braces, who looks like a banker out of an Alex cartoon.

The world was moving on around the Webers and they were not moving at all, they were being outflanked and outnumbered, even by their own children (notably their go-getting materialist daughter, Belinda who is given several strips despising their useless, woolly old-fashioned values).

Themes

Changing times / the Weber values becoming passé (9)

Pot-head revisited The Webers hire Crispin Naylor, a young fogey down from Oxford to tutor their daughter Beverley. He is astonishingly old-fashioned, dressed in a tweed suit and smoking a pipe, he berates the 1960s generation as the ones who undermined the fabric of society. (The ITV adaptation of Brideshead Revisited was broadcast in 1981. The expression ‘young fogey’ was coined in 1984.)
The ox and tiger The middle-aged, middle classes have no idea how they’ve screwed up the world for the unemployed young, who bitterly resent them.
W.O.T. For some reason Simmonds coins the expression Wifully Over-Tasked for people who choose to over-work or use work as an excuse not to face relationships or parental responsibilities.

W.O.T. A doctor warns (1986) by Posy Simmonds

Fortress Britons Simmonds quotes the famous John of Gaunt speech from Shakespeare’s Richard II (‘This other Eden, demi-paradise..) contrasting the jingoistic words with the reality of a society in which everyone’s afraid of everyone else, has burglar alarms on their cars, persons and multiple locks on doors and windows.
Gingerbread without guilt At a very swanky private party given for Stanhope Wright a kind of strippergram arrives, except that she has an odd role, which is to assuage Stanhope’s guilt at revelling in such luxury and persuade him that the party is giving employment and jobs to all sorts of people. She is a ‘guilt-o-gram’.
Weights and measures Another strip depicting the fad for jogging, exercising and losing weight, depicting a party of bright 1980s people dominated by a smart woman who shows off how much weight she’s lost… until a very ‘big’ woman joins the conversation at which point they change the subject.
Toujours la politesse Belinda Weber’s rich City boyfriend is struggling to write a thank you note to George and Wendy for letting him stay over, and describes the evening to a work colleague, ridiculing George being a househusband, them letting the kids stay up and their general liberal permissive household. Maybe Guardian readers were meant to sympathise with the Webers but the thing is… City boy won.
Babaware A balding, paunchy middle-class chap goes to a Mothercare type shop pushing a buggy with a very small child in it and asks an assistant about an item of clothing for it, and the assistant makes the mistake of asking, Is it for your grandson? No my son says the man. So the strip is addressing the (middle-class) trend for men to become fathers older and older.
Lunch break An office meeting attended by four men and two women who all appear to be equals discussing business, turnover, profits etc. they break for lunch and the men go to a bar where they’re served by scantily-clad young women, while the two women go to an Italian restaurant where they enjoy being fawned over by handsome young Italian men. Then they reconvene and carry on business. Is this strip making a comment on feminism, or equality, or real gender differences? To a modern reader the most striking thing is that they go to a restaurant for lunch break. Or that they have a lunch break at all.

Women and feminism (7)

Rough winds do blow On Bank Holiday the Webers drive down to the countryside to visit friends, but after a stroll through the fields and a drink in a pub, George snaps at his host, and we see him worrying and fretting about his work. Don’t worry, explains Wendy, he’s always like that when it’s his turn to look after the kids. Maybe that’s funny but I thought it just insulted men.
The house-keeping A wife suggest to her husband that she stops working (as the dogsbody in an art gallery), they stop employing a nanny, she’ll be able to shop properly and have good hot meals ready, iron his shirts and everything properly washed… then she pulls his nose and says ‘April Fool!’ Presumably this is meant to be funny, because in Posy Simmonds’s view, all men’s deepest wish is to have their wives at home looking after the kids, keeping a good house and so on.
A mother’s plea Hand-written in dancing script, this is a letter from the statue of a suckling mother perched high on a plinth over some busy street, about how she is ignored, isolated, mute, passive, and only notice her to call her a single-parent family and a threat to society.
Always in the news George is in the front room watching telly with Wendy and two of their older daughters, as the news reports a succession of violent and sexual crimes perpetrated by men, while George – cartoon-style- gets smaller and smaller and smaller until, as the three women tut, ‘Tsk, men eh?’ he makes his excuses and leaves. I guess that’s because all men are rapists, paedophiles and child-murderers.
Pictures of the ages Like the Seven ages of women and the Seven ages of men cartoons she drew, this wordless strip shows the progress of a woman in twelve pictures from baby to old lady (dressed all in black in a parody of the painting Whistler’s mother [full title ‘Arrangement in Grey and Black No.1’ by the American-born painter James McNeill Whistler]).
Long in the tooth Stanhope is in bed with his wife, Trish and for the first half dozen pictures is flossing his teeth which makes a peculiar tic and toc sound. Suddenly his wife says, ‘Stanhope, I want to have another baby before it’s too late’. ‘What’s brought this on?’ asks Stanhope, continuing to make the tick tock tick tock sound of her biological clock.
The world turned upside-down My wife remembers reading this strip back in 1987 in its original Guardian context and laughing out loud, it was so true! A harassed secretary, being leered over by her boss, dreams of a world in which women are in charge and men are patronised, touched up and made to do menial tasks, leered at by security guards and building workers etc.

Difficulties of motherhood and childcare (4)

Who worries about the worriers? Looking miserable and exhausted, Wendy walks home with a mum friend and explains how she gives all her energy to supporting her husband, her mother, Benji and Tamsin and Sophie and the babysitter and the bloody car and even the cat… ‘No one ever worries about ME!’

Who worries about the worriers? by Posy Simmonds (1986)

An inspiration to us all Having given the kids their tea, Wendy Weber reads an interview in a women’s magazine with a successful globe-trotting woman writers, whose smug patronising tones make Wendy screw the mag up and chuck it in the bin.
Nature abhors a vacuum Another ironic reversal: for ten pictures a youngish mum tells Wendy how wonderful it is to finally have her kids off her hands, as they are starting full-time school, painting a vivid picture of what hell it is to be sole carer for young children, and Wendy supportively asks what she’s going to do next, get a job, do a PhD? And the mum dreamily says… ‘Thing is… I thought I’d have another baby.’
Cheerful thoughts George and Wendy are in their garden with a heavily pregnant mother, but the conversation soon takes a pessimistic turn as George in particular rants against the horribly violent aggressively materialistic society the new baby will be coming into. Result: general depression.

Childhood and small children (4)

The ratings Two youngish children are watching a TV soap in which the characters are shouting and criticising each other, until the voices of their parents in the kitchen get louder and we realise the parents are having a row (she’s accusing him of being selfish and being out every night and leaving her to do all the housework) and so the kids turn away from the TV to watch the squabbling shouting soap which is their parents’ marriage, until the parents quieten down and the bored children return to the TV.
Little ones’ lunch A busy strip divided into 4 to six boxes each depicting the various stages of children playing with, putting in their mouths, spitting out, mixing with uneaten food or spitting at their neighbours one of: fizzy drinks, jelly and ice cream, noodles with sauce, chocolate digestive biscuits, stew mash and peas.
Men’s talk Two little girls come into a room where two little boys are falling about laughing and eventually find out it’s because one little boy has looked at another boy’s willy. So the girls ask to look at the boys’ willies and themselves fall about with laughter, at which the little boys are aggrieved: ‘S’not funny.’

Men’s Talk by Posy Simmonds (1986)

Good sports Little Katie’s birthday party, where the bien-pensant liberal parents are determined to give everyone who takes part in the games presents – although ironically this creates lots of upset and unhappiness because those who genuinely won something are aggrieved that children who didn’t get exactly the same as them.

Divorce

Divorce featured strongly in the previous collection; for some reason it doesn’t feature at all in this one.

Ironies of love (2)

Live-in-love Young woman takes her cat to the vet. The cat is furious because after five years of living alone together, the woman’s fiancé has moved in so now the cat is pooing everywhere and generally misbehaving.
Moon flush A middle-aged woman is reading a romantic novel (the text of which is given in an unusual font, a type of Courier) and the cat is fidgeting with boredom so she shoos her out into the garden where the cat proceeds to re-enact the ‘romantic’ scene depicted in the novel, with a female cat, till their caterwauling prompts George Weber to throw a shoe at them and the cat scampers inside back to her owner’s lap just as the latter burst into tears at the sad love story she’s reading and the cat sobs at the missed opportunity for a shag.

Sex and adultery (5)

Forbidden fruit An ironic reversal of the reader’s expectations, for we find dedicated philanderer Stanhope Wright chatting up a dishy old flame at a Christmas party, and asking whether they can have a quick one for old time’s sake, but, when they sneak outside, it is revealed that they’re both being furtive and ashamed because they’ve nipped out… for a smoke!

Forbidden fruit by Posy Simmonds (1986)

Good timing One of the pastiche cartoons Simmonds is so good at, five rows of pictures which depict the four phases of a casual sexual encounter, namely: well before, before, during, and after – and on the left of the rows a bunch of Rococo cherubs hassling one of their number to intervene with an important message. It’s only at the very last picture that you realise they are encouraging him to prompt one or other of the participants to ask: WHAT CONTRACEPTIVE PRECAUTIONS ARE YOU TAKING?’ (Given that this dates from 1986 it’s surprising Simmonds isn’t satirising the Safe Sex / use a condom message, which first appeared in British journalism in 1984.)
Just past it That said, this strip from 1987 is about AIDS, featuring Belinda Weber sitting at dinner with her parents and some friends complacently discussing AIDS and how difficult sex is going to be for young people today… until she burst their complacency by suggesting that the AIDS virus has been about longer than people think, like back into the 1960s… at which the smug middle-aged people start panicking.
Where there’s a will A long ironic strip wherein inveterate philanderer Stanhope Wright chats up an old flame over lunch and they agree to have a shag, but there’s a snag: wife? au pair? STD!? No, it’s the new neighbourhood watch scheme and the snooping neighbour Primula Stokes. To evade her ever-watchful gaze Stanhope outlines a plan of Byantine complexity and the would-be shagee politely declines.

A writer’s life (3)

Nine till five Satire on a woman writer who has to produce a weekly column showing how she puts off all her other chores and social engagements yet still manages to leave it to the last minute and have a massive crisis the night before.
J.D. Crouch As far as I can see this is the first appearance of the tubby, middle-aged, bearded writer J.D. Crouch, who will go on to become a regular feature in post-Posy strips (in 1992 Simmonds commenced a year-long strip solely about him and a writer’s life). Here he is in his natural habitat – the book signing – when unexpectedly his ex-wife appears and asks him to sign a copy of the book for: herself who he beat up in 1975, one each for the writer’s she saw him plagiarise (Kingsley Amis, John Updike, Alan Sillitoe, Gunther Grass), one each for the children he has never bothered to visit, one for his former researcher who he was knocking off while his wife lay in hospital… during which recitation Crouch shrinks smaller and smaller until he is hiding under the table. Men, eh.
The pleasure of their company A literary party at which a load of writers mill about gossiping about new books, are jealous of more successful writers, criticise book deals and publishing execs and publicity people and generally bitch and backstab, ending with the ironic conclusion that they don’t know why they bother attending them. A strip like this just makes you despise book luvvies even more.

Academia (3)

George retires? In the poly canteen George’s colleagues speculate that he’s retiring and in a chorus tell him about the pitiful perks he’s amassed in 17 years working there (a small parking space, use of the Xerox machine, he can claim for cassette tapes on expenses), all of them tending to how pitiful and puny his rewards are, except that… in an ironic reversal… they all reveal that they are madly jealous of these huge perks and tell him he’d be mad to quit.
The absent-minded professor George has a nightmare in which he actually really kicks an insufferable colleague he’s dreamed about kicking for years.
To whom it may concern George is angry that he’s been asked to provide a reference for one of his pupils without the student asking him first, also that the boy was lazy and rude. At first he types out the truth, but then we see the debate in his wooly liberal conscience as the figure of the student asks what right George has to ruin his life and, slowly, reluctantly, George goes back through his draft revising it and systematically lying.

Middle class mores and hypocrisies (10)

Year of the tiger A dinner party where most of the guests are lamenting how awful 1985 (the year of the Ox) was but how they’re looking forward to 1986 (year of the Tiger) and proceeding to chunter on about the new vintages of Bordeaux and champagne and so on – leading to an outburst by the posh host’s son. An unshaven man who points out that he and his girlfriend are unemployed. They represent the new year and the anger of the tigers.
Union Jakes In the Brass Monk pub the Weber’s are discussing Britain with some Americans and the conversation somehow gets onto toilets and toilet humour and the assembled Brits make fools of themselves by trotting through the amazing gamut of slang expressions we have for toilets and crapping.

Union Jakes by Posy Simmonds (1986)

New minorities A comment on the spread of health food shops and jogging, Edmund Heep is in a cheap corner shop where his punk sons spot him and encourage him to buy a selection of crisps and buns and lollies, but when they go out onto the street we see all the other shops have become gentrified (‘Croissant Neuf’, the Natural Food Store, the Grainery, Herbalism) and it is they who are regarded as oddballs and cranks.
Senses and sensibilities A very structured strip in three rows of five pictures, the top row showing three high street shops, including clothes, burgers and records: in the next row pedestrians experience the five sense of sight (nice looking clothes), smell (of fired burgers and chips), taste (people munching burgers on the street), hearing (sounds from the record shop), touch (two women feeling nice clothes). And in the third row is the reaction of passersby to a tramp (unsightly, smelly, distasteful), a busker (unheard) and some vagrants who tell passersby to fuck off (untouchable). This is the kind of strip my daughter (aged 17) read and asked me, ‘So? What’s it meant to be about?’ Maybe Posy’s strips are an early example of ‘virtue signalling’ and reading them was meant to make you feel that, somehow, you more sensitive and caring about the homeless and squalid high streets than anyone else… all without the effort of putting down your newspaper.
The Age of REASON A television commentator reports that inhabitants of gentrified Balaclava Road are up in arms because one new incomer has stripped away all the chintzy facade of his house and restored it to being the Victorian artisans’ dwelling (which, we then learn, the entire street, despite their facades, actually consists of).
School steps Two teachers at parents’ evening discuss how there’s been a lot of them this evening, them being the parents who fuss about giving their beloved kids extra coaching and tutoring and support and so on and the punchline is that… these are all the signs of over-concerned step-parents. (This 1986 strip is notable for having a non-white person speaking, an apparently Asian male teacher.)
What Monet can buy At a house party that posh woman with the big blonde hair and twin pearl necklace we’ve met at her second home and running the Society for People With Second Homes, ribs Wendy because she’s heard Wendy is sending Bev to a private school. No no no no no insists Wendy, however can we expect to tackle inequality and improve the state system if the middle classes abandon it etc etc? But then the daughter in question reveals that she does have a private tutor and Wendy turns bright red with embarrassment.
May Day The Webers and children drive through wretched Bank Holiday traffic, the children requiring stops to throw up, everyone getting tired and angry… all to visit George’s mother in her rest home, whereupon she is subtly dismissive of all the presents they’ve brought and moans and complains. Maybe this is meant to prompt ‘the wry smile of recognition’ but I found it simply depressingly accurate.
French impressionists A funny strip in which the Webers take some French friends to the Royal Academy and, to the Webers’a amazement, the French rave about the foggy, grey, dull English climate. Really? Yes think of the great masterpieces it has produced and then… they point at some of the shops along Piccadilly showcasing the great names of British art, namely… Harris Tweed, Burberry and Barbour!
Smoke signals Bonfire night and three London neighbours have fires which pinpoint their social class: the posh Belpers are burning wood they brought back from the countryside, admittedly with one or two disposable nappies in it; the Timmises are burning an old settee and some shag pile carpet, the Webers are burning old books and magazines and theses (in a symbolic bonfire of so much of the late 60s / early 70s French intellectual content they valued and went out of date like old fruit).

Pastiches and parodies (5)

The Christmas carol Good King Wenceslas is retold with the king giving a poor collector of wood in the snow ‘Take this sovereign and this tie / This clever bar utensil / And this stilton and this pie / This matching pen and pencil’… and then the strip cuts to some moustachioed club bores telling a silly joke at a modern party.
A second cartoon features Good King Wenceslas and his rich party-goers besieged in their castle by four million unemployed for whom they have zero sympathy: ‘Don’t bore us with talk of strikes / Or your whingeing blather / Off your bums and on your bikes / And pull yourselves TOGETHER!’
Pilgrimage An extended skit which takes the opening verses of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (‘Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote, The droghte of March hath perced to the roote…’) but applies it to middle-aged, middle class people going on pilgrimage to sanctuaries and health spas.
Spring song The text is written in Simmonds’s trademark chintzy hand-written script (technically, dancing script, I think) which tells a jingle (‘As I awoke this morning, I heard a funny thing…’) which is ironically set against poor student Jocasta Wright waking, crunching around in her dingy student flat, and suddenly realising she’s late handing in her dissertation.
Household tips from the household gods Not sure it’s really a parody, but the strip is dominated by the Greek gods who give spring cleaning tips on how to clean various dirty areas round the house, like the kitchen floor or the toilet, but give up when – unexpectedly – this includes nuclear waste! A reflection, maybe, of the Chernobyl disaster (26 April 1986).

Second homes (3)

Arcadia Also a parody, two large pictures, the first showing an 18th century gentleman and wife admiring a winsome country cottage, the second in the present showing a coachload of tourists turning up to photograph the same cottage, now the second home to rich Londoners.

Old Arcadia by Posy Simmonds (1986)

Different species Rich London family enjoy walking round the cliffs near their second home identifying plants and species until, in the final frame, they enter a packed pub of locals and we are shown the latter’s thoughts, assessing their worth, calling them a blight, and figuring out how to mulch them for money doing repairs and gardening.
Turning an honest penny Tresoddit is the fictional seaside Cornish village Simmonds has invented to take the mickey out of the way the countryside is colonised by rich Londoners buying up second homes. The strip concerns Kevin Penwallet, one-time lecturer in anthropology who gave it up to open a shop in Tresoddit but has been forced to abandon all his socialist principles and reinvent it as an emporium of revoltingly twee knick-knacks for posh London mums to coo over and pay extortionate prices. Again, this isn’t funny so much as depressingly accurate.

Christmas (3)

The book opens with one big photo showing a Santa on top an open-top red bus yelling ‘Ho Ho Ho’ in the middle of an Oxford Street absolutely thronged with harassed shoppers, even the bus driver looks pissed off, and Wendy Weber is among the throng and yells up at Santa, ‘It’s NOT FUNNY.’
The book ends with a sequence of Christmas strips:
Thinking of you this Christmastide Notorious philanderer Stanhope Wright is slow coming to bed with wife Trisha. Being Christmas-time, she is thinking about all her relations, making a list of everyone she’s got to send a card to. Stanhope, by contrast, is weighed down by fears about his relations which are, of course, sexual in nature: He worries that he may have contracted a sexually transmitted disease, maybe even AIDS!!! and so runs through a list of all the women he’s had sex with – Helen after the D&AD awards, Vicki, Penny, you never know. It is typical of Simmonds to be really depressing at Christmas-time.
Edmund Heep’s problem page An oddity made up of two big pictures in which you’re asked to spot the difference – except I don’t think there were any differences. Another in which you’re asked to spot the four policemen – except I don’t think there were any policemen in it. Edmund asks three riddles, none of which I thought were funny or interesting. And then there’s a maze the reader has to navigate to help drunk Edmund back to his house.

Teenagers and the Generation Gap (3)

George and Wendy’s eldest, Belinda, is moping round the house leading the parents to worry what it could be – break-up with boyfriend? pregnant? herpes? other STDs? drink? drugs? debt? trouble with the police? general depression? But then she comes bouncing out of the loo happy and clutching a box of tampons: she’s had her period and she’s not pregnant.
Family planning Trish Wright is showing her step-daughter Jocasta photos of a family wedding tutting about the ghastly relatives. Jocasta says Don’t knock the family, it’s the cornerstone of society (echoing Thatcherite rhetoric), and then ironically goes on to point out how the young couple getting married in the photo will end up having to support a whole array of ageing relatives (as is coming true in our own time).
Hair today A young dud with stubble and a ponytail goes into a barber’s who presents him with a bewildering range of haircuts, until the dude says he needs one that will help when he goes home to see his parents to beg for money since he can’t survive on his grant.

Edmund Heep the alcoholic (3)

Good samaritans Heep is staggering home drunk in his sheepskin jacket and beer belly, and about to throw up, ignored by decent couples who pass by on the other side of the road when… he is accosted by two skinhead bovver boys who appear to be rifling through his pockets, finding £20 notes etc, but… it turns out they are looking for a 20p piece to open a nearby street lavatory. They find one, pay, help him into it, wait till he’s thrown up, then help him out and give all his money back, and walk off, two modern angels.
Giving up An ironic reversal where the appalling Edmund Heep is propping up the bar at some pub and showing off to friends how he’s cut back on smoking by making a cigarette log which he then shows them and reveals.. he’s smoked two packs already that day!
Edmund Heep’s problem page as above

Miscellaneous (4)

Live from the scene of the tragedy An odd strip devoted to satirising TV news, showing a reporter shoving his microphone in front of someone who’s just witnessed a terrible (unspecified) tragedy, asking how they feel, and the interviewee does what most of us wish they would do in these situations, which is knee the insensitive, crass reporter in the nuts, grab his microphone, and asks him how he feels now!

We bring you – live, from the scene of the tragedy… by Posy Simmonds (1986)

To a tree Wendy gets furious with the council workmen who’ve come to prune the tree in front of the house, insisting they cut the bloody thing down as it is a magnet for dog poo.
A modern alphabet 26 acronyms, starting with AIDS and going through to the Zzzz of a homeless person in a cardboard box, via CND, GBH, PLO, UB40, and VDU among others.
Two American tourists wonder just what it was that stood out most for them on their visit to Britain and trot through a set of clichés – was it the pub, the language, the history and culture, the healthy lifestyle – to each of which, as you might expect, Simmonds gives a typically depressing, downbeat ironic visual counterpoint (the language of Shakespeare is old codgers in a pub, the healthy food is sausage and mash and beans) until they conclude – depressingly – that whatever it was they sure are glad they don’t live here.

Animal liberation and vegetarianism (2)

Flying fur Unexpectedly, a strip showcasing ‘speciesism’ in the form of a selection of furry toys in a department store all complaining about how humans exploit them for food, fur, research and so on
Only connect Linked to this 1987 strip which has a straightforward vegetarian message, as the lamb joint Wendy Weber serves up to guest starts singing and dancing.

Homosexuality (1)

A kind of liberation The one and only strip about homosexuality in the strip’s ten year existence, this is an odd one about George going shopping with a gay friend and how the gay friend camping it up has ruined all the effort George has put in over the years to persuade the proletarian shopkeeper that it’s OK for men to do the shopping and the housework. I couldn’t work out if this is insulting or patronising, but I couldn’t see how it could be considered funny.

A kind of liberation by Posy Simmonds (1985)

Politics (4)

The game of happy families The one and only appearance of the dominant personality of the age, Mrs Thatcher, showing her playing a game of happy families with a vicar which is ruined when it’s revealed one of the cards has run off with his PA leaving a one-parent family to sponge on the state.
Heresies and blasphemies George and Wendy try to persuade their daughter Sophie to come on a march against nuclear dumping. the joke, such as it is, is that they present it as a duty, and Sophie resents it as a duty, which eerily echoes the pieties and sitting and standing and shuffling round which used to accompany attendance at church.
Suffering Compares the suffering of anonymous dark third World figures (war, famine, disease etc) with the suffering of the bien-pensant middle classes who read Guardian reports about it; and the real relief (food, medicine, money, water, clothes etc) is juxtaposed with the ‘relief’ felt by the Guardian-reading classes at how much they raised and donated to charity.
Consequences A surprisingly blunt and crude ‘political’ strip in comparing the fates of three drivers pulled over by the police. The rich white man talks his way out of it. The posh white woman gets off, although not without the policeman patronising her (‘Is this your boyfriend’s car?’). And then a black man driving an expensive car who doesn’t even wait for the police to ask if he’s stolen it but drives right out of the strip. Ending with the rhyme: ‘If you drive a motor car… You’ll get stopped, the chances are. But as a rule, you’ll be alright, If you’re male and posh and white.’ I found this crude, obvious and patronising, especially from a writer who includes no black or Asian or ethnic minority characters in any of her strips. In fact, the black man in this strip appears to be the only black person who speaks in any of the ten years of Posy Simmonds’ cartoon strips and his role is – to get into trouble with the police. Can’t help feeling Simmonds deals in stereotypes which are as patronising and clichéd as anything you’d find in the Sun or Daily Telegraph but just that they’re the patronising stereotypes of her tribe.

The end of the Webers (2)

Cutting the cord At a barbecue George sees his grown-up daughter Belinda in a huddle with notorious philanderer Stanhope Wright and thinks she must be propositioning him. In fact she is asking if he will ‘give her away’ at the big traditional wedding she’s planning to have, since her ‘principled’ feminist father refuses to.
Wedding party politics A strip describing Belinda’s marriage to options trader Mr Alistair Razer-Dorke, humorously profiling all the relatives and guests in terms of their party politics. In fact the wedding is an opportunity for Simmonds to review the key characters she’s created and whose company readers have kept over the previous ten years – and to say GOODBYE. The Posy strip’s time was up.

Thoughts

I showed my teenage, feminist daughter this book and she surfed through a dozen or so strips before handing it back saying she didn’t find anything in it funny in it, the opposite. She said she felt she was being nagged or scolded – a common enough feeling for readers of the Guardian, which after all is targeted at self-flagellating liberals who feel guilty because they’re not doing enough about sexism and racism and homophobia and Islamophobia and the environment etc.

Some of the Posy strips are funny, but many of them rely on this mood or attitude – of taking a perverse pleasure in being told off or lectured or harangued. Of course the reader feels that, because they are being told off, they somehow rise above the guilt and responsibility for all the wrongs and injustice of the world. As if being nagged and lectured, cleanses and absolves you. As if, by reading a bitter comic strip about homelessness, and tutting and tsking about it, you have in any way whatsoever ameliorated the problem of homelessness.

It’s a peculiar psychological state, this state of recognition of some social ill, without any kind of proposal for what to do about it – and it is much the most frequent feeling you experience at the end of reading a strip, far more so than humour or comedy.

But the real story of the book is the way the Webers with their polytechnic-level, woolly soft liberal socialism and feminism and vegetarianism and permissive attitudes and touchy-feely concern about society and everyone less well-off than themselves had lived far beyond their sell-by date.

The strip had become stuck in that world, a world which had become a small island, a leftover of faded 1960s ideas, while the big wide world outside had moved on into a violent schizophrenic situation, caught between the millions thrown onto the dole, especially in the North of England and Wales, by the wide-ranging devastation of British industry, symbolised by the Miners’ Strike of 1984-5 (not referred to anywhere) – while down in London, the City and related service industries of advertising and TV and publishing had never had it so good, with money cascading out from bankers’ bonuses into holiday homes, and new fashions for clothes and music and foreign holidays, while the escalating tension between the superpowers gave even the most stoic sleepless nights.

Not much of this, the drastically changing national mood, could be captured in the Webers’ homely little world, which is why it was the right decision to kiss them goodbye. And why I admire the cleverness with which Simmonds did it, the book climaxing in the highly symbolic marriage between the Webers’ own daughter, go-getting daughter Belinda – who had repeatedly repudiated and criticised their narrow old views – and rich, posh, public school City banker, Alistair Razer-Dorke.

Simmonds did, in fact, return to writing a weekly cartoon strip for the Guardian for the year 1992-3, and the Webers and a few other characters do, in fact, make a few scattered cameo appearances in it – but it was entirely the right decision for her to end the Weber strip in 1987 and move on to other projects and new perspectives.

Credit

All Posy Simmonds cartoons are copyright Posy Simmonds. All images are used under fair play legislation for the purpose of analysis and criticism. All images were already freely available on the internet.

Other Posy Simmonds reviews

Posy Simmonds: A Retrospective @ the House of Illustration

Pick of Posy by Posy Simmonds (1982)

Wendy Weber, a former nurse married to verbose polytechnic sociology lecturer George Weber, and mother of a brood of six children, ranging from little Benji to teenage glamour-puss Belinda
Jo Heep, married to tedious, drunk whisky salesman Edmund Heep, and mum to two rebellious teenagers who’ve adopted the punk look
Trish Wright, married to philandering advertising executive Stanhope Wright, mother of a young baby

Throughout the period the cartoons were periodically gathered together into books, namely:

Mrs Weber’s Diary (1979)
True Love (1981)
Pick of Posy (1982)
Very Posy (1985)
Pure Posy (1987)

And these books were themselves gathered together into a huge compendium volume, Mrs Weber’s Omnibus which was published in 2012 and now appears to be the only way to get hold of the cartoons.

Pick of Posy is the second in the series of collections, given that True Love was a one-off ‘graphic novel’, loosely based on the schoolgirl crush of one of the characters, Janice Brady, for a regular cast member, tall, suave philandering advertising executive Stanhope Wright. The most obvious aspects of the book are:

– it is twice the length of Mrs Weber’s Diary, at getting on for 90 pages

– the diary format which dominated the first book has been dropped, allowing the strips to stand on their own

– the drawing has changed and improved; the earliest cartoons from the previous book were sometimes drawn with a very heavy, thick outline; in Pick of Posy the lines are thinner, more subtle

– and accompanying this there is a noticable increase in the amount of background detail in the frames. Some cartoonists leave the frames almost empty except for the human characters. Simmonds’s frames are stuffed with detail of an almost photographic realism.

Compare and contrast the almost children-book simplicity of a very early cartoon, most of the frames having a simple white background:

With the style of only a few years later, which is stuffed with minutely catalogued and realistic details, designed to reinforce the mood and meaning of the text.

Class distinctions

Surfing the net around Simmonds I came across an American blogger who said that for a long time he didn’t understand Posy Simmonds cartoons at all. He didn’t get what they were about, they just seemed so British, with no real humour in them. Then one particular strip gave him a Eureka moment and made him realise that Simmonds’s cartoons are predominantly about class, about the thousand tiny subtle markers of class and class distinctions which the British obsess about and which are so opaque or invisible to outsiders. That was the key, and from that point onwards he was able to understand and appreciate them.

I think this is a massive insight. It explains why the strips are almost all talk or thought bubbles, rather than actions or events. Because it is via thoughts and dialogue and words and concepts that the subtle distinctions of class which are Simmonds’s meat and drink are expressed.

But I think you can extend the insight. Her cartoons are not only about class. Age and gender are also dominant themes:

Gender in the form of the familiar sex war in which countless women feel they are the hard-done-by, downtrodden, stay-at-home-mums, or harassed working mums, or young women wolf-whistled in the street, or leered over at work by lecherous middle-aged men.
Age in the obvious way that the concerned liberal Weber couple have a teenage daughter, Belinda, who has become a punk, goes out with leather-clad bikers, and generally rebels against everything her parents held sacred, as do the two punk sons of alcoholic whiskey salesman Edmund Heep. The presence of these two types of teenage rebellion (one female, the other male) allows Simmonds to make countless jokey observations about the gap between the idealistic 60s generation and the nihilistic 70s generation.

This line of thinking helps explain why the strips are not about broad humour, or puns or boom-boom punchlines, but are concerned with a thousand subtle, acute observations on the differences of class and age and gender which permeate British society and, in particular, which divide the so-called middle classes into scores of sub-tribes or groups.

Mundane subject matter

It explains why so much of the subject matter – what is happening in the strips – is extremely mundane and everyday: it is not the events which are interesting, it is the way they spark divergent responses in this or that middle class tribe, divides men’s responses from women’s, the overly-concerned liberal parents from their spotty stroppy kids.

The wry smile of recognition

It explains why even her strongest fans tend to use words like ‘wry’ and ‘dry’ about her humour, which are code for something which is obviously not serious but also is not trying to prompt laughter. Instead I think the central aim or effect of her cartoons is to trigger recognition: her readers read a strip and nod their heads and think – ‘Yes, I know that sort of angry mum, or leery businessman, or stroppy teenager’. They give you a wry smile of recognition.

It’s the same kind of wry smile that is prompted by her clever-clever references to famous paintings, or use of pastiche elements like suddenly accompanying the strip with the worlds of an Elizabethan song, or slipping into the style of 1950s True Romance magazines.

All the elements – recognition of social types, recognition of their precise class position, recognition of clever cultural references – are designed to make you nod and think, ‘Yes, I get it; very clever’.

Humour

Where there is humour in the strips, beyond the wry smile of recognition, it is most often expressed in ironic reversals – when an exasperated mother, or concerned parents, or adulterous man, set out with one intention and then find themselves ironically frustrated, or (very often) outsmarted by their children or rivals or would-be targets.

A good example is Peaceful twilight years where George’s Aunt Weber comes to stay and is sitting comfortably in front of the television when she starts saying ’89’, repeatedly. George and Wendy look at each other and then have a sotto voce conversation about how the old lady’s going gaga, and Wendy very patronisingly asks if that’s her age. To which Winny shocks her and the reader by replying that, No, 89 is the number of violent TV deaths she’s seen so far this month. ‘They say today’s children see over 10,000 TV murders by the time they’re 15… I’ve seen over 120,000.’ Now that is quite funny.

Or Happy families where Paul and Emma Standish have come round to George and Wendy’s for Sunday lunch and afterwards one of their little kids starts drawing on Wendy’s wall and then on the sofa so Wendy gives her a light smack which leads to an enormous argument and debate about the rights and wrongs of smacking – the comic punchline comes as the strip cuts away to the other kids playing quietly on the floor, one of whom says: ‘It always ends in tears.’

Themes

I tried to do a one-sentence summary of some of the strips just to record what they’re actually about:

Spotlight on beauty Wendy buys new wall lights, fits them herself but is then horrified when they spotlight the mess, damp and chaos in her kitchen
Happy ever after George and Wendy take the mickey out of all the merchandising surrounding the Royal Wedding, which prompts their teenage daughter Belinda to complain that they’re always belittling things and mocking romance, at which point George and Wendy say they’re just as much in love as ever, which prompts Belinda and the other kids to go ‘Eurgh, GROSS!‘
Sunday TV Wendy, her mum and the little kids are watching a TV documentary about lions in Africa which includes scenes of them mating, which prompts her mum to whisper, in French so the kids don’t understand, that they ought to turn it off – so they turn it off and draw the kids’ attention to their two pet rabbits in their cage, but when the adults have left, the kids notice that the rabbits are also mating and -m in an ironic payoff – one of the older kids parodies their grandma by saying ‘Ooh la la, Keith! Pas devant les enfants!’ because, of course, being good middle-class children they do of course understand French.
Mea culpa Wendy is in the basement kitchen of the Weber household when she sees a man walking a dog which is doing a poo right outside. She rushes up and out the door to berate him, but he tells her a long shaggy dog story about how the dog was foisted on him by his ailing mother-in-law and he thinks its behaviour is awful, but what can you do? On and on, until it is Wendy who feels abashed and ashamed of herself.
Hawks and doves Dominic’s parents are giving a dinner party but the little so-and-so, in his pyajamas, runs around the dinner table shouting and making a fuss and tugging his mums’ skirt: in their minds the guests divide neatly into hawks, who would give him a good smack, and doves, who thinks he is just over-tired and needs attention. The strip ends with his father picking him up at which point he becomes calm and docile, and his long-suffering mother looking daggers at her husband who seems able to mollify their son so effortlessly.

Piggy bank George joins everyone else staring at a man who is walking through the street effing and blinding, George goes in to see his bank manager who gives him a hard time about bank security and needing to verify his identity, until George emerges onto the street doing exactly the same kind of effing and blinding as the man the strip started with.
Higher education In the Polytechnic canteen on the first day of the new academic year, we see all the staff moaning and worrying.
Exchange of views The Dean of the Polytechnic where George works needs to shed some staff and so is shown soft-soaping George and several other old-timers, telling them now is the time to take early retirement, write that book they’ve always wanted to, pick up work as a consultant and so on…

Exchange of views by Posy Simmonds (1980)

Identity parade A visiting lecturer at the Poly is introduced to George who recognises him and takes a moment to review where they’ve met – was it at the Uni of Essex in the 60s, at hippy rallies in Hyde Park, at fashionable beatnik cafés, or attending R.D. Laing’s fashionable lectures on psychiatry. Then the penny drops. God, no, it was when they were both in the army doing their national service at Oswestry and the visitor was corporal to George’s private.
Clouds of glory A split-screen strip in which George visits the GP because of something up with his poo – on one side the doctor tells him he only weeks to live, all his relatives tearfully come and see him and after his death his magnum opus is published and given a rave review in the Time Literary Supplement; on the other side exactly the same sequence of events leads up to the doctor telling George that, from the state of a sample of faeces he’s given him, George has been eating too much beetroot!
Urbs and rus Stanhope and wife Trisha are at their second home in the country and Stanhope pontificates about how his knowledge of country matters and nature is infinitely superior to their neighbour, farmer Pearcey, who is not a real farmer and just makes a mint renting his and to a caravan park. All of which Mr Pearce unfortunately overhears, putting Stanhope in his place with the witty riposte: ‘As the man said, we must all cultivay notre jardin, eh?’
THE DENTIST A couple of surreal strips in which Trish Stanhope visits an Australian Marxist dentist who, in effect, hears her embarrassed confession about how she’s not as left-wing and right-on as she ought to be, what with the second home and the cleaner and the private school for the little ones…
Rustic blues Stanhope takes a country neighbour of his, another Londoner who bought up a disused railway station and has renovated it and moans about how he can’t ingratiate himself with the locals to the local pub where – they discover it is packed to the rafters with Londoners down for the weekend and treating the locals to fancy tipples and fags.
Home is where the heart is Stanhope drives the family down to his lovely country cottage, singing the praises of the countryside all the way – until he opens a letter waiting for him to discover it is a summons to jury service, at which point he explodes that he’s going to be stuck in this ‘one-eyed dump’ for weeks! (The insult ‘one-eyed’ applied to a remote village will recur in the graphic novels Gemma Bovery and Tamara Drewe.)
Angles and Saxons Stanhope and Trisha Wright are enjoying a picnic in the country with their step-daughter Jocasta, who has brought along her middle-aged boyfriend, an expert in graphs. When a motorbike roaring by sputters to a halt, the boyfriend shows Jocasta a series of graphs based on the likelihood of Stanhope giving the rider a bollocking. But to everyone’s surprise Stanhope is intimidated by the biker, and ends up wishing him well. Much to the chagrin of Stefan the graph-expert. And Jocasta’s punchline to the strip is: ‘Stefan has always believed that British middle class behaviour goes out of its way to defy rational explanation.’ Not that funny.

Always welcome Typically English middle-class, envenomed restraint, when Trish and Stanhope welcome Jocasta home to say, and then find themselves lumbered with putting up middle-aged Stefan – going out of their way to make a nice diner for im, and making up the sofa bed with pillows and a duvet – and then retiring to their own bedroom to fret and criticise and disapprove.
A room of one’s own Jocasta in her freezing, scruffy student flat at Christmas.
Christmas Christmas is a recurrent theme in all the books. Simmonds hates Christmas, all the fol-de-rol and pretending. So the Christmas strip in this book kicks off with Wendy and Trish traipsing through the West End past gaudily decorated shops lamenting which pack of ghoulish relatives are coming to stay this year – but then both notice little Benji cooing over the shop window decorations and Wendy ends up thinking: ‘It’s all a terrible expense… but still… it is Christmas… & one has to do it for the children, after all…’
Wish you were here The Christmas Day cartoon is one big picture of Jocasta in bed in her filthy flat, smoking and reading a book surrounded by dirty dishes and fag packets and food wrappers, imagining the polite family Christmas Stanhope and Trish are having with some in-laws who they politely loathe and how everyone is getting on each other’s nerves in that repressed, English way.
Lonely heart The thoughts of an Action Man doll who is horrified when his owner’s big sister starts dressing her Barbie doll in the Action Man clothes and putting her in his tank etc.
Wendy’s mum comes to stay and insists on doing all the washing up and chores and dusting and cleaning the loo and Wendy is hugely relieved when she finally leaves!
Consumers In post-Christmas mode George and Wendy watch ads on TV and George way over-analyse them in terms of ‘reification’ and ‘heuristics’.
Perpetuum immobile One big clever cartoon showing alcoholic Edmund Heep propping up the bar at his local and buying drinks for everyone, with his tiresomely cheerful banter.
All systems go showing the brand new regional office of International Brewhouse Inc empty, as the designers designed it, and then full of boozy male middle-managers after work, with harassed secretaries having to cover for them. Men, eh!
The silent 3 introducing Edmund Heep’s two sons who are safety-pinned, spiky-haired punks, and their mate arguing and swearing at each other all the time.

The silent 3: Gather ye rosebuds shows the three punks hanging out, threatening passersby and ogling passing birds, only to reveal at the end that young Jules, occasionally, in the privacy of his own home… can be quite sweet to his old parents, buying his mum a gardening book and his dad a tie.
Settlers Quite a funny strip in which George and Wendy are round the house of a friend who’s done up a house in a remote and derelict area, all the language leading you to believe they’re talking about the remote countryside until… they step outside and you realise the house is in n area of abandoned urban wasteland.
Happy families Paul and Emma Standish have come round to George and Wendy’s for Sunday lunch and afterwards one of their little kids starts drawing on Wendy’s wall and then on the sofa so Wendy gives her a light smack which leads to an enormous argument and debate about the rights and wrongs of smacking – the comic punchline comes as the strip cuts away to the other kids playing quietly on the floor, one of whom says: ‘It always ends in tears.’
An unnamed strip which ironically takes tropes to do with spring, and singing birds and buds breaking through to…. show that these daffodils are blooming in the foetid flat of Jocasta Wright where they start coughing and choking.
True confessions Stanhope and his wife Trish are weekending at their cottage, but when Stanhope beings tentatively to tell his wife about his latest fling (they have an open marriage) she gets cross and shouts that she’s not his Mother Confessor. She decides to invite ‘the Dixons’ over although this requires a complex set of instructions as they’re two hours from London. In counterpoint to Trish’s directions Stanhope draws an imaginary maze which would lead Trish to discovering him, Stanhope, in bed with his latest floozy.
Angles of incidence Stanhope is in the lift with his mother when he starts making eyes at a pretty young thing who makes eyes back at him. Stanhope’s mother spots it and treads in his feet interrupting the flow of sexual enticement, saying as she helps him limp from the lift: ‘I thought we’d had quite enough of ETERNAL TRIANGLES, Stanhope.’
The conversation piece Jocasta and her dad, Stanhope, are hanging out in the airport departure lounge because the plane to take them on their skiing holiday is delayed. Stanhope, as is his wont, starts chatting up another middle-aged woman, which Jocasta listens to for a bit and then suddenly stands up and announces to the entire lounge that she is his mistress which leads to a massive picture showing all the passengers in the lounge commenting on this revelation in a rich mix of European languages.
Bitter sweets Trish is shopping at the supermarket when little Willy spots sweets at the checkout counter and starts wailing, crying, screaming for them. The mum she’s with sympathises and a chorus of other women all give their opinions about how to manage – when Trish just smacks Willy, he stops crying in surprise, and she buys him the sweets anyway.
Peaceful twilight years George’s Aunt Weber comes to stay and is sitting comfortably in front of the television when she starts saying ’89’, repeatedly. George and Wendy look at each other and then have a sotto voce conversation about how the old lady’s going gaga, and Wendy very patronisingly asks if that’s her age. To which Winny shocks her and the reader by replying that, No, 89 is the number of violent TV deaths she’s seen so far this month. ‘They say today’s children see over 10,000 TV murders by the time they’re 15… I’ve seen over 120,000.’ Now that is quite funny.
Perspectives Over dinner George, Wendy and a beardy socialist friend discuss the issues of the day – the arms race, collapse of detente, nuclear war, the economy, nationalism, pollution, destruction of the ozone layer, unemployment… Later than night George has a nightmare but, in ironic counterpoint to all these big weighty subjects, his subconscious is harassed by worries that his library books are three weeks overdue, he might be getting Wendy’s cold, and that something’s dropped off the car.
A dog’s life A split screen narrative in which a colleague of George’s at the Poly – Pierce – goes through a typical day, nicking George’s parking space, trying it on with a secretary, criticising George and the other lefties for being so soft, nicking the office projector and so on. In the parallel set of pictures we see the adventures of Pierce’s dog during the day, the doggy equivalent of all Pierce’s actions. Except that at the end of the day Pierce gets home late to a chilly reception from his wife, while the dog gets home to be embraced and rewarded.
Sharing George gets home from a draining day to find that Wendy has done all the chores even though it’s ‘his’ turn .He gets quite cross, explaining that he wanted to do the shopping, cooking, cleaning and washing up and her having done it has left him feeling deprived. ‘It was MY TURN to feel really OPPRESSED.’
No smoking George takes the train and is driven mad by the loud sounds all the other passengers make, listening to the radio, eating an apple, slurping a cup of tea etc.
Bon brush George is cleaning the toilet while Wendy goes out to night class, but his cleaning conjures up a genii, a middle-aged woman of a genii who proceeds to be shocked that he’s doing the housework and insists a woman’s place is in the home and a load of other sexist cant, so that George pushes her back into the toilet, rams the lid down and flushes it.
Il Fondo George and Wendy go to the cinema to see an Italian movie. George drifts off and is thinking about new sheets for the bed, when the characters proceed to strip off and (presumably) have sex, at which George goes all red in the face and… notices Wendy looking at him. Oops, quick, time to hide that male sex drive. So he readjusts his thoughts until he is condemning the film as ‘appalling, horribly sexist, revolting and exploitative.’ When he hurriedly tells Wendy all this as they leave the cinema she smiles and agrees. Phew.
Cheers In a pub some leery businessman spends the entire strip chatting up the young woman they’ve promoted to management, patronising and insulting her about how pretty she is, until the woman throws her drink over the guy and storms out, leaving him spluttering: ‘There! See! What have I always said – they’re IRRATIONAL… EMOTIONAL… & completely UNPREDICTABLE.’
Uneasy riders George and Wendy’s daughter is a stunningly sexy teenager who wears tight clothes, low tops and is going out with a motorcycle courier. Off she zooms and George and Wendy tut tut and reminisce about their heady days in the 1950s, going by scooter to a cool coffee bar and onto the Royal Court theatre.
The natural order Wendy drops little Benji off with one of her neighbours and is appalled to hear the mum telling her boy that he has to be a doctor and the daughters that they have to be nurses. Sexist stereotyping! In fact as soon as the adults have gone this is exactly what the little girls do, playing with their dolly and not letting Benji get a look in. But when they hear the grown-ups returning, the girls give the doll to Benji and tell the admiring Wendy that he’s been a nurse while one of the girls has been acting a mother and brain surgeon. In other words, they know how to play Wendy’s politically correct prejudices. And this is 1979, 40 years ago!
Well known facts Another split strip concept, where the children are walking back from school telling each other things their mums have told them like, if you step on the cracks a bear will get you, or if you swallow apple pips a tree will grow in your tummy. This is ironically counterpointed by the mums’ conversations which are all about ‘my mum says’ and ‘my doctor told me’ and ‘my architect friend said’ and so on. Moral: we never really grow up.
Art gallery George takes his kids to an art gallery and delivers long high-falutin lectures about the politico-historical realities behind each painting, while the kids yawn and want to leave. I think the joke is that their regular Sunday morning visits, complete with lecture, are identical in format to the kind of preachy sermonising George and Wendy hated about the church their parents took them to.
Temptation’s way Belinda Weber goes into town on the tube wearing an extraordinarily sexy black leather figure-hugging outfit and thinks she’s being touched up in the tube carriage. Instead it is a feminist who has covered her with stickers saying ‘This garment exploits women’.
Daily dose Jocasta Wright catches the tube and looks at all the images and stories about women in the papers and magazines the commuters are reading, leading to a large cartoon of ‘the Seven Ages of Media Women’
A Messy Business Jocasta is walking down the street when she steps in some dog poo, then catches up with a dog on a leash and stares daggers at it, imagines killing it, imagines it dead, imagines the newspaper headlines about herself being a dog killer, and so walks past the dog, smiling cheesily at it. The dog says ‘Chicken’ to her.
Promises, promises A female friend insists on showing Wendy the photos from Sue’s wedding. Every single one involves someone who is divorced or splitting up or remarrying. By the time they get to the photo of the happy bride, and her friend comments that they’re getting married rather young, Wendy sardonically comments, don’t worry: ‘It’s just a PHASE she’s going through.’
L’après-midi d’une divorcée A divorced mum is waiting for her husband to come and collect the kids. The delay allows her to work herself into a frenzy of anger and frustration at him so that when he finally knocks on the door, she opens it holding her child dressed as a cowboy who demands, ‘Your money or your life, Daddy.’
Theory and practice is another split screen, on one side the successive stages of a happy and equable divorce, on the other side a set of mathematical equations depicting an extremely fractious and rancorous divorce.
How the other half lives A divorced woman phones her ex-husband imagining him snug in a big bed with his dishy new girlfriend. In fact he is living in a sad bedsit surrounded by rubbish, and is imagining her living in domestic bliss with happy kids stroking the pet labrador. They’re both angry and deluded.
Company loves misery At a smart house party a group of women bill and coo over a male friend of theirs who’s recently got divorced. But when he turns up in the company of the stunning young fox, Belinda Weber, their giggly fondness turns to bitterness and spite.
Going solo Wendy phones a friend of hers who’s recently got divorced, Ellen, a creator of hand-crafted wooden house signs. Ellen goes to great lengths to tell Wendy how happy she is to be single, to be living by herself, to be free, not to be dominated by some man. But after Wendy hangs up. Ellen bursts into bitter tears.
Putting the bootee in At a nice house party Nigel, married with two kids, deduces that single Avril earns three times what he does, and start chatting her up, without realising how patronising and sexist he is being. Finally, his heavily pregnant wife comes to collect him and he manages to really anger her by thoughtlessly remarking: ‘Y’know… I really admire women like that, who make something of their lives’, implying that his wife, by ‘merely having babies, has wasted hers.
Rich desserts Tow mums are visiting. Christine has a small baby. the other mums bills and coos and makes an enormous fuss over baby, talking horrible baby talk and putting her up on her shoulder where… the baby proceeds to be copiously sick, much to the first mums’ amusement.
Mother knows best Trish is taken out for tea by her mother-in-law, Stanhope’s mother, who proceeds to lecture her about how a mother ought to be at the beck and call of her children, nothing is too good for them… until she spies a mother across the restaurant breast-feeding her baby, at which point she is overcome with disgust and disapproval… much to Trish’s ill-concealed glee.
The shape of things to come A joke reveal strip – in which we meet George, Wendy and other parents in the kitchen catering to a raucous party, complaining about the guests, the gatecrashers, throwing up behind the flowers, dancing lasciviously and then… the final big picture reveals that they’re supervising a party not of adults but of 11-year-olds making themselves sick on fizzy drinks and chocolate and gyrating to pop music whose sexy lyrics they can’t possibly understand.
At Tobit’s fourth birthday party the well-dressed hostess explains that she simply couldn’t do without her wonderful au pair, Lizzie, who looks after the kids, arranges everything, makes it possible for swish mum to have a jet-setting career. But then she says wonderful Lizzie is leaving her to go and study in America at which all the other mums say, How awful, How dreadful, Oh poor you etc. And then, a second later, realise that they’re saying that the academic success of this woman Lizzie is dreadful… at which point they all rush to correct themselves, How simply wonderful for her etc.
Tres snub George and Wendy attend a party of appalling snobs and social climbers at Mrs Brinsley Bowe’s bijou residence, which George regards as excellent field work into ‘a discourse of totemic bricolage’.
An acid experience Old friend of George and Wendy’s, American ethno-botanist is staying and is thrilled to meet ferociously sexy Belinda and her cool, shaded boyfriend. Hair-banded, hairy old hippy Frisbee tries to co-opt them into his memories of rebellion and the summer of love, giving them a big bear hug and proclaiming Love, man – while the two youngsters have thought bubbles with KILL in big letters.
Sex’n’drugs Wendy worries that Belinda is going out in a very low-cut top which reveals her boobs, but Belinda tells her to calm down, she’s not having sex or taking drugs, like her old hippy parents did at her age.

Pupa power Wendy is round a fellow mum’s who begins criticising some fiml or TV programme for being sexist and her teenage kids start taking the mickey out of her: ‘Sexism! sexism! That’s all you talk about’ which sets the mum off ranting about how she’d hoped to bring up two kids to share her liberal values but appears to have raised ‘two SLUGS who lie about chewing holes in everything I stand for.’
The joke strip where Jocasta and another girl have gone for a day’s sketching in the countryside accompanied by two of their male tutors. When the old tutors criticise the cynicism of the t-shirts the girls are wearing Jocasta spontaneously takes hers off, and then her jeans (made in South Africa) and then her trainers (made in a Latin American dictatorship) and then her panties (made from multi-national man-made fibre) – until she is sitting naked next to the two clothed men in a pastiche of the famous Manet painting, Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe.

Manners Friends go and stay at Stanhope and Trisha’s country cottage and at the end of the weekend tell him what a divine time they had, slept like logs, simply the best… then spend the entire drive back to London complaining how ghastly it was.
Loss and profit Benji steals George’s car keys and hides them in the garden. George gets angry with him at which point Wendy intervenes to coax Benji and offer him sweets. At which point Benji confesses where he hid them and is rewarded. So that he learns that crime really does pay.
L’Étranger George and Wendy are on the beach in the south of France, very white and pasty among the bronzed foreign bodies. Wendy begins to take her bikini off but then is overcome with doubts, prompting George to explain to the other beach occupiers, in his bad French, that they are not embarrassed about going naked, it’s just that the day before they got sunburn on their naughty bits.
A little turbulence The insufferably good-humoured drunk Edmund Heep is on a holiday flight which runs into really bad turbulence during which all the passengers beg God that they’ll mend their ways if only the plane survives.
Jocasta and friends are hitch-hiking through France and are eating at a seafood restaurant when they can’t helping the noisy Germans and (as usual) the braying confident upper middle class Brits telling their kids how to crack and eat lobster claws, leading Jocasta to bubble-think a parody of the poster for Jaws called Claws in which a giant lobster reaches upto munch the all-unwary swimmer.
Edmund and Jo Heep have gone on holiday to a hotel in England where they are embarrassed by their obnoxious punk teenage sons until… Julian gets the letter with his O-level results proclaiming that he’s got all nine, and his parents, the waitress and even the other guests are all full of approval and admiration.
All good gifts around us As the time of the Harvest Festival approaches the curate has been canvassing goods to display at the church and tells the vicar the middle classes have been most generous of all… but then reveals all the gifts are pies and cakes and quiches which come from their freezers. Quite why this is funny or satirical or has point eludes me.
The last days of peace A broad satirical strip which appears to take the Conservative Party election victory as the pretext for thinking that The Great War Against Inflation is coming in which creches and daycare centres and hostels for the old and so on will all close down, women will be forced back into the kitchen and men will go to the front to fight inflation. It seemed an arch, strained and unfunny allegory which ends with a pastiche of the famous poster with a child sitting on her father’s knee asking, ‘Daddy what did you do during the war?’
Zuppa Inglese George takes his two eldest daughters out for an Italian meal and grows increasingly irritated as the waiters hover round the two nubile glamour pusses like flies on poo, until he snaps and tells them to leave them alone. The comedy derives from the fact that George tries to explain that his daughters are not sex objects to be objectified, while the Italian maitre d’ entirely misinterprets him, rereading George’s anger as being like traditional Italian protectiveness towards his womenfolks’ ‘honour’ – and the more worked up George becomes, the more the Italian staff respect his machismo and old-fashioned sense of honour.
Facts of life At a summer dinner in the garden the kids innocently ask their parents where babies come from and George gives a factually accurate account of wombs and sperm while Wendy talks about love and romance – and then all the adults overhear the kids repeating this garbled version of misinformation.
Sweet sorrow Her mother is taking little Katya to nursery school for the first time and the little girl cries with apprehension while the mum reassures her about all the good things and games and friends she’ll meet. Having left her little girl there, the mum comes away upset and crying and Wendy repeats to her all the advantages and pluses which we have just heard the mum reassuring Katya with.
Listen with mother Wendy takes her smallest children to the local art gallery where she is in the middle of explaining what the Camden Town School of artists was trying to achieve when she looks up and realises she’s attracted quite a crowd of adult listeners.
A divided self At the offices of Beazeley and Buffin Jocasta shows Stanhope the artwork for a new beauty product which features an impossibly dishy model and, while Stanhope describes in words the numerous ‘feminine’ qualities the product is meant to symbolise, Jocasta does ironic dances and pirouettes round the office, ending up tied up in knots, almost as if… a sexist, patriarchal society places impossible demands on women.
Vigilance Jocasta is visting a friend and when it comes time to leave, the friend says she’ll accompany her to the busstop and on the way they discuss how ten years after Liberation women are still not safe to walk the streets at night, all the time aware that a sinister figure is following them through the dark alleys and slowly gaining on them who is… eventually revealed to be the friend’s dad who was concerned and has been following all the time to make sure they’re OK.
This sporting life Relatives pop in to visit the Heep family who, we learn, live in a semi under the motorway flyover. The relatives try to make the most of Edmund’s two unprepossessing punk sons who cadge a fiver off them on the pretext that they’re going on a sponsored run. Five minutes later the punks walk back in and when the surprised relative asks why it was such a short run, the punks take off their leather jackets to reveal t-shirts with the slogan ‘Sponsored Motorway Dash’ – they run from one side to the other dodging the traffic.
Breath of a salesman TV reporter Gareth french pops into the castle and Ball for a quick one but is accosted by the unbearable Edmund Heep who proceeds to breathe foul pickled onion and scotch egg fumes all over him.
Piggy in the middle Benji has a cold so Belinda is reading him a storybook about rich pigs and poor pigs, but Wendy interrupts and criticises the book for having such appalling stereotypes in it such as the mummy pig being in the kitchen cooking all the time and – this being a cartoon – the piggy character start arguing back against Wendy’s political correctness during all of which bickering… Benji has happily fallen asleep.
A la recherche du temps perdu Rummaging in the attic Belinda uncovers a pair of fading hippy jeans which revolt her but Wendy explains how it was hand patched and festooned with logos and peace signs and so on, and lectures Belinda that they were the generation who cared… Yeah, and who ‘ROTTED the FABRIC of SOCIETY’ thinks Belinda, with her Lady Di haircut and Thatcherite values.
Sheep and goats Sitting on a crowded bus Wendy and a load of other passengers are forced to put up with the ranting of a scuzzy old bigot raving against immigrants, and reds, and long-haired scroungers, and bloody feminists taking our jobs… until the conductor tells him there’s no standing room and he’ll have to get off. At which point Wendy nervously says ‘what a horrible old man’ and then, in the dead silence, realises that everyone else on the bus agreed with him.
They’re never ever satisfied Wendy is buying presents for all the kids in a toyshop ad when she gets to the till the middle-aged teller is at first all sweetness and light about watching their little faces light up until… she suddenly lets her guard down and reveals how much she loathes Christmas and thinks modern children are spoiled, after all she never had a paint box, she was never given a brand new bike at Christmas, she…
Showing off Wendy is off studying while George looks after the kids who beg him to make robin costumes for the school’s Christmas play or they’ll be the only ones without a costume. George piously thinks that going that extra mile, doing those little extra tasks, is what true equality is all about and so dutifully runs up two beautiful robin costumes. Only to attend the performance and realise that his two kids are the only ones with robin outfits and overhear other mums in the audience tut-tutting that some parents really do have too much time on their hands.
Perquisites Jocasta goes to the office of her dad, Stanhope, hoping to cadge some Christmas money but instead marvelling at the array of luxury goods he’s been sent by various clients, which are listed in special folksy Christmas font as in the song the twelve days of Christmas. Jocasta points out how fattening or toxic (cigars) they are and ironically wishes her dad ‘a Merry Cholesterol’.
Jocasta gives us her view of Christmas, a jaded cynical view which appears to be Simmonds’s since it appears in all her books, a time of boozy pub goers, and cash till ringing up phenomenal sales, and she wishes all of her relatives captious or spiteful presents, for example a lizard-skin belt for her trendy stepmother, but a size too small… etc.
In the last strip George and Wendy are in bed when they’re woken by their youngest, Benji, who has a tummy ache and wants a story. Wendy dozes listening to George’s voice reading the story but… which suddenly gives a jolt, becomes very adult, and starts talking George’s characteristic pseudo-intellectual twaddle. Sneaking downstairs Wendy is astonished to find that Father Christmas is in the front room sharing a drink with her husband.

A lot of information, isn’t it, a lot of stories? Not many are funny, most spark. at most, a wry smile of recognition. Some puzzled me with their curious lack of purpose. But there is no doubt that having read all of them carefully, you do build up quite a deep sense of the Weber family and their children and friends and circle and a slightly mocking affection for their well-intentioned foibles.

I think little Benji is my favourite character. All things considered, I think I’d like a piece of chocolate cake, a balloon and a carry home.

Credit

All images are copyright Posy Simmonds. All images are used under fair play legislation for the purpose of analysis and criticism. All images used are freely available on the internet.

Other Posy reviews

Posy Simmonds: A Retrospective @ the House of Illustration

Posy Simmonds: A Retrospective @ the House of Illustration

‘The humour tends towards the wry rather than laugh-out-loud’

I hadn’t realised she was so posh. Rosemary Elizabeth ‘Posy’ Simmonds (MBE) was born in 1945 in the Royal County of Berkshire and educated at the independent, fee-paying Queen Anne’s School in Caversham before going on to study art at the Sorbonne in Paris, and then returning to London to attend the Central School of Art & Design.

In the video interview included in the exhibition, she remembers growing up in a house full of books which included leather-bound volumes of Punch magazine, which she loved looking through from a very early age.

The exhibition includes a display case of some of the earliest sketches and drawings she did, while still a child, spoofs of 1950s glamour magazines and so on.

In 1969 Simmonds began her first daily cartoon feature, Bear, in the Sun newspaper, and she also contributed to The Times and Cosmopolitan magazine. But it was her move to the Guardian in 1972 that fully established her as an artist and social commentator.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Simmonds entertained readers and won critical acclaim with her low-key but bitingly satirical comic strips, commenting on the changing face of the English middle classes. She has worked on other newspapers and magazines, but it was her Guardian work that made Simmonds’s name.

The Silent Three

After years of contributing ad hoc and topical cartoons, in May 1977 Simmonds started drawing a weekly comic strip for The Guardian. It was initially titled ‘The Silent Three of St Botolph’s’ as a tribute to the 1950s comic strip ‘The Silent Three’ by Evelyn Flinders, and parodied the tradition of the harmless adventures of girls at precisely the kind of jolly hockey-sticks private school which she had herself attended.

The strip quickly focused on three girls in particular and contrasted their school adventures with the ongoing tribulations of their grown-up, adult selves, set in the contemporary world of the late 70s. They were:

Wendy Weber, a former nurse married to polytechnic sociology lecturer George Weber and struggling to look after a large brood of children
Jo Heep, married to alcoholic whisky salesman Edmund Heep, with two rebellious teenage sons who form a punk band
Trish Wright, in an ‘open marriage’ with philandering advertising executive Stanhope Wright, and their small baby

The Silent Three by Posy Simmonds

Posy

The strip eventually dropped the references to ‘St Botolphs’ and became known simply as ‘Posy’. It ran for ten years, from 1977 to 1987. During that period the cast of characters was expanded, as the children grew up and developed characters of their own. The strips don’t tell a consecutive narrative: each one focuses on an issue or event or slyly comic theme, and Simmonds gave herself the freedom to depart from the well-known cast altogether, as well as experiment with format and layout.

Periodically, the strip was collected into a number of books, namely:

Mrs Weber’s Diary (1979)
True Love (1981)
Pick of Posy (1982)
Very Posy (1985)
Pure Posy (1987)

The three families are distinct middle-class ‘types’; they each occupy a specific niche within the broad sprawling category we English refer to as the middle classes and the humour, such as it is, comes from the precision of Simmonds’s depiction of all the aspects of each group and their ‘set’ of friends.

But although the strip sometimes left all the known characters behind to experiment with purely political or satirical commentary, at its core were the couple of Wendy and her husband George – epitomes of the popular conception of the Guardian reader – intellectual, ex-hippie, bookish, left-wing, vegetarian and wracked by a whole raft of liberal causes – anti-sexism, anti-racism, anti-nuclear and so on.

The point is that the humour is often at their expense, Simmonds gently satirising ‘the furrowed brow of liberal guilt’, showing the thousand and one ways in which they fall short of their own high ideals. In particular, many of the strips mock the high-falutin’ modishly French intellectual ideas George is liable to bring to completely inappropriate situations, such as the choice of new kitchen blinds dinner party chat.

Consumers, a George and Wendy Weber comic strip by Posy Simmonds

The five books listed above were eventually brought together into hefty omnibus hardback edition comprising some 480 pages (Mrs Weber’s Omnibus) which makes up a fascinating and revealing social history of the bien-pensant liberals of its time.

Feminism

Alongside the regular Posy strip, Simmonds produced topical cartoons and illustrations for other publications and for one-off occasions. According to the wall label:

In her newspaper strips and graphic novels, Simmonds returns regularly to the experience of women. An affirmed feminist, she has been advocating for women’s rights since the 1970s, challenging the injustices of male privilege and sexism in the home, at work and in wider society. Simmonds’ regular contributions to The Guardian newspaper’s women’s page have enabled her to make comment on issues ranging from the judgement women face when breastfeeding to the portrayal of ‘femininity’ in advertising.

So the exhibition includes a wall of narrative cartoons satirising women’s experiences of being harassed in pubs, or walking down the street, or by leery bosses, and so on. Take this satire on the way women only ever appear in the cartoon genre as foxes, babes and sex dolls, with all other periods of women’s lives completely ignored by the genre.

Seven Ages of Woman by Posy Simmonds

Children’s books

Also during the 1980s, Simmonds turned her hand to writing, and in particular to writing children’s stories. Thus began the sequence of illustrated children’s books including:

Bouncing Buffalo (1984)
Fred (1987)
Lulu and the Flying Babies (1988)
The Chocolate Wedding (1990)
Matilda: Who Told Lies and Was Burned To Death (1991)
F-Freezing ABC (1996)
Cautionary Tales And Other Verses (1997)
Mr Frost (2001)
Lavender (2003)
Baker Cat (2004)

The exhibition includes original artwork from most of these children’s books. The illustrations to Hilaire Belloc’s classic cautionary tales show a sketchy, washed-out style a little like Edward Lear. But it was the intensely coloured illustrations of a book like Fred which I liked most.

Illustration from Fred by Posy Simmonds (1987)

Text heavy

Comparing Simmonds’s children’s illustrations with the adult ones revealed one single, central, massive difference – the amount of text.

The children’s books have almost no text and, as a result, feel light and airy. The adult strips, on the other hand, are packed with text. I thought it revealing that, at the start of the Mrs Weber Omnibus there is an extensive cast list which gives not only names but information about each of the characters’ lives, careers and interests, right down to the number of A-Levels the older children are taking.

I think this may explain why I found hardly any of the hundred of more strips on show here very funny. Certainly none of them made me laugh out loud, it’s not that kind of humour. A few of them made me smile. And it wasn’t just me: there was no audible response from any of the other visitors who shuffled around the rooms in respectful silence. The humour, as another online reviewer points out, ‘tends towards the wry rather than laugh-out-loud’.

More than that, I’d say you have to pay a lot of attention and read the text very carefully, in order to ‘get’ many of the strips – in order to notice the very slight nuances, and digs and satirical swipes at the affluent middle-class types who she so likes mocking.

The graphic novels

This becomes evident in Simmonds’s graphic novels. In 1981 she published True Love, which is an extended parody of sensational romance comics. In it the plain and mousy young Janice Brady – who we first met in the Weber strips – is working in a male-dominated publishers office and mistakenly imagines that tall blonde handsome 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 wife – but in her naive innocence Janice dreams that, if she applies enough make-up and wears the right glamour clothes – Mr Wright can be hers!

True Love by Posy Simmonds (1981)

True Love is now generally acknowledged to be Britain’s first ‘graphic novel’, although I’m not sure the genre really existed when it was written and it’s certainly not what you associate with the walls of graphic novels you can find in any bookshop nowadays.

In fact the narrative is pleasingly ‘unstable’ in the sense that it is still made up of self-contained ‘strips’ and some of them wander away from the central plot altogether to show characters from the main strip, e.g. the ever-agonising liberal George and Wendy at the cinema, and the tiresomely cheery Edmund Heep also makes some appearances.

There is a central event of sorts, which is an advertising shoot out in the country which requires the hiring of some sheep to make it look more scenic. Janice overhears Stanhope on the phone to what she thinks is his mistress, and his mention of ‘sheep’ sets off a broadly comic misunderstanding in which Janice wonders if they’re into perversion and bestiality.

On the day of the filming, Janice is sent by the crew filming the ad to find Stanhope and discovers him having a little ‘picnic’ with his pretty mistress. From her hiding place in a copse of trees Janice rolls down downhill towards the spooning couple the tin of cheese which Stanhope gave her at the firm’s Christmas party (and which has become a sort of comic totem of their love). Unfortunately the tin bounces off a tree root and hits Stanhope on the head, giving him concussion and forcing a trip to the local hospital, which he then struggles to explain to his long-suffering wife Trisha.

Anyway, 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, and the entire book mimics the genre’s exaggerated glamour, overblown prose, capital letter fonts, and the liberal use of glamour magazines’ tell-tale colour – hot pink.

It is without doubt clever, and full of subtle references (like this copying of the form’s visual style), but I rarely really found it funny. It all seemed too predictable to me. It is exactly the kind of rather obvious satire you’d expect an exasperated feminist to make. And mocking 1950s glamour magazines for being unrealistic… it’s not a difficult or novel target for satire, is it? By the 1980s.

Gemma Bovery (1999)

In the late 1990s Simmonds returned to the The Guardian with the first of what has turned into a series of graphic novels, Gemma Bovery.

Gemma Bovery is a modern, comic-strip reworking of Gustave Flaubert’s classic novel Madame Bovary. In Simmonds’s hands this becomes a satirical tale of English expatriates in France, enmeshed in divorces, whining exes, needy children and ghastly rich banker neighbours. It was published as a graphic novel in 1999 and was made into a feature film in 2014.

Given that the wall labels emphasise what a feminist Simmonds is, and how she has spent her life campaigning against sexist stereotypes, I was surprised that this long graphic novel is devoted to a fabulously slender, attractive and sexy young woman who has numerous ‘affairs’ (i.e. super-idealised, glamorous sex) with a succession of tall, handsome, slender young men. Here she is, getting it on with the tall, slender, good-looking aristocrat Hervé de Bressigny.

A lot has happened in the 18 years since True Love. Simmonds’s drawing style is infinitely more sophisticated: she can draw anything now, and the arrangement of pictures and text on the page is far more professional and effective. True Love felt like an extension of the weekly comic strip consisting, in effect, of a series of gags and comic scenes – Gemma Bovery really feels like a graphic novel.

Nonetheless, moving a few yards along the exhibition wall from one to the other, I couldn’t help being puzzled by the apparent contradiction. In 1981 true romance was despicable, unrealistic, sexist stereotyping – in 1999 it deserves a long, intensely imagined novel.

Tamara Drewe (2006)

This apparent contradiction was emphasised by the frames on display from Simmonds’s next graphic novel, Tamara Drewe. It also depicts a wide range of middle class characters who are, as usual, skewered for being pretentious, rich, snobbish, hypocritical and so on and yet, once again, the story focuses on a strikingly tall, statuesque, slender, shapely, nubile young babe, the eponymous Tamara.

The homely clunkiness of the Webers and of freckly, dumpy Janice Brady seem light years ago. The fusty little world of George and Wendy fussing about lentil soup or fretting about the introduction of business studies at the polytechnic where he teaches, have been replaced in both these graphic novels by tall, streamlined young sex goddesses living wonderful lives of affluence and foreign travel.

Tamara Drew makes her first appearance in the revised graphic novel, 2007 by Posy Simmonds

Both these novels features sexy heroines and they are about love affairs and sex and emotions. The women in them have careers, of sorts – Gemma is an interior decorator – but seem to define themselves by their relationships with men. For all the feminist rhetoric of Simmonds’s own cartoons, and of the curators’ wall labels, I couldn’t help feeling disappointed, as if earlier thoughts and beliefs had been abandoned.

Tamara Drewe debuted in the Guardian’s Review section on 17 September 2005 and ended, with episode 109 and an epilogue, on 2 December 2006. It was published as a book in 2007 and was also made into a film, starring tall, nubile young actress Gemma Arterton.

On the upside, both these graphic novels really do read like novels. I borrowed Gemma Bovery from the library, read it in one sitting and was slowly entranced. The characterisation initially felt thin and the satire of ghastly rich Brits abroad was irritating, but slowly, something deeper and more tragic genuinely emerged, and by the book’s last few pages I was absolutely gripped.

Cassandra Darke (2018)

Most recently – and in a relief from this succession of nubile young heroines – Simmonds has produced a much darker graphic novel, about a disgraced art dealer, Cassandra Darke. She’s caught selling dodgy fakes to the rich clients she despises, sentenced to community service, and then emerges almost penniless into a dark, gritty London just at Christmastime which is when the genuinely threatening sub-plot kicks in, concerning the young daughter of a friend who she lets her basement room to and who’s gotten involved with some seriously violent people, guns and drugs.

There are only three exhibition rooms in the main gallery of the House of Illustration and the entire third room was devoted to Cassandra Darke, with a book-size strip running continuously right around the wall and a set of display cases showing original artwork for the book, including early sketches of the characters, the initial paste-up sheets showing rectangles of paper with the text printed on them, glued onto the drawings – all this giving insights into how the book progressed from conception to completion.

What interested me was how distinctly darker and more pessimistic the story and the images are than anything else Simmonds has done. The Webers, back in the late 1970s, inhabited a safe and cosy world, cosy in the sense that they felt confident that good people everywhere shared their values. They were at home in what felt like a relatively benign society, everyone turned out for the annual street party or went on CND marches.

Now, forty years of feminism, identity politics, mass immigration, and neo-liberal right-wing economics later, the world feels a lot, lot, lot less friendly. It feels dark, rundown and dangerous, with vandalism, graffiti and the threat of violence on every corner.

Cassandra Darke goes to the rundown East End of London looking for clues as to the identity of the murdered young woman at the centre of the plot

What an immense distance we have travelled from the jolly hockey-sticks girls of St Botolphs. And it feels like Simmonds’s laser-sharp satirisation of changing middle-class mores has reflected every step of those socio-economic changes.

Social history

All in all, then, there are a few smiles but no laughs – I found this more of a thought-provoking exhibition than I expected.

The feminist stuff from the 70s and 80s reminds you what a horrible hairy, drunken, lecherous world it was back then. The Weber strips remind you of a whole type of knit-your-own yoghurt, ‘concerned’ and caring moustachioed polytechnic lecturers blabbing on about the nouveau roman and structuralism, who don’t seem to exist any more.

In fact the first half of the exhibition reeks of a world which is long gone. When True Love satirises the glamour images of the 1950s you can see Simmonds taking revenge on the sexist bilge she was fed as a girl, but, as a parent struggling to bring up my own teenage girl in 2019, not only the 1950s originals but also Simmonds’s 1980s satires on them, have a massively dated feel. The Weber strips feel like they could contain the threat. Satirise her characters as she did, you still had the sense their values were good, were the right ones, and would triumph.

But they didn’t. They were squashed and obliterated. Thatcherism confronted organised militant left-wing politics but what really killed that entire world of earnest, moustachioed left wingers was the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc in the early 1990s. The demise of actual socialism around the world left a huge intellectual, ideological and imaginative hole. Suddenly the underpinning for everyone on the soft or hard left just disappeared. Into this vacuum rushed Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s Third Way, slowly acclimatising all of us to the soft form of neo-conservative capitalist economics and consumer culture which we have inhabited ever since.

Thus it is that the graphic novels seem to come from a completely different world from tut-tutting George and Wendy Weber. You can see that Simmonds ceased drawing them not only because she was bored of doing the same old thing, but because their world was fading into insignificance compared to the bright and brash, shiny consumerist paradise which the 1990s promised everyone.

Gemma and Tamara – as the names suggest – come from the heart of the shiny, comfortably-off 1990s when old-style Labour politics had been obliterated and people were now making immense amounts of money ‘in the City’ or in advertising or in TV or in publishing – where the rich were buying up holiday homes around Britain and in France (where Gemma and Tamara are set) and beyond.

Certainly all of the characters in the graphic novels are comfortably off and well-heeled in a way the make-do-and-mend Weber family never was. They inhabit different imaginative universes.

So that’s why I liked the Cassandra Darke section of the exhibition most – because it is fascinating to see posh 1950s public schoolgirl Simmonds’s take on the world most of us now live in – not slender sexy heroines bonking in French chateaux – but the grisly streets of modern British cities, filled with closed-down shops, odd-looking people from all around the world speaking a babel of languages, the sense of public decay and dereliction, all contrasted with the comfortably-off art world which Cassandra inhabits and which gives her a window onto yet another world, that of the really genuinely super-rich international art collectors, the American and Russian and Arab billionaires who buy up art like they buy London properties, to add to their investment portfolios. And lurking beneath all this glitter, in the main plot of the novel, the threat of serious violence from white working class hard men.

It is a modern world where everyone is on their mobiles phones all day long, locked into their own little Facebook universes, consuming music, TV, movies and American culture like there’s no tomorrow, utterly heedless of the careful, caring values which George and Wendy devoted their lives to.

George and Wendy worried about their children showing the tiniest signs of becoming a bit materialist, and quoted French cultural critics to make snide, knowing criticisms of ‘consumer culture’. Their world has been obliterated, buried, drowned in an unprecedented global tide of mass consumption, and it is the unbridled greed and heartlessness of the modern world which Cassandra Darke conveys so well.

Illustration from Cassandra Darke by Posy Simmonds

So reading about the everyday trivial hypocrisies of the 1980s lower middle-classes, of competitive gossip in the playground – the difficulty of telling your childminder what to do without offending her, or the frustrations of stay-at-home mums or the even worse frustrations of mums who go out to work – all this was mildly entertaining. But as my cruel teenage kids would say, ‘Yeah, so what, grandad?’ They don’t give a monkeys what happened ten, twenty or thirty years before they were even born.

So I think the curators were right to devote the last room entirely to Simmonds’s most recent book. Satire, or observational cartooning like this, is at its most powerful when it is about the now. And I found the rich colouring and the depth of texture of the illustrations to Cassandra Darke as interesting, as new, and as up-to-date, as its gritty, violent storyline.

And lastly, what a relief that the central character, Cassandra, is a grumpy, frumpy, older woman, well into her 60s, maybe 70-something, what a relief and a pleasure. After the nubile heroines Gemma and Tamara, it felt good to see Simmonds being true to the critique she herself made all those years ago in that ‘Seven Ages of Women’ cartoon, and depicting a woman who is not young and lithe and sexy and obsessed with bonking, but is nonetheless just as interesting and rewarding a character and easily meriting a book of her own.

Hooray for frumpy, grumpy Cassandra Darke, and hooray for Simmonds’s detailed, deep and discomfiting cartoons!

Preparatory character studies for Cassandra Darke (2014) by Posy Simmonds

Reviews of Posy Simmonds’ books

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Books & Boots

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Pure Posy by Posy Simmonds (1987)

Historical context

Pure Posy

The triumph of Thatcherism

Themes

Changing times / the Weber values becoming passé (9)

Women and feminism (7)

Difficulties of motherhood and childcare (4)

Childhood and small children (4)

Divorce

Ironies of love (2)

Sex and adultery (5)

A writer’s life (3)

Academia (3)

Middle class mores and hypocrisies (10)

Pastiches and parodies (5)

Christmas (3)

Teenagers and the Generation Gap (3)

Edmund Heep the alcoholic (3)

Miscellaneous (4)

Animal liberation and vegetarianism (2)

Homosexuality (1)

Politics (4)

The end of the Webers (2)

Thoughts

Credit

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Pick of Posy by Posy Simmonds (1982)

Class distinctions

Mundane subject matter

The wry smile of recognition

Humour

Themes

Credit

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Posy Simmonds: A Retrospective @ the House of Illustration

The Silent Three

Posy

Feminism

Children’s books

Text heavy

The graphic novels

Gemma Bovery (1999)

Tamara Drewe (2006)

Cassandra Darke (2018)

Social history

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