The Four Color Media Monitor

The Connexion spoke with a few experts on comics in France, on how adults can take up the reading hobby:

They recommend starting out with the following list:

The Clandestines de l’Histoire series by Catel Muller and José-Louis Bocquet, telling the story of women forgotten by history: Kiki de Montparnasse, Olympe de Gouges, Joséphine Baker, Alice Guy and Anita Conti

The Frustrés series by Claire Bretécher

L'Incal by Jean Giraud (known as Moebius), one of the great titles of science fiction

Le Monde sans fin, by Christophe Blain and Jean-Marc Jancovici, a bestseller in France in 2022 and now translated into English

Tamara Drew by Posy Simmonds

They also interviewed veteran Simmonds about her career:

Posy was interested in cartoons from a young age, and with lots of siblings, she had access to plenty of comics.

“I had always drawn and originally I actually wanted to do painting.

“However, I always liked writing as well, so after I'd done the foundation year, I chose to be in the graphic design department. At that time it was mainly a typographic course, but I found it very useful ever since for doing my own lettering, because in those days, pre-computer, you had to learn how to hand-letter. That was useful.

“There wasn't much illustration, but I managed to turn the projects that we were given into kind of illustration projects as well. I left in 1968, so of course it was a great time then to be an art student.” [...]

Her modern take on Frenchman Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, which sees an English expatriate in Normandy facing modern problems, was produced in The Guardian in the 1990s, and Tamara Drewe started in September 2005 as a weekly comic strip. Both were turned into graphic novels and subsequently films, featuring Gemma Arterton.

Posy’s satirical and often humorous views on British society are what set her apart in a ‘boys’ club’ of cartoonists and illustrators, and she is credited with redefining the graphic novel industry.

From what I can tell, she's been around in the biz a long time, since the late 1960s, so there's a woman whom the PC crowd in the USA pay no attention to, recalling the joke of a claim a decade ago that women working in GN development were literally something new to the medium, which obviously isn't true when one considers veterans like Ann Nocenti to boot. I'm sure some of her resume is worth reading.

Labels: comic strips, Europe and Asia