British cartoonist Posy Simmonds is relatively well known in her home country. Lee so here in the U.S., though her book Gemma Bovary received a number of accolades when Pantheon published it a few years back.
Anyway, the Telegraph has a very nice profile of her online, giving a nice bit of backstory and her new book, Tamara Drewe:
Simmonds appears a mild, rather reserved woman – hard to pair with the bawdiness of some of her jokes (a pivotal scene in Tamara Drewe takes place with one character on the lavatory). She is 62 but looks younger, with a neat oval face, arched eyebrows and dark fringed hair that cups her countenance. She talks softly, with a considered air, and when early on she cries ‘Good God’ it comes as a shock. She is wearing a black trouser suit with a Nehru collar, and lace-up shoes with a heel. No sign of a handbag, and the room we are in is unclassifiably elegant – polished boards, a velvet sofa, Chinese vases, interesting prints on the walls, bound copies of Punch on a black lacquer bookshelf. She is not a figure and this is not a room one might necessarily find in any of her work. Increasingly, with age, she likes to think of herself as ‘invisible, which is very useful. People say things in front of you as though you’re not there.’
