Harry Mount

Picture books for grown-ups

On its 10th anniversary, the Cartoon Museum celebrates an underrated art form in which the British excel, as demonstrated by the works of Posy Simmonds and Bryan Talbot

Art Spiegelman, the American cartoonist behind Maus, the celebrated Holocaust cartoon, dreamt up a good definition of graphic novels: comics you need a bookmark for. This jolly show about the British graphic novel takes an even broader approach.

It begins with Hogarth’s 1731 series, ‘A Harlot’s Progress’, the tale of an ingénue in London who becomes a prostitute and dies of syphilis. You’d need an awfully big bookmark for the six original paintings in Hogarth’s series. But the point is well made — the idea of telling stories through a series of pictures has been around for a long time in Britain.

Perhaps that’s why we’ve often denigrated cartoons and comics — we take them for granted. The late, great Ronald Searle was treated far more seriously in France than he was here. Incidentally, there’s a terrific Searle graphic novella in the show. ‘Capsulysses’, from Punch in 1955, tells the story of Caps, chief of Ithaca, returning home through the Med, after beating the Axis powers in the second world war. The Odyssey rip-off is drawn with all Searle’s joyful brio and anarchic line.

It’s wrong to demote cartoonists and graphic novelists like this, but it has a beneficial effect: these cartoonist-writers take themselves less seriously than straight writers or straight artists, and they’re outside the establishment. It means they’re that much funnier and more satirical — like the cartoons of Private Eye stretched into a novel.

Take the master of the graphic novel, Posy Simmonds, whose works figure prominently at the Cartoon Museum, celebrating its 10th birthday this year. Her books are wickedly funny, and skewer certain types —particularly academics, journalists and writers — better than any conventional novel. I was glad to find Simmonds’s supreme works, Gemma Bovery, 1999, and Tamara Drewe, 2007, in the London Library.

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