Posted in: Comics | Tagged: Alan Moore, cartoon museum, knockabout, london, melinda gebbie, robin ince
Melinda Gebbie In Conversation With Robin Ince About Her Greatest Fits
Melinda Gebbie in conversation with Robin Ince about her Greatest Fits hardcover publication from Knockabout
Article Summary
- Melinda Gebbie discusses Melinda Gebbie’s Greatest Fits with Robin Ince at the Cartoon Museum in London.
- Robin Ince praises Gebbie’s overlooked brilliance, calling attention to her extraordinary life and career in comics.
- Gebbie reflects on childhood, art as survival, England’s influence, and the politics shaping her creative voice.
- She revisits banned comic Fresca Zizis, destroyed artwork, and intimate portraits of Alan Moore in Greatest Fits.
Last year, I announced the news that Knockabout was to publish writer, artist and cartoonist Melinda Gebbie‘s large-format full-colour retrospective of her artistic career, Melinda Gebbie’s Greatest Fits, under her husband’s revived imprint, Mad Love. And last week at London’s Cartoon Museum, she was interviewed by writer, comedian and friend of the family, Robin Ince. I was in the front row, and now you can be too…
Melinda Gebbie’s Greatest Fits
Melinda Gebbie’s Greatest Fits
“Melinda was a Haight-Ashbury runaway in 1967; a post-war glamour girl, a compulsive delineator since her childhood she emerged as perhaps the most accomplished artist in the predominantly masculine San Francisco underground comics movement of the 60s and 70s. Moving to the UK, she worked as an old-school animator on Raymond Briggs’ harrowing When the Wind Blows, and has the unique accolade for a contemporary artist of having her pioneering book Fresca Zizis declared obscene by a British Court and subsequently burnt. It remains illegal to have a copy in the UK. Attracted to the field’s most marginalised and least-explored territories – politics, female identity, fetishism and unflinching autobiography – she crafted bulletins on everything from anarchist Emma Goldman to a first-hand account of the British Miner’s strike, taking in talking vulvas, Marat-Sade, and surrealist French poets on the way. The book gives insight into these and into her work as the creator of a multitude of visionary canvases that span the jewelled ground between the mystical and the psychedelic. By turn sexy, funny, scathing, human and profound. Gebbie’s extraordinary work distills a woman’s experience in the late 20th century western world into every blazing line.”
Notably, Melinda Gebbie’s Greatest Fitsis not being made available through the usual comic book and graphic novel distributors. If you want a copy (and you do), order it directly from Knockabout, buy it in person at the Cartoon Museum or possibly at Gosh Comics, on either side of Oxford Street in London.
Robin Ince opened with a complaint disguised as praise. He had spent the afternoon in the nearby Quaker Café, marking nearly every page ahead of this interview, expressing his anger, “Every time I pick up this book, the idea that you are not known by more people, the idea that people have not had the chance to see what you create.” He remembered Gebbie once saying she had accepted that her art might not be properly known in her lifetime, “but that you believed in your art enough to know that it would live on.”
He asked her, “You’re eight years old and you decide you’re going to devote your life to art. You decide that art will be yours. Can you tell me a little bit about that kind of sense that art was something that was not something you could escape from, it was not something you could avoid, it was something that was an utter necessity?” Melinda Gebbie answered with geography first. Sausalito, by the water in the Bay Area. Hurricane Gulch. The Golden Gate Bridge, “directly beside it… It’s a kind of a dreamy reverie kind of place anyway.” But not her home. “My dad was scared of my mom. I was scared of my mom. We both tried to stay away from her as much as possible. And so I had a little room that got mildewed periodically, but it looked out over redwood trees.” And at eight, looking at her parents, she made a set of refusals that still structure the work. “I don’t want to get married. I don’t want to have kids because I’d be terrible at being a mother because I have no patience… because I looked at my mother and I saw how she didn’t want kids. And I just thought, okay, I’m going to be an artist, and that’s what I’m going to be because that will be all mine. Everything I see will belong to me. I won’t have to negotiate. I will just take everything I love and am fascinated by, go into my little tiny pink bedroom, look out at the view, and just live in my own world. And luckily, my parents were really pleased that they didn’t have to talk to me.”
Later, she talks about how England changed her thinking, noting that the sorts of people she met in her everyday life, especially in Northampton, were more genuinely open, and that everyone was more political in their lives and work. “I love the people there because their faces tell you where they’ve been, you can see the pain, you can see the tolerance, you can see the weariness, and when people look up and smile back at you after all they’ve been through, that means so much. And that just didn’t happen in San Francisco. Everybody was being their idea of the perfect this or that, and you never were able to touch base with anybody on this level of ‘I hope you’re all right.'”
She also talked about the repeated destruction of her art, at school, in artistic collectives and eventually the British Government. She was kicked out of Synanon, a religious movement founded in Santa Monica, originally drug rehabilitation programme which then developed into an alternative community centered on group truth-telling sessions. They told her that “I was the most dangerous person they’d ever met” and burned her large painting of her mother. And her first solo comic, Fresca Zizis, published in 1978, was burned by the British Government, after it was declared obscene (it still is), though Gebbie reiterated it was just “a retelling of my life and my experiences, and a warning to other women to stay away from men like these.” She enjoyed the irony that the prosecutor in the case, Ted Branson, was the father of Virgin founder Richard Branson, who had been selling her comic in his stores. The most important pages from that comic, however, appear in the new book.
And she also took time to discuss the various ways she has portrayed her husband through the book. “I’ve depicted Alan as a big, hairy, golden lion. He’s got lots of rings on his paws. And I’m a little domestic cat in a sort of a ringmaster’s outfit. Thinking I’d be all that. And then the two, you know, very powerful little daughters who are not really pleased about this thing here. So we’re all cats together, and he’s looking at me like, ‘Who do you think you are?’ And I’m looking at him like, ‘I fancy you.’ And the kids are looking at me like, ‘No way’…. I’ve done several portraits of my husband, and they’re all a bit different, and they’re all from different moods.” Robin Ince saw it as theatre. “It does make you really wish that Alan had just, for a while, gone into panto and done Wizard of Oz.”
Melinda Gebbie’s Greatest Fits – Hard Cover, Oversized Art Book
235mm x 312mm x 35mm – 312 pages £59.99. Includes an introduction by Dr. Melanie West, PHD Ethnic Studies, UC San Diego. Signed book plate, limited to 1000 copies.
Melinda Gebbie’s Greatest Fits
Melinda Gebbie’s Greatest Fits
Melinda Gebbie’s Greatest Fits
Melinda Gebbie’s Greatest Fits
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