Posy Simmonds : "I am still doing what I loved doing aged 9 — making comics."

Preparing this retrospective made you delve deep into your archives... How do you look back at your career?

Going through the old portfolios, it seemed that I’d done a lot of work. Some of it, long forgotten, came as a surprise — did I really do that? Apart from the childhood drawings, there’s a consistency in the work…a long series of deadlines. Sometimes leisurely deadlines, but more often tight ones. I can still recognise the panic in certain drawings. I think I was lucky to have worked for a newspaper (The Guardian) which gave me the space and freedom to develop ideas. And I was also lucky to have a second phase in my career, when Gemma Bovery was published in French, giving my work an international readership. Looking back through my archive, it’s clear that I am still doing what I loved doing aged 9 — making comics.

Tell us more about the image you created for the exhibition poster…

I wanted to show an assembly of characters, especially the ones from my graphic novels, who I lived with for long periods.They often invaded my dreams. At the top of the image, Janice (created in 1980) dances with the Most Handsome Man in the World; further down, Raymond Joubert gazes at Gemma Bovery and Cassandra Darke scowls at the world. The cats, Fred and Baker Cat, feature in books for children; the hens, who only had a tiny role in Tamara Drewe, are there because I have a general fondness for chickens. In the books, the characters mostly went along with the plans I had for them, but sometimes they evolved on their own and refused to follow the storyline - Gemma Bovery turned out not to be suicidal and another demise had to be invented…and, at a late stage of the artwork, a cat needed to be re-named and become Fred.