Rabbiting on

Simone Lia's new graphic novel, Fluffy, is the moving story of a bunny that thinks its father is a man called Michael. She tells Laura Barton why it is so much more than a comic
Fluffy by Simone Lia
Bunny story... panels from Fluffy by Simone Lia. © Simone Lia 2003, 2004, 2005. Click here to see a slideshow of Fluffy.

'I like squirrels, but one ran up my leg once," Simone Lia says, the words seeming to forward roll out of her mouth. "I do like rabbits because they're really quiet. I think rabbits represent something very vulnerable and small and furry and cute. And also, have you ever had those dreams where you've got to look after kittens or bunnies or something and ..." she looks up and pauses. "No? Oh, I thought everyone had those dreams."

Lia's penchant for rabbits has served her well. Her new graphic novel, Fluffy, relates the tragi-comic tale of a small, sweet-natured bunny rabbit that assumes a man named Michael is his daddy. "Well," she says, shuffling in her chair, "one day my boss's son sat on my lap and said, 'You smell like my daddy.' And I thought that was a weird thing to say. No, I don't know what he smelled like," she adds. "I never sniffed him." Lia, now 33, decided to turn the weird thing into a picture. "I thought if I draw a rabbit it will be sweeter than a child and then I started thinking, who is that rabbit's daddy? In my mind he is about five. I think being five is a really cool age because kids are so bright and they can communicate really well, but they're so innocent and their imaginations are all over the place and they come out with such funny things."

The funny things Fluffy says in the book are largely gleaned from conversational fragments overheard by Lia, as well as the murky depths of her own mind. "What I want to do with my work is to be really, really honest and tell the truth in pictures," she says, tapping her kitchen table with the palm of her hand. "So sometimes characters will say things that are a bit ugly, not what you want them to say, they'll take on their own life. I've discovered lately that if you just go to Sainsbury's or you're vacuuming and you're thinking about a character, it's like having another world in your head. I love going on the bus as well and just listening to people's conversations. And it ends up in a drawing. Some of the things that Fluffy comes out with, it surprises me. He'll do something and it'll make me laugh because I wasn't expecting it."

Lia always loved drawing. "Anything, I'd draw anything," she recalls. "Well, everyone draws at school, but when I was about 13 I really got into painting. I just really love it cos you'd paint and you'd just get completely lost and enter into another dimension and I felt so happy, escaping from the world." Her parents encouraged her enough to give her the garden shed in which to paint, though when she elected to study for an art foundation course they were a little more worried. "They're still worried," she sighs. "They still say, 'Wouldn't you like to be a teacher?'" Lia went on to study art at Brighton, and graduated with the intention of becoming an illustrator, but initially found it difficult to find work. "I kept all my rejection letters in a large folder, stained with tears," she laughs.

It was in her early 20s, newly graduated and not a little lost, that Lia found herself employed clearing tables at Gatwick airport. "One day there weren't many flights," she recalls, "and the manager just said, 'Can you go and pick up the bits of fluff from the carpet?'" Lia pauses and lets the idea sink into the morning air. "And I thought - what am I doing?" She looked up and saw the flight departures board. Seeing the destination Malta, she wondered if she might go and stay there with her relatives for a few months. "As soon as I decided to leave I started to get work. It was weird. I think it's a bit like boyfriends." In Malta, she worked for a newspaper, ran an art class for schoolchildren and produced a pilot for a television show. "Yes, like Tony Hart!" she laughs.

Upon returning to London, the decision to go to the Royal College of Art didn't so much occur to her as appear out of thin air. "I was working in a studio in Peckham," she says, then pauses and looks sheepish. "I dunno if I should say this but there was a bloke that I quite fancied massively and he said, 'Oh, I'm gonna apply for the Royal College of Art,' and I said, 'So am I!'" She giggles furiously. "It just came out and I thought, WHAT? I couldn't stand the thought of him going and me being stuck in Peckham. We never got together, no. And he didn't get in either."

It was at the RCA that she met Tom Gauld. She admired his drawings first of all - "they were just very clever and funny and he was really good at drawing" - and then his work ethic. "He was really studious and he looked as if he was 12 years old and he was just sitting there drawing and making things and I found that very inspiring." It was Gauld who convinced her to abandon ideas of illustrating children's books and consider making comics. "I didn't really think of myself as a comic artist, because I didn't have that background," she says. "He used to read comics all the time, but I thought they were a bit rubbishy, a low form of art. He made me realise that actually they're not. He said, 'Comics is just telling stories with pictures.' And when he said that I was like, 'Uhhhhgh!!'" She grips the edge of the table and her eyes grow round as saucers. "And when you do comics there are so many things you can say. You can go anywhere. I had limited myself a lot with the children's book idea. I thought you've got to do 24 pages and it's got to be a round story. With this you can have any number of pages, it didn't matter what anyone else thought. There was a freshness to it."

Lia and Gauld set about producing a comic book together, an assemblage of her work and his that they photocopied and distributed themselves. They called it First, and with it the pair would go on to win an award sponsored by Deutsche Bank that enabled them to print 1,000 copies of the follow-up, Second, professionally. She clumps upstairs and returns with an original copy. "Here," she says, pointing at an illustration showing several mites driving cars up and down a person's leg. "This was because I got headlice. Briefly. I think it was something to do with being at college. But I put on all the cream and then I woke up in the middle of the night and I thought, what about those poor creatures that I killed? That was their home."

This is typical of Lia. She seems to hear conversations in everything: headlice, bunnies and grown men, dust particles, a chip and a bean. The unifying factor in all of her work is a fundamental optimism, a goodness, a sweetness. "A lot of the stuff you see at comic festivals I don't like," she says. "It's just gross for the sake of it, so it's not shocking, it's just boring. And then you find the stuff that is just uplifting and it's like a breath of fresh air." She giggles again. "It's like when you go to art college you've got a lot of rubbish inside of you that you want to get out, but then a lot of people's work you see and think, why are you doing that? Is it for your audience? Is it for you?' I think you want to think about the people that are receiving it as well. You want to give them a bit of a gift really".

· Images taken from Fluffy by Simone Lia. © Simone Lia 2003, 2004, 2005. To be published by Jonathan Cape on February 15 2007 at £12.99.

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