Jacky Fleming
About
Jacky Fleming was born in London in 1955, and attended the North London Collegiate School for Girls. A Foundation Year at Chelsea School of Art was followed by a Fine Art degree at Leeds University.
Fleming’s earliest inspiration as a cartoonist were Ronald Searle’s anarchic drawings for the St. Trinians books, and John Glashan’s cartoons, in particular the Genius series, which Fleming collected whilst still at school. Her first published cartoon appeared in 1978 in the feminist magazine Spare Rib, whilst Fleming was still studying Fine Art, and was an essay handed in as a cartoon.
These were followed by a series of cartoon postcards, originally published by Leeds Postcards, then self-published. Her postcards were very popular, and led to a series of cartoon books, the first of which was ‘Be A Bloody Train Driver’, published by Penguin in 1991, followed by six more.
Fleming contributed a weekly cartoon to the Guardian Women’s Page, and her sixth cartoon book, ‘Demented’, published by Bloomsbury in 2004, led to a weekly strip of the same name in You magazine.
Her seventh book, ‘The Trouble With Women’, was published by Square Peg in 2016.It was drawn in response to Darwin’s theory of women’s evolutionary inferiority and innate mediocrity. The book is a comic satire, about the systematic erasure of centuries of women’s achievements from our history books, and the theories put forward by Darwin, and many others, to explain women’s absence.
Fleming’s work has also appeared in The Guardian, The Observer, The Independent, New Statesman & Society, New Internationalist, The Huffington Post, Diva, Red Pepper, and The Big Issue.
Holdings
A collection of Jacky Fleming’s postcards.