Mimi Pond sat at the Drawn & Quarterly booth, a vision in blue at San Diego Comic-Con on Friday, July 24.
Blue hair, blue eyeglasses, blue tones on the pages of “Do Admit! The Mitford Sisters and Me,” her Eisner-nominated book this year.
Blue pens in dark and light hues with which she signed copies of that book, as well as her two volumes of memoirs, “Over Easy” and “The Customer Is Always Wrong.”
The notorious Mitford sisters get the blues in Mimi Pond’s ‘Do Admit!’
Her interest in the Mitford sisters, six aristocratic British women born over the first two decades of the 20th century, dates back to her own childhood in San Diego, Pond said.
“My parents had checked out [Jessica Mitford’s] ‘The American Way of Death’ from the San Diego Public Library, and then they loved it so much they had to buy it,” Pond said of Mitford’s 1963 book of social commentary. “And they never stopped talking about it.
“In 2009, my mother saved 90 percent of the cost of her own cremation because they had joined a funeral society after reading it,” she said. “They just never stopped talking about Jessica Mitford.”
As a young woman in New York City in the early ’80s, Pond started to learn about the other sisters, too.
“She came up at a party I was at, and somebody turned to me and said, ‘You know she had sisters,” and I began reading about all of them,” Pond said. “i just became obsessed. I grew up with two brothers; I wanted sisters. They lived in the English countryside in the 1920s, and it was just all the elements I love.
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“I started talking about them so much I was endangering my marriage,” she says, laughing. “My husband was like, ‘Would you just shut up?’ I finally just decided I had to channel it into this book.”
Pond said her college years in art school left her knowledge of history spotty, but reading about the Mitford sisters filled the gaps in how she saw the history of the 20th century.
“They had their fingers in every single aspect of 20th-century history,” Pond said. “Winston Churchill was their cousin. Nancy Mitford’s boyfriend was [French general and president Charles] De Gaulle’s right-hand man.
“Diana married [British fascist leader] Oswald Mosley. Unity was best friends with Hitler. Jessica came out as a civil rights warrior in the 1950s and tirelessly worked for civil rights. Her husband defended the Black Panthers; her best friend was Maya Angelou.
“Deborah Mitford was friends with John F. Kennedy. So you get everything. Everything.”
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Later on Friday, Pond planned to attend the Eisner Awards, which honor the best achievements in comic books each year at Comic-Con. “Do Admit!” was a nominee in the category of best reality-based work.
And as for all those hues of blues?
“I think color is just always an emotional choice,” she replied. “And it just felt right. It’s as simple as that.”