The Gift of "Suzanne"

Inside a book that vividly brings the history of tennis to life for the present.

Though it has only just begun, the fleeting tennis off-season is nearly halfway over already depending on how you measure it. Matches in the 2025 United Cup begin incredibly early this year—December 27th, 2024 in Australia—meaning many players will have to leave home before Christmas to begin the new year.

It’s a time of year to feel rushed for everyone, really, especially if you have gift-shopping to do for the holidays.

With that in mind, I have two suggestions for the tennis fan and/or readers on your list.

First, and most briefly, you can give a gift subscription to Bounces (a Substack feature I somehow only just learned about) to an avid tennis fan in your life. There will be lots of big tennis stories to follow in 2025, so if you want to share the writing that will appear here with someone else—and support the work I’m doing here—this is a great way to do it. (And thank you again to the hundreds of you who already have paid subscriptions!)

The second gift recommendation I have is for one of my favorite tennis items of recent years: Suzanne, the graphic novel (or hardcover comic book, if you prefer) by Tom Humberstone which lushly illustrates the story of Suzanne Lenglen, one of the most remarkable characters of tennis history, across its 200 pages.

There’s nothing else out there like Suzanne, at least that I’ve ever seen, which makes dusty tennis memories from more than 100 years ago so vivid for modern audiences, while also providing remarkable historical texture and context about the era in which Lenglen became a worldwide phenomenon. It’s a great read for adults, too, but if you have a teen on your list who loves graphic novels and might love tennis, I think Suzanne is an especially wonderful choice.

To learn more about this unique project, I recently did a Q&A with the author, Tom Humberstone, about how he brought Suzanne to life.

You can read our conversation below, and catch many glimpses inside his book along the way.

B: What inspired you to do this project about Suzanne Lenglen?

Tom Humberstone: I've always been a big tennis fan and like to supplement following the tour with reading about tennis history. While I knew the name of Suzanne Lenglen (mainly because of the court at Roland Garros), I'm embarrassed to say I didn't know much about her life or her achievements until I read a passage about her in Elizabeth Wilson's Love Game. It's an excellent book that encompasses the entire history of the sport, so Lenglen is only mentioned in a short paragraph or two. But it was enough to send me down a rabbit hole of finding out as much as I could about her.

The frustrating thing was, there were very few books about her in existence. For someone who appeared to have such a huge impact on tennis, sport in general, and fashion in the 20th Century, the paucity of interest in her seemed striking to me. When we think about sports stars from the 1920s, I think the name we might grasp for is Babe Ruth. Lenglen was a much bigger phenomenon than he was at the time, and yet hers is the name that has become obscure and largely forgotten.

I read the books about Lenglen that I could find, and started reading memoirs and biographies of players from the same era, just on the off-chance of an anecdote or insight about her. The more I read, the more I became fascinated with her, the historical and socio-political context of her career, and the storytelling possibilities that presented. But I realized in all this research that I was ultimately looking for a book about her that didn't exist. So I decided I would try and make it.

B: How did this medium shape how you wanted to tell her story?

Tom Humberstone: As a comic creator, I tend to think about storytelling in panels, so that will always be my go-to medium when I start thinking about a new project. But with that said, I think it's important to make sure I know why a story I'm working on needs to be told as a comic as opposed to say, a film, prose novel, or TV show.

For me, I was really keen in communicating the vibrancy, glamour, and magic of Lenglen and the Roaring Twenties with sequential pictures. A lot of the books I was reading presented Lenglen's achievements in dry statistics and very little color. That felt antithetical to who Suzanne was and what she represented. I wanted her life to jump out of the page and feel as relevant now as it was then.

It's not a film I'm a big fan of, but Baz Luhrmann's Gatsby was smart in using contemporary music to communicate how the music of the 1920s sounded to people then. I wanted Suzanne to feel the same. As vivacious and vital as Lenglen was then. So I knew at that point I would be writing a piece of narrative nonfiction. The idea would be to stick to the key facts of what happened, but write my own dialogue and scenes around it. To try and bring life to the sassy, passionate, mercurial version of Suzanne everyone talked about.

I think tennis has a lot of great stories in it. There are probably about ten other players from the 20s and 30s that I could do another, equally fascinating comic about. But there is, sadly, a lack of storytellers who seem interested in telling sports stories - particularly in tennis. I liked the idea of making a comic about tennis and using it as a love letter to the sport. Who better, as the focus of that love letter, than Suzanne Lenglen?

B: What was your process like for crafting this book?

Tom Humberstone: I spent about two years researching it. I read every book I could get my hands on that was about or by players who were contemporary to Lenglen. I was very lucky to spend a few weeks at Wimbledon's archives where I had access to old press clippings, and even some of Lenglen's letters. The biggest problem was that Suzanne died very young and never got to tell her own story with some distance and perspective. Everything I read about her was written by journalists, tennis historians, or players and peers from the time like Bill Tilden, Rene Lacoste and Ted Tinling. All of them men. It was near to impossible to find out what Suzanne really thought and felt. Ultimately I had to accept that my version of Suzanne would be a construction of me reading between the lines and a bit of projection.

After collecting all this research, I collated it all into one document and wrote key dates, events, scenes, matches, and people onto index cards that I would move around a giant cork board as I tried to build a satisfying structure and narrative arc that stayed true to the real events. It's always difficult at this point because you have to try to not get lost in the research and remember what it was that interested you in the story in the first place.

For me, I started to write those things down: the intersection with the suffragette movement and women's changing role in society, how women's fashion was completely revolutionized, the invention of sport as an entertainment industry, the rise and fall of the Jazz Age, the shifting global hegemony from the old world to the new... I realized that I could almost one-to-one attach these themes to Suzanne's biggest matches. That gave me the framework that I used in the book where I generally focus each chapter around the conversations before and after a career-altering match that addresses the themes of that chapter.

The next two years were spent writing the script and drawing it. I like being quite iterative in my comic making process so each stage was like a new draft of the book. I wrote two or three drafts of a script that was essentially written like a screenplay so friends, editors and peers could read it and offer feedback. Then I penciled the entire book with a rough color and lettering pass so it could get another round of notes from readers. Then I would ink it, letter it, and color it - at each stage tinkering with the dialogue and the placement or staging of panels. Sometimes entirely rethinking the coloring or lighting of a scene.

B: Tennis was a much gentler looking game, stylistically and physically, 100 years ago. How did you try to translate that to something modern viewers of the sport could appreciate?

Tom Humberstone: Because tennis players in the 1920s played with wooden racquets instead of shock absorbing modern equipment, the game was played very differently than it is now. Smaller racquet heads meant the "sweet spot" was much more narrow. Heavy topspin was harder, so players had to hit the ball flatter with more margin for error. Players approached the game with greater finesse and power wasn't quite as much of a factor (that said, Bill Tilden's serve was apparently recorded at around 163 mph, though this has never been verified). One of my favorite pieces of modern tennis promo was having Rublev and Dimitrov play each other with vintage racquets. I'd love more of this sort of thing - where you really get to see how the equipment completely changes the way people play.

Looking through old footage and archival photos, I knew I'd have to find a balance between a fidelity to how people played the game in the 20s, and drawing dynamic, visually arresting "action shots" of matchplay. It was important to me to communicate the delicacy and finesse of the tennis of that era - especially Suzanne's balletic movement across the court, but it was also crucial to relate how the different playing styles would feel at the time. Dorothy Chambers played the game as most women before Lenglen did: from the back of the court, with long groundstroke rallies. Lenglen was one of the first to play with more power, and to serve as the men of the time did. The players that could bother Lenglen—Elizabeth Ryan, Molla Mallory and Helen Wills—hit a bigger ball than Lenglen, forcing her to play more tactically.

These are the nuances and subtleties of her matches that I tried to show in the comic, rather than tell. As such, rather than exclusively looking at archival photos from the time for reference, I often looked to modern players to help me. I sought players with similar builds—Caroline Garcia tended to be a good stand-in for Lenglen; Ons Jabeur was a good Elizabeth Ryan double—and infused their modern, more visually dynamic ball striking into the comic when it suited the story. While an expert might look at some of the serving motions or forehands in the comic and consider them historically inaccurate, my hope is that the inaccuracies helped to capture how it felt to watch and play against these athletes.

B: Suzanne Lenglen was navigating a world of tennis that was different in many ways from the professionalized circuit of today, but are there parallels you see between the challenges she faced and the struggles and tribulations of modern tennis superstars?

Tom Humberstone: I think the parallels with today were what drew me to Lenglen's story in the first place.

I could see Naomi Osaka in Suzanne's fractious relationship with the press.

I could see Garcia/Tsitsipas/Kenin and a huge number of others in the toxic parent/player coaching dynamic.

I could see Venus Williams’ and Billie Jean King’s trailblazing struggles for worker rights and equal pay in Suzanne's high-profile switch to the Professional Tour (decades before the Open Era).

I could see the modern day misogyny of the tennis press as exemplified by John Inverdale and his "never going to be a looker" comments in the way Suzanne was written about.

I could see Agassi's love/hate relationship with the game and his ambivalence as to whether he even liked tennis in Suzanne's own uncertainties.

I could see the perennial GOAT conversation in her incredible win-loss record.

I could even see the tired, simplistic conversations about Federer's innate genius versus the hard graft of Nadal in the way Lenglen's father built the legend of Suzanne's God-given gifts.

The story of Suzanne—the way she played, her relationships on and off the court, and the way she was talked about and viewed by the press, the public and the tennis establishment—is the story of tennis today.

B: Where can folks get Suzanne?

Tom Humberstone: People can order the book directly from Avery Hill, the publisher, here:

People can also order the book from me and I can sketch and sign it.

In the US, it’s available from Barnes & Noble.

And it also can be available from most bookstores and comic shops. If it isn't in stock, it really helps for people to ask their local store to order copies in. Asking for it to be stocked in your favorite library helps, too!

[Ed: Suzanne also came out in French this year, if you have a francophone on your shopping list.]

Thanks to Tom Humberstone, and thanks for reading Bounces!