![]() He also grew up in the golden age of comics: the first Superman comic strip appeared in 1938 and the first comic book devoted to the character in 1939, the year that also saw the launch of Marvel Comics. ![]() ![]() In the half-century following his parents’ death in 1971, Briggs made regular return visits to the house, whose later owners kept it largely as Ethel and Ernest had left it, down to the 1930s wallpaper that still lined the inside of a hallway cupboard.īriggs was drawn to illustration by his love of the newspaper comic strips of his childhood, when Mary Tourtel and Alfred Bestall’s Rupert Bear was a publishing phenomenon in the mass-circulation Daily Express newspaper and, from 1936, as an annual. The house and its old-fashioned kitchen, scullery and outside lavatory feature repeatedly in Briggs’s work, from Father Christmas onwards-where Briggs based the title character, and his “blooming” cursing at the anti-social hours and conditions of his work, on the grind of his father Ernest’s labour, delivering milk to people’s doorsteps at all hours and in all weathers. Becoming an artistīriggs had a stable childhood in the 1930s and 40s, growing up in a terraced house in Ashen Grove, Wimbledon Park, southwest London. Watching the finished film, he said, he had cried several handkerchiefs worth of tears. He described in 2016, on stage at the British Film Institute, how he had wept through the audio recording sessions for the animated film of Ethel & Ernest and that listening to the actors Jim Broadbent and Bernda Blethyn had made him feel that his parents had come back to life, their south London accents caught to perfection. One of Raymond Briggs's illustrations from The Snowman book Image: Raymond Briggs / Penguinīriggs was an always inquisitive artist who had breathed in the artistic and popular culture of his time, and was most un-British in his willingness to show public vulnerability about his emotional state. Briggs had told Coates he was against the idea, but was later very happy to admit how well the addition had worked. He also told stories against himself at how resistant he had been to suggestions made by his collaborators, including the producer John Coates’s proposal that a scene with Father Christmas should be added in the 1982 animated film adaptation of The Snowman. ![]() ![]() He penned a column in The Oldie magazine, “Notes from the Sofa”, and his family recalled, following his death, how delighted he had been to be described in a leading article in The Guardian newspaper as an "iconoclastic national treasure”. In later life, Briggs liked to present himself as a curmudgeon, or “grumpy old man”. All Briggs’s books have an underlying empathy-sometimes explicit, sometimes concealed, even to the author, until critics and readers discovered it-for the life, loves and mortality of his working-class Londoner parents. But the barely concealed emotional charge of his children’s tales, and their bucolic charm, acquired a stinging, subversive power when deployed, in an unaltered visual style, in his adult, satirical and autobiographical books, including Gentleman Jim (1980) and When the Wind Blows (1982).Įthel & Ernest (1986), was an affectionate biography of his parents Ethel Bowyer, a lady’s maid turned housewife, and Ernest Briggs, a milkman. Raymond Briggs, the British author and illustrator of the classic children’s books Father Christmas (1973), Fungus the Bogeyman (1977), and The Snowman (1978), died on 9 August, aged 88.īriggs was uneasy at being described as a pioneering graphic novelist-he preferred to describe his creations as “picture books”. ![]()
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