Briggs helped bring the visual language of comic books to children’s stories.
Briggs told the BBC in 2017.
Briggs often depicted domesticity and the routines of the working class.
Briggs’s other books, has no words — rounded frames house the emotional arc of a boy’s winter adventure.
“The books are funny and the books are also sad,” Nicolette Jones, who wrote the biography “Raymond Briggs” (2020), said in an interview for this obituary earlier this year.A film adaptation of “The Snowman,” which was released in 1982 and features the haunting song “Walking in the Air” in its symphonic score, was nominated for the Academy Award for best animated short film.Briggs briefly set the scene in the film’s introduction, which was later rerecorded, to his chagrin, by David Bowie.
Briggs told the BBC.
Briggs had depicted the gift-giver as an old man burdened by the frigid weather and his demanding work rather than as a jolly soul.
Growing up in a house without many books, he gravitated instead to the storytelling found in newspaper cartoons.He spent 18 months drawing nearly 900 illustrations for the “Mother Goose Treasury” (1966), for which he won the Kate Greenaway Medal, given for the best illustrated children’s book in Britain.A book about his parents’ long relationship and their traumatic deaths, “Ethel and Ernest,” was named the illustrated book of the year in 1999 by the British Book Awards, which had declared MrBriggs its children’s author of the year earlier that decade