Raymond Briggs

SNOWMAN’S LAND

In a scorching summer where we all feel like liquefying, it’s only fitting that the man behind the saddest instance of melting for many a tyke leaves us. Beloved illustrator Raymond Briggs was best known for softly-coloured children’s tearjerker The Snowman, depicting the magical friendship between a boy and a snowman that ends when the latter is reduced to a puddle. The story was inspired by the snowiest day in Briggs’s life and the TV adaptation of it (alternatively hosted by Briggs, David Bowie, and Mel Smith) remains a Christmas perennial. He applied a similar undercurrent to other stories, including Father Christmas, which depicted a cranky Santa, and Fungus the Bogeyman, about a troll-like creature who has an existential crisis over doing little besides scaring people. At his bleakest, When the Wind Blows laid bare the horrors of nuclear warfare through the lenses of an elderly couple in a bombed Britain. Briggs was 88 and a unique for And they all died.

Raymond Briggs
18 January 1934 – 9 August 2022, aged 88
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