He later professed himself surprised by its popularity, saying: “I thought that very few people would be interested in it apart from the peace movement. In a typically black comic touch, it is implied that the smell of cooking meat that the Bloggs notice while venturing out comes from the charred corpses of their friends and neighbours.īriggs published the book at a time when the Cold War showed worrying signs of heating up, and nuclear paranoia gripped the country to an extent that had not been seen since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.
The Bloggs construct a fallout shelter once they hear government announcements that a nuclear strike is imminent, but thanks to a combination of their naïve trust in the powers that be and the debilitating effects of radiation poisoning, they soon find themselves slowly dying, even as virtually everyone else in the country has been killed instantly.
It’s just as good a medium as a film really if it’s used properly.”īriggs told his story from the perspective of an elderly couple, Jim and Hilda Bloggs, who had previously appeared in his book Gentleman Jim. It doesn’t have to be about violence or comic cuts. He was inspired by watching a documentary, When The Bomb Drops, which was scathing about Britain’s lack of preparation for nuclear war.Īs he said about his work: “Strip cartoons are looked down on in England as a culturally inferior art form but I think that When The Wind Blows at least showed that strip cartoons can deal with a serious subject. When The Snowman was first shown on television on December 26 1982, it became an immediate success, but earlier that year Briggs had demonstrated his versatility by publishing a short, terrifying book that depicted the fallout from a nuclear attack on Britain by Russia. It combined his peerless artistic and literary skills with a bleak, but never gratuitously unpleasant, narrative that was a world away from the big-hearted optimism of Aled Jones singing Walking In The Air. Yet it was his follow-up book, and later film, When The Wind Blows, that may be Briggs’s finest work. So there’s no point avoiding it.”Īs the world mourns the death of one of the great imaginative storytellers of the 20th and 21st centuries, most of the headlines have inevitably singled out The Snowman as Briggs’s best-known achievement.
Granny and Grandpa die, dogs die, cats die, gerbils and those frightful things – what are they called? – hamsters: all die like flies. Children have got to face death sooner or later. He once said: “I don’t believe in happy endings. While generations of children were exhilarated by his seminal book – and subsequent animated film – The Snowman, Briggs himself eschewed sunny optimism for a more realistic, even pessimistic view of the world. Raymond Briggs, who has died aged 88, was, by his own admission, something of a curmudgeon.
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