Raymond Briggs was famous for his grumpiness – but behind the facade he was shy, thoughtful and kind | Books

Raymond Briggs’s handwriting was distinctive: bold, elegant and cursive, in black ink. For a long time he avoided email, preferring faxes or the post. He liked wordplay and gave many of his correspondents nicknames. I have envelopes addressed to Percy Summons or Poxy Summons. The contents could be a grumpy Christmas card, a moan about the time it took pencilling, inking and colouring two pages, or a diatribe about brussels sprouts.

Briggs’s grumpiness was legendary, but behind this facade he was only slightly grumpy – as well as shy, kind and thoughtful and, to his students, an inspiring teacher at Brighton College of Art.

His books made him famous, but Briggs shunned the frills of celebrity. “Showing off” he called it. “We’re just commercial artists, we keep our heads down,” he told me. When he was at art school, commercial artists – illustrators and cartoonists – were considered an underclass, well below fine artists. Briggs has made the term a badge of honour.

By keeping his head down, he observed and recorded everything about the human condition, from the comic to the tragic, from boils and bogeys to bereavement. As a champion of strip cartoon, he has elevated its status and changed the format of children’s picture books and their subject matter. All his books are original and innovative. Often subversive, often melancholic. Almost always funny. He delighted in the domestic (Father Christmas); in the disgusting (Fungus the Bogeyman); and in the dreams of a lavatory cleaner (Gentleman Jim). Briggs also took head-on the horror of war, the Falklands (The Tin-Pot Foreign General and the Old Iron Woman) and nuclear (When the Wind Blows), where the explosion is a shocking double-page spread, entirely white except for some pink scorching at the edges.

Coming from a pre-digital age, Raymond Briggs did everything by hand. He told me he used to count up the hours that each operation took – designing the page, the lettering, drawing and colouring, frame by frame. “Bloody endless!” he said. It was time well spent. What I have consistently admired over the years is how he paced the stories, the way every page-turn is a surprise and his use of different mediums to create atmosphere. The Snowman is entirely drawn in soft crayon, which gives a dream-like effect. The drawings for The Tin-Pot Foreign General and the Old Iron Woman are jagged, savage drawings in strong black line, whereas the dead and maimed of the war are realistically drawn in soft charcoal. Briggs often represented pain in an understated way. His grieving figures are all the more poignant for being drawn from the side or behind.

Thanks to observation, his eye for telling detail and his ear for dialogue, Briggs’s characters are always convincing. He was like a good film director, knowing exactly when to place the closeup or the long shot. He knew the right moment for silence, when to exclude speech balloons from a frame.

His rough drawings show how well he was able to draw from memory. Expressions and gestures are captured in a few energetic lines, the figures caught in mid-action. In order to keep this liveliness, Briggs has described how an old photocopier was brought into play, the pencil sketches copied and then worked on, first in ink and then colour. Among illustrators, a general rule is that finished artwork is never quite as good as the preliminary drawings. I once asked Briggs why he thought this was. He said sweat was to blame, bloody sweating over the job. He’s probably right.

Raymond Briggs’s handwriting was distinctive: bold, elegant and cursive, in black ink. For a long time he avoided email, preferring faxes or the post. He liked wordplay and gave many of his correspondents nicknames. I have envelopes addressed to Percy Summons or Poxy Summons. The contents could be a grumpy Christmas card, a moan about the time it took pencilling, inking and colouring two pages, or a diatribe about brussels sprouts.

Briggs’s grumpiness was legendary, but behind this facade he was only slightly grumpy – as well as shy, kind and thoughtful and, to his students, an inspiring teacher at Brighton College of Art.

His books made him famous, but Briggs shunned the frills of celebrity. “Showing off” he called it. “We’re just commercial artists, we keep our heads down,” he told me. When he was at art school, commercial artists – illustrators and cartoonists – were considered an underclass, well below fine artists. Briggs has made the term a badge of honour.

By keeping his head down, he observed and recorded everything about the human condition, from the comic to the tragic, from boils and bogeys to bereavement. As a champion of strip cartoon, he has elevated its status and changed the format of children’s picture books and their subject matter. All his books are original and innovative. Often subversive, often melancholic. Almost always funny. He delighted in the domestic (Father Christmas); in the disgusting (Fungus the Bogeyman); and in the dreams of a lavatory cleaner (Gentleman Jim). Briggs also took head-on the horror of war, the Falklands (The Tin-Pot Foreign General and the Old Iron Woman) and nuclear (When the Wind Blows), where the explosion is a shocking double-page spread, entirely white except for some pink scorching at the edges.

Coming from a pre-digital age, Raymond Briggs did everything by hand. He told me he used to count up the hours that each operation took – designing the page, the lettering, drawing and colouring, frame by frame. “Bloody endless!” he said. It was time well spent. What I have consistently admired over the years is how he paced the stories, the way every page-turn is a surprise and his use of different mediums to create atmosphere. The Snowman is entirely drawn in soft crayon, which gives a dream-like effect. The drawings for The Tin-Pot Foreign General and the Old Iron Woman are jagged, savage drawings in strong black line, whereas the dead and maimed of the war are realistically drawn in soft charcoal. Briggs often represented pain in an understated way. His grieving figures are all the more poignant for being drawn from the side or behind.

Thanks to observation, his eye for telling detail and his ear for dialogue, Briggs’s characters are always convincing. He was like a good film director, knowing exactly when to place the closeup or the long shot. He knew the right moment for silence, when to exclude speech balloons from a frame.

His rough drawings show how well he was able to draw from memory. Expressions and gestures are captured in a few energetic lines, the figures caught in mid-action. In order to keep this liveliness, Briggs has described how an old photocopier was brought into play, the pencil sketches copied and then worked on, first in ink and then colour. Among illustrators, a general rule is that finished artwork is never quite as good as the preliminary drawings. I once asked Briggs why he thought this was. He said sweat was to blame, bloody sweating over the job. He’s probably right.