Photograph: © Raymond BriggsĪs with all Briggs’s subsequent titles, the book is full of autobiographical elements and references. Raymond Briggs’s artwork for Father Christmas, about a grumbling, flawed Santa. His grumbling, lavatorial and flawed Santa was immensely popular. Father Christmas brought him a second, and catapulted him to fame. A major breakthrough had already come in 1966, with The Mother Goose Treasury, for which he received his first Kate Greenaway medal.

Her death from leukaemia in 1973, and the deaths of his parents, led Briggs to throw himself into his work. In 1963 Briggs had married the painter Jean Taprell Clark. He continued to teach for a day a week at Brighton until 1987, and his tuition was much admired and appreciated by generations of artists including the prolific illustrator and Observer political cartoonist Chris Riddell.

That year, he began teaching illustration part-time at Brighton College of Art (now Brighton University’s faculty of arts) at the invitation of the then head of department, the calligrapher and engraver John R Biggs. In 1961 he wrote and illustrated two books, Midnight Adventure and The Strange House, for the publishers Hamish Hamilton, with whom he would have a lasting working relationship. Photograph: © Raymond BriggsĪs various narrative texts came his way, he realised that not all of them were of the highest quality, and took to writing himself. Raymond Briggs’s illustrations for his 1978 book The Snowman, which was adapted into a film in 1982.

More Than Comics by Elizabeth Briggs