The same spirit infused Briggs’s 1977 Fungus the Bogeyman, which imagined Fungus living in dank, smelly tunnels evoked in a palette of mud brown and acid green. He’s sick to the back teeth of it: who wouldn’t be? So it follows, naturally, that he’s going to be grumpy.” Speaking in 2014 about his bestseller, Briggs said, “He’s been doing this dreadful job for donkeys’ years: going out all night long, in all weathers. We follow him as he wakes up – “Blooming Christmas here again!” – and sets off on his round, the sparse dialogue a litany of complaints about “Blooming aerials”, “Blooming cats”, “Blooming soot”, “Blooming chimneys” and all the “Stairs, stairs, stairs”. This 24-page strip cartoon imagines Santa Claus as a grumpy old man, grumbling his way through his busiest day of the year: Christmas Eve. ![]() In 1973, he won won a second Kate Greenaway medal and a wider audience with Father Christmas. Jim and the Beanstalk, a warmhearted sequel to the traditional tale, came in 1970. ![]() The Strange House was published in 1961 and five years later, his 800 illustrations for an edition of The Mother Goose Treasury won him the prestigious Kate Greenaway medal. But instead he said he would publish it, which shows what the standard was like if a complete novice who had never written anything more than a school essay could get his first effort published.” “They were so bad that I knew I could do better myself,” he told the Guardian, “so I wrote a story and gave it to an editor hoping he would give me some advice. But when he left at 23, his talent for drawing realistic images from memory meant it was not hard to find work as an illustrator for magazines, advertisers and books.Īs the 1960s dawned, Briggs had begun to despair at the quality of the books he was illustrating. “I went there wanting to do cartoons.”īriggs’s interest in commercial art was met with horror at college – one teacher spluttering, “Good God, is that all you want?” – and after national service Briggs met with more snobbery while studying at the Slade School of Fine Art in London. “I never thought about being a gold-framed gallery artist and was only pushed into painting when I went to art school,” he told the Guardian in 2004. His decision to leave school at 15 to go to Wimbledon Art College may may have puzzled his milkman father, but he was not dreaming of becoming Michelangelo. Glimpses of beauty, humour and generosity keep shining through and, as always, Briggs’s drawings have a touch of magic about them, conjuring human beings and their foibles out of a few precious lines.Born in 1934, Briggs went to the local grammar school in Wimbledon. ‘By the nature of its subject matter, Time for Lights Out is gloomy, but for some reason not dispiriting. All human life – and death – is here in this lucky dip of memories and fears, irritations and idle thoughts.’ Observations, jokes, snippets of autobiography, quotes on death from writers and philosophers. The Observer’s Graphic Novel of the Month, Rachel Cooke comments that one of the book’s drawings, of Raymond’s parents Ethel and Ernest’s breadboard and knife, ‘is so serenely exquisite that it might as well be by Morandi’.Ĭraig Brown in The Mail on Sunday summarises that Time For Lights Out is a ‘category-defying rag-bag of drawings, poems and 犀利士 Raymond has illustrated Time For Lights Out throughout with his beautiful pencil drawings. ![]() Nicholas Tucker’s interview with Raymond ‘about facing the end with incredulity and humour’ is in The Times today: ‘Grimly amusing and unsparing of detail, he charts this new life journey with resignation on one page, incredulity on another, irritation on a third and mordant humour all the way through’. We are thrilled with the critical reaction so far. Time For Lights Out, Raymond Briggs’ exploration and contemplation of old age and death, is published by Jonathan Cape today.
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