The Tin-Pot Foreign General and the Old Iron Woman

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It would be interesting to discover other, lesser known interpretations of Mrs. T in British comics. Were there anarchist fanzine strips about her? Anti-Poll Tax comics? Miners’ Strike comics? She made several cameos in North American comics too, most notably Canada’s Dave Sim who introduced her as the fervent ‘Cirinist’ believer and enemy of art and freedom in a piece of perfect casting for the denouement of ‘Jaka’s Story’ in Cerebus. A similarly grumpy but essentially warm-hearted character was Fungus the Bogeyman (1977), who lived among a breed of underground creatures who visit the surface to make things go “bump in the night”. After becoming a professional illustrator, he worked and taught illustration at Brighton College of Art. In February 2017, Briggs was honoured with the BookTrust Lifetime Achievement Award and the trust responded to news of his death by tweeting: “He will live on in his stunning, iconic books.”

Drawings from fans – especially children’s drawings – inspired by his books were treasured by Raymond and pinned up on the wall of his studio. Surprisingly, it was in longer-form comics, of all places, a medium still mainly below the radar, that flashes of some of the most outspoken, audacious and extended criticisms of Thatcher and her policies emerged and engaged with a young readership, reaching teens to students and young adults. Of course, Steve Bell’s weekly Maggie’s Farm comics in Time Out and later City Limits hounded Maggie from 1979 to 1987 (a 1983 example above), and his six-days-a-week If… strips in The Guardian (a and still going strong) were some of the most barbed satire of the day.Briggs has recently returned to illustrating, with Alan Ahlberg’s interactive children’s books The Adventures of Bert and A Bit More Bert (2001-2), but his own latest, The Puddleman (2004) is another idiosyncratic work, about a child’s appreciation of a character who puts puddles in the ground. He has now achieved a subtle and expressive form, equally able to move and entertain us. He has, says Nicolette Jones, ‘elevated the standing of the art of strip illustration and added status to children’s books’. His family said: “We know that Raymond’s books were loved by and touched millions of people around the world, who will be sad to hear this news. This article does not cite any sources. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed.

His first work was in advertising, but he soon began to win acclaim as a children's book illustrator as well as teaching illustration at Brighton College of Art. He came to public attention when he illustrated a book of nursery rhymes, The Mother Goose Treasury, in 1966, winning a Kate Greenaway medal. Since then he has become one of the most innovative and popular author-illustrators. As part of his national military service, he worked in the Royal Corps of Signals, where he was mostly required to draw electrical and radio circuits. By the time he had completed his higher education at the Slade School of Fine Art, he was already receiving commissions from publishers and advertising agencies.His parents died in 1971 and his wife soon after in 1973, from leukaemia. This led Briggs to throw himself single-mindedly into his work. Father Christmas (1973) was the result. Devised in comic book fashion, Briggs took an iconic, mythical figure and depicted him as an ordinary worker doing an often tedious and repetitive job.