By Shaenon K. Garrity
Our columnists are independent writers who choose subjects and write without editorial input from comiXology. The opinions expressed are the columnist's, and do not represent the opinion of comiXology.
My aunt in Pittsburgh has two teenagers who fill the house with Playstation games and Yu-Gi-Oh cosplay, but when I was little she was the bohemian relative, the one who had no kids and a house full of books and a bearded husband who made risotto. And she had gone abroad. No one else in my family had gone abroad; even my grandfather had spent most of WWII trying to avoid getting shipped out for a sub attack on Japan that never happened because we bombed Hiroshima instead.
My aunt had been to places like Ireland and Greece. She had mysterious English friends who sent her books from across the Atlantic. Comedy, mostly: a
Spitting Image book and a
Not the Nine O'Clock News book and a Comic Relief fundraising book with the Four Yorkshiremen sketch. I read them, curled up in the armchair by the corner bookshelf, when we visited every Christmas.
Among them were some books that were like comics, only thicker and better.
Fungus the Bogeyman, about the daily lives of filth-loving monsters, which I always shut before finishing because the sticky green watercolors made me sick.
The Tin-Pot Foreign General and the Old Iron Woman, which I didn't understand except that I was pretty sure it was about politics. I knew Margaret Thatcher was somebody important, and here she was as a mechanical monster with missiles for boobs. And
When the Wind Blows, about a pleasant old English couple surviving, for a little while, an all-out nuclear war. I was one of those grim children who grew up terrified of the Bomb, and I read that comic over and over, delighted by the couple's bumbling efforts to construct a bomb shelter, horrified by radiation poisoning and rats in the toilet.
A few Christmases later, probably sometime after the animated special aired on American TV,
The Snowman was all over bookstores. I realized these books were all the work of the same artist, Raymond Briggs.
The Snowman was the first silent comic I read. That's true of a lot of people, I guess.
This is probably common knowledge on the other side of the Atlantic, but Raymond Briggs is one of the greats. His sardonic holiday children's books
Father Christmas and
Father Christmas Goes on Holiday, published in the early 1970s, often crop up in nerd fights over the "first graphic novel." (Of course, comic albums have been common in Europe since the invention of Tintin, and children's books with sequential-art elements go back a long way, so the whole debate is pretty arbitrary. But
Father Christmas drags both children's books
and Europeans into the debate, so kudos for that.)
Fungus the Bogeyman is so good the makers of the movie
Shrek decided to base their movie on it instead of on the William Steig book
Shrek, and just not credit it.
When the Wind Blows is unforgettable.
Briggs has a soft, round, honest art style reminiscent of some of the great English children's book illustrators, particularly Edward Ardizzone, another of my childhood favorites. He has some of the most expressive colors I've seen in comics. I wasn't kidding about the greens in
Fungus the Bogeyman making me sick. The gradual fading and browning of the color palette is one of the most unsettling features of
When the Wind Blows, while
Father Christmas and
The Snowman burst with holiday primaries from beginning to end.
And he's funny. And wise. And draws his parents into his comics, which is something cartoonists' relatives often tell them to do and then get upset when it actually happens. So it's a good time, reading Raymond Briggs.
This is Briggs writing for the
Guardian, on the occasion of his inclusion in a 2002 exhibition of children's illustrators at the British Library. His essay is entitled,
"Why I'd Like To Be a Proper Author":
In the book I'm working on now, The Puddleman, the little boy appears 81 times. Last week I decided he should be in Wellingtons not shoes. This meant rubbing out 162 shoes and drawing in 162 wellingtons. After this I decided he should be in shorts, not jeans, so 81 pairs of jeans...
The one great advantage of strip cartoons is that you can tell the story without any narrative prose. Ethel & Ernest tells the story of my parents' married life from their meeting in 1928 to their deaths in 1971. It is almost a mini-biography and even contains social history yet there is not a word of narration, only speech bubbles. Readers and reviewers never mention this, which is good as it means they haven't noticed it and this shows it has worked. It is the thing I am most pleased about in these books.
I'd still like to give it up though.
And that is how Raymond Briggs is wonderful.
I finally went abroad in college, doing my junior year in Ireland. That was the year
Ethel and Ernest, Briggs's masterpiece, came out. It was in all the bookstores in Dublin that Christmas, front and center, like I'd flown across the Atlantic just to read it. I probably had.
Shaenon K. Garrity is a manga editor at Viz Media and is best known for her webcomics Narbonic and Skin Horse.
All the Comics in the World is © Shaenon K. Garrity, 2010
