The Tin-Pot Foreign General and the Old Iron Woman

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This brilliant piece may look like a children’s picture book, with typeset narration between single images, often across spreads, but it is hard-hitting and heartfelt. Briggs makes his point by contrasting the exaggerated puppet-show battle between the two leaders of Britain and Argentina - monstrous egos in strident colours, in manic caricatures resembling Gerald Scarfe or Ralph Steadman at their strongest, clad in fantastical iron-plated armour (original art above) - with the utterly heart-rending simplicity and sensitivity of his grey pencilled portrayals of soldiers in combat injured and dying, of their dead bodies returned in a big container, of the war-wounded on crutches and in wheelchairs being excluded from the patriotic pomp and spin. 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.

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. 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. Briggs’ final book, Time for Lights Out (2019), is a poignant, funny and honest exploration of the experience of ageing and reaching the end of life in the form of a patchwork of verse, drawings and random thoughts.Francesca Dow, managing director of children’s at Penguin Random House said: “I am very proud that Puffin has been the home of Raymond’s children’s books for so many years. Prompted by the poor quality of some of the novels he was illustrating, he produced his own, The Strange House (1961), an adventure story, and gave it to an editor friend hoping for some constructive criticism. To Briggs’ astonishment, the editor had it published. People often ask about the technique in (The Snowman)... it is done entirely with pencil crayons, with no line in pen or pencil and no washes of ink or watercolour.' 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”. An animated version of The Snowman made for Channel 4 in 1982 has become a festive staple and has been shown every Christmas since.

A breakthrough came for Briggs in 1966, with The Mother Goose Treasury, for which he contributed almost 900 illustrations and received his first Kate Greenaway medal. In Fungus the Bogeyman I wanted to show the petty nastiness of life - slime and snot and spit and dandruff, all this awful stuff which is slightly funny because it detracts from human dignity and our pretensions.' At the age of 6, during World War II, Briggs was twice evacuated as one of the millions of children, who along with expectant mothers and the infirm, were sent away from heavily populated areas of England to escape the Nazi air raids. Briggs said he enjoyed what he later described as a happy but uneventful childhood. Despite outward appearances, however, anxieties over the ever-present threat of death and destruction cannot have failed to leave a mark on the impressionable boy (already 10 years’ old when the war ended) and undoubtedly accounts for these themes looming so large in his later work.Elsewhere, away from the mainstream press, among the other British creators to respond to Thatcherism were more than a few ‘neurotic boy outsiders’, to quote Grant Morrison’s diaristic, part-autobiographical character study, St. Swithin’s Day. This comic stands as one of Morrison’s most quietly effective and affecting pieces. Even though [spoiler alert] his first-person narrator does not brandish a gun in his assassination attempt, instead pointing an imaginary ‘hand-gun’ made by his fingers and thumb, a symbol for the power of the imagination, disgruntled Members of Parliament raised questions in the House of Commons and The Sun newspaper hammered the comic book under the headline ‘Death To Maggie Book Sparks Tory Uproar’. News of Raymond Briggs' death has been met with sadness not just by those who knew him, but by millions around the world - Ian Woods reports 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.” Author and illustrator Raymond Briggs, best-known for the 1978 children’s picture book The Snowman, has died aged 88. The Snowman has sold more than 5.5 million copies around the world, and Briggs also created beloved children’s books Father Christmas and Fungus The Bogeyman.

Mrs Thatcher would resurface recurrently in Morrison’s oeuvre. She is clearly the model for Gloria Munday (above), the villainous coiffured matriarchal prime minister in his revisionist take on Frank Hampson’s Dan Dare. The ‘Pilot of the Future’ was the most upright of British heroes in Eagle starting in 1950, originally envisaged as a Chaplain in Space complete with dog collar. Dare could not be more establishment and conservative with a small ‘c’, but under Morrison and Rian Hughes’ revamp in Revolver in 1990, he had to face up to a corrupt right-wing government and question his political beliefs. His family said in a statement through his publisher Penguin Random House that Briggs died on Tuesday morning. At the victory celebrations staged by the Old Iron Woman, “the soldiers with bits of their bodies missing were not invited to take part… in case the sight of them spoiled the rejoicing.” Raymond Briggs was born in London in 1934, and studied at Wimbledon School of Art and the Slade School of Art, London. 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’.The essence of being able to draw from memory (is) to be a mini actor. If the figure is to walk jauntily with its nose in the air, you have to imagine what that feels like.' He won numerous prizes across his career, including the Kurt Maschler Award, the Children’s Book of the Year and the Dutch Silver Pen Award.

Find sources: "The Tin-Pot Foreign General and the Old Iron Woman"– news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR ( May 2022) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) Ms Dow said Briggs had been “unique” and had “inspired generations of creators of picture books, graphic novels, and animations." 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.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. There remains one other starring role of Mrs. T. in comics that truly stands out. Raymond Briggs in 1984 created The Tin-Pot Foreign General and The Old Iron Woman, one of the most damning and moving anti-war graphic essays of the period, born of his anger at the terrible loss of lives in the Falkslands War and the government’s callous cover-up of the injuries and deaths of British troops. 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. Born in Wimbledon in 1934, Briggs studied at Wimbledon School of Art and the Slade School of Fine Art before briefly pursuing painting. Deputy Labour leader Angela Rayner added: “Raymond Briggs brought so much magic and joy to so many.