Raymond Briggs was once the author of an hour, alas, a decade.

That was in the eighties.

The disarmament debate had gripped the whole world, the fear of nuclear war drove hundreds of thousands onto the streets, and in 1982, the year of the big disarmament demonstration in Bonn's Hofgarten, Briggs published "When the Wind Blows", the story of an English working-class couple who focused on the poor news that hostilities had broken out, went to a shelter and survived the nuclear war there.

It all happens quickly, because that's when the action really gets going, and how Briggs portrays the situation in a fallout-infested world is unforgettable (and even has some comic components that make reading more bearable).

Andrew Plathaus

Responsible editor for literature and literary life.

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A year later the book was translated into German (“When the wind is blowing”) and found a huge audience in this country as well as everywhere else in the western hemisphere, and four years later, in 1986, it was filmed as an animated film with music by such megastars as David Bowie, Genesis or Roger Waters, and that in the year of Chernobyl.

Ghastly times had never played more fruitfully into the hands of a picture book author, and Briggs, born in 1934, evacuated from London during the Second World War and then used during his military service as a draftsman far removed from all normal military service, which he rejected as a convinced leftist, suddenly found himself as someone who was read as a prophetic counselor.

With a comic, because that was "When the Wind Blows" - and today the volume is considered by some to be the first internationally successful graphic novel, i.e. as a comic that found its way into bookstores instead of only to the kiosks before.

It was a sequel, because Briggs had already told about the life of the Bloggs couple in "Gentleman Jim" in 1980 - at that time still largely unnoticed.

But it wasn't about a nuclear war.

Comic elements were a hallmark of Briggs' picture books, particularly the merging of text and drawings.

That's how he'd styled his two books on Father Christmas in the first half of the '70s, and 1977's Fungus the Bogeyman continued that style, but then came The Snowman, his first silent picture book, so without any text.

It was going to be the opposite of the laborious "Fungus" in every way: "I've been buried in dirt, slime and words for two years, so I wanted to do something clean," Briggs later scoffed, and the result was this cute white snowman , which immediately won the hearts of British audiences.

So much so, that the community activist Briggs rushed back to a serious, dark storybook subject, that of Gentleman Jim, inspired by the experiences of his working-class parents.

"Bloggs" and "Briggs" - the consonance of the family names was intended as a subtle reference.

After "When the Wind Blows" Briggs really had nothing more to gain, but he continued to draw, always from his own stories, and in 1998 he created his most moving book: "Ethel & Ernest", again the story of his parents, but this time very bluntly , from the couple's first meeting in 1928 to their deaths in the same year 1971. This book was also made into a film (this time Paul McCartney wrote a song for it, among others), and so in 2015, seventeen years after the original was published, a German publisher was finally found for the small masterpiece: the comic specialist Reprodukt.

When you read this book, you have everything that defined Briggs: his depth of feeling, his humor, his melancholy and his unconditional belief in humanity and humanity.

The melting snowman, the lonely bloggs, the aging Ethel and Ernest - they each celebrated life.

Now her draftsman has died, on August 9th at the age of 88.