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RAYMOND BRIGGS, who has died aged 88, was famous as the author of illustrated Christmas stories for children - with a difference.
Briggs's Father Christmas is a cantankerous old curmudgeon who complains about the "bloody reindeer" and "work, work, work"; The Snowman comes to life for a lonely little boy but melts in the morning; Fungus the Bogeyman is a repulsive monster hero who revels in slime, body secretions and rot.
Briggs made a fortune out of Christmas but his tales were deeply subversive of the conventions of the festive season. His own views on the traditional jollifications were positively Scrooge-like: "My ideal Christmas would be to go into a bomb shelter and not come out again until the all-clear sounded."
Briggs's chosen medium was the strip cartoon or, more accurately, strip illustration. His technique was to take a fantastical situation and apply what he called "common sense and literalness" to make it believable, a technique that often involved setting the story within the trappings of English suburban domesticity - complete with lavatories, three-piece suites and cups of tea.
His characters, too, were instantly recognisable. Father Christmas is not the generously proportioned old buffer heave-hoing his way down the nation's chimneys, but a moody, foulmouthed old soak fed up with the backbreaking physical tedium of his job (Briggs envisaged him as a workman "a bit like my dad, who was a milkman").
Briggs was sometimes described as a political writer and it was easy to see why. In his black comedy of nuclear holocaust, When the Wind Blows (1982), an ordinary couple survive a nuclear attack and are still obediently following futile government instructions, unaware that they are slowly dying. In The Tin-Pot Foreign General and the Old Iron Woman (1984), Briggs's take on the Falklands conflict, the dead lie forlorn as the title characters strut across the political stage.
But it was not a stance he sustained; he admitted finding most politics too confusing. When, after September 11 2001, Briggs was asked by a newspaper to "do a When the Wind Blows-type of thing on it", he declined.
If there was a common theme in Briggs's work it...