Raymond Briggs has changed the face of children'spicture books, with his innovations of both form andsubject. Stylistically versatile, he has illustrated some sixtybooks, twenty of them with his own text, and first becamea household name in the late 1970s and early 1980swith a handful of books Father Christmas, Fungus theBogeyman, The Snowman, When the Wind Blows thatwere entertaining and subversive and appealed to bothchildren and adults. The refrains of his work are class,family, love and loss. Nevertheless, his default mode ofexpression is humour. Briggs is always funny, and thebalance between this and melancholy is his definingcharacteristic, though his style ranges from the romanticto the grotesque, from the fanciful to the direct.Encompassing sixty years of Raymond Briggs'swork, from political picturebooks to children's classics,this study explores his themes of class, family and loss,and how he demonstrates both emotional power andgreat technical skill.