Raymond Briggs

[Up the Junction]

Another giant in their particular field passes on... it's been a week of it.

[Estuary]

Totally choked. I worked on the Snowman and the first toy I bought my new born daughter was a Snowman plush. Rest in peace

[Korea Hammer]

Very sad. I always felt an affinity to him and his work. As a kid, I loved Father Christmas and Fungus The Bogeyman, both of which fit right in with the grumpy, creative cultural landscape of the late 1970s and the end of my childhood, and also books which understood that kids didn't need to be patronised.

Later, I remember discovering the harrowing When The Wind Blows, the unsentimental but moving homage to his parents, Ethel & Ernest, and the savage The Tin Pot Foreign General & The Old Iron Woman. So many others. He was wildly experimental too, sometimes densely packing information in (Fungus), subversively hiding his hardest punches under the cover of large pre-school picture book style double pages (Tin Pot Foreign General), and even going totally wordless (Snowman).

For some, he will be associated with the sanitised TV production of the Snowman but for many others Briggs was a very British genius who had more in common with the Sex Pistols and the Young Ones than he did with the worlds of children's books and art, and probably taught me as much as any other writer when I was a boy.

[Puff Daddy]

A nice obituary to him on ITV early evening news, he actually didn't much care for children, having none of his own, but he created a classic. RIP old fella

[simonpaulthomas]

Absolutely loved Father Christmas Goes On Holiday as a kid - so much so, I bought it to read to my own children last year. Some of the illustrations of places from around the world really captured a mood and my imagination.

[Metal Hammer]

Loved Fungus the Bogeyman when I was a kid, RIP Raymond.

[OFT]

We watched Ethel and Earnest last night, not for the first time, which is basically the story of his parents and his own life until they died.
Beautiful stuff.
RIP Raymond