#he'll move out of speech bubbles and into a white space with a conversation script written out

[thedreadvampy]

The museum near my mum's was hosting a Raymond Briggs retrospective and it wasn't until we went today that I realised the absolutely outsize influence Briggs quietly had on my development and sensibilities as an artist. I've never really thought to flag him as one of my Favourite Illustrators but I realised walking around the room that his comics work - reading stuff like Fungus The Bogeyman and Father Christmas as a kid, and When The Wind Blows as a teenager - really formed like the platonic ideal for me of what comics should be and do.

A short list of things I think I've unconsciously learnt from his work without thinking about it:

the amount of character you can wring out of framing and posing

the idea of stylised faces in a highly rendered world

using repetitive panels to create meaning

breaking the edges of panels and frames

energetic lettering

filling up the world your characters inhabit with lots of little details you find entertaining

trying to create worlds and people that feel like Real Things That Exist by drawing on the world around you even if what you're making is a fantasy

borrowing faces and places that fit

it's allowed to be very silly

Anyway it's honestly left me quite emotional looking at his work like this bc I didn't know! I didn't know how much he'd influenced me! and there's something about looking at the artwork with all his notes to self around the margins and relettered phrases and "change this bit"s. there's a spread from fungus the bogeyman where the margins have been repeatedly filled with carefully drawn bubble letters counting down how many thousands of words and hundreds of hours of lettering he still had left to do and I'm just like i see someone is losing his actual mind lettering. relatable.

There was also. one of the last spreads in Ethel and Ernest, and it shows him and his dad coming to the hospital to see his mother's corpse after she died. and everything else on the page is done in his usual repeatedly-photocopied-and-redrawn style and worked through, but the body of his mother is almost just a pencil sketch over loose watercolour. and it's like. looking at that you can really really feel how unbearably hard it was to draw that. and next to that they had the closing spread where Briggs is showing his wife his parents' house after they died, and so right next to this drawing that evidently hurt too much to work on too long, you can see how in-depth and thoughtfully he's drawn the house he grew up in, he's done it brick by brick and every bit of detail worked in like he doesn't want to stop working on it and be done with the house. and idk it left me insanely choked up.