Illness, Disease, and Death in the Graphic Novels of Raymond Briggs: A Retrospective Review Essay

By J.T.H. Connor, Memorial University, St John’s, Newfoundland, Canada

Titles:

1. Father Christmas

2. Fungus the Bogeyman

3. Gentleman Jim

4. When the Wind Blows

5. Unlucky Wally

6. Unlucky Wally Twenty Years On

7. Ethel & Ernest: A True Story

With the death of Raymond Redvers Briggs in 2022, Britain along with the graphics community at large, lost a talented and beloved, if not a bit grumpy, storyteller, artist, and illustrator. Briggs (1934-2022) trained in London first at the Wimbledon College of Art and then at the prestigious Slade School of Fine Art. Initially, he  worked as a freelance illustrator for children’s books, which earned him the now defunct but “rebranded’ Kate Greenaway medal in 1966 (for his work on a Mother Goose Treasury); later he garnered a second Greenaway medal in 1973 (for his Father Christmas), international recognition, commercial success, and even affluence as the author/illustrator of graphic novels using the “strip cartoon” format depicting stories and characters of English working-class ordinary people who were often socially and educationally challenged; they  perhaps might even be classified and dismissed as “losers” or misfits within the rigid British class hierarchy. Typically, his work is humorous, but in cranky, grouchy, dark, dry, and curmudgeonly ways.

Numerous themes characterize Briggs’s works, but those of illness, disease, and death subtly permeate many of them. Strictly speaking none of Briggs’s œuvre can be classified as graphic medicine, but if one accepts that included in the values, aims, and tenets of the genre is the aspiration that this visual medium can engender empathy and further explore the discourse of healthcare, then his comics may reasonable be covered under that rubric. Through an investigation of selected text and images I describe and analyse how they range from being identifiable but somewhat incidental to character development and plot line (Father Christmas, 1973); integral but for humorous effect (Fungus the Bogeyman, 1977; Gentleman Jim, 1980;); and essential and critical (When the Wind Blows, 1982; Unlucky Wally, 1987; Unlucky Wally Twenty Years On, 1989). Ethel & Ernest: A True Story (1998), which is autobiographical/parental biography, stands out as it addresses the schizophrenia of Briggs’s wife, the cancers his parents suffered from, and eventually their deaths in 1971. In one panel in the book, Briggs draws a poignant and angry scene of the dead body of his mother lying unceremoniously and disrespectfully in the hospital. Curiously, as is shown below, Briggs reprised this image, but with important differences, from Unlucky Wally Twenty Years On. Interlaced in this review essay will be insightful comments by Briggs himself from Paul Gravett’s interview (The Comics Journal #250, February 2003 at https://www.tcj.com/the-raymond-briggs-interview-by-paul-gravett/). All the works referred to were published by Hamish Hamilton (London), excepting Ethel & Ernest which was published by Jonathan Cape (London).

In Father Christmas, Briggs’ inaugural graphic novel, the main character is not the jovial and avuncular man we are used to—this Santa Clause does not chant HO!HO!HO! at the drop of a hat, and would never have made it in any Coca Cola ad campaign; a bottle of beer, or a good shot of brandy or scotch are his preferred beverages when on or off the job. As Briggs declared to Gravett, “I just thought, ‘Follow it through logically: He’s an old man, we know that, he’s fat and he’s been doing it for donkey’s years, so he’s fed up with it.’ It’s a vile job anyway, out in the freezing cold, on your own, going up and down filthy chimneys. You can’t imagine a worse job, really, going through the cold air, all over the world. And he never gets any thanks; they just put out a mince pie!” In this statement, Briggs encapsulates what would become a template for most of his primary male protagonists: an ordinary (British) bloke just doing his job the best he can and trying to make it through life, notwithstanding some grumbling or questioning about his situation from time to time. So as Briggs’ Father Christmas trudges through the snow across roofs when on his Christmas rounds and sneezes with a loud “AAACHOO!” to follow up with “Getting a blooming cold now” in a speech bubble, readers can empathize (Figure 1, Father Christmas, 21). This ordinary and mundane reference to health at first appears incidental, but it humanizes this character without diminishing his magical role and function.

Figure 1, Father Christmas, 21

In Fungus the Bogeyman Briggs invented the vocabulary, culture, and technology of Bogeydom, which is the dark, dank, subterranean habitat of Bogey men, women and children. Their cold, wet and slimy world contrasts with that of The Surface which is dry, bright and warm and is home to Drycleaners—the land and people like us; i.e., humans who mostly like to keep clean, warm, dry and practise personal hygiene—the antitheses of Bogey people! For breakfast, Bogey folks don’t eat cereals such as Corn Flakes or Grape Nuts, but rather consume Flaked Corns (best mouldy, never crispy) and Gripe Nits; green slime is the drink of choice for ordinary Bogey people. Hobbies and pastimes include reading up on illnesses and ailments of Drycleaners including foot and mouth disease; verrucas; bloat; piles, pimple and pus; pox; snot; and night soil. The raison d’être of a hard-working Bogeyman is to irritate, annoy and otherwise bother Drycleaners, especially at night, by tugging and dislocating bed clothes (leading ideally to an argument between those sleeping in the bed), making scary noises, hiding only one sock, or playing tricks with alarm clocks.

The “Supreme Achievement of the Bogeyman’s Art,” however, is the creation of boils on the back of the neck of adolescent male Drycleaners (Figure 2, Fungus the Bogeyman, 36).  To be clear, not every Bogeyman is imbued with the ability of working this charm, for it is an “art that demands an inborn gift, great concentration and long practice”—and Fungus, like his father before him, is a master of engendering a boil so it will begin to “swell, and in the fullness of time, when it reaches maturity, it will flower forth and then, the glorious golden pus” (36). Although Fungus is the epitome of what a Bogeyman ought to be, he is troubled: He is going through an emotional crisis (with a resulting drastic increase in his nasal drip rate to the point of a continuous flow of mucus), as he now ponders the question of why his life is spent frightening Drycleaners—what is the ultimate good or bad in that? The book closes with Fungus lying in bed with his wife, Mildew, musing over “What is the purpose of our existence?” but consoles himself with the thought that “Love is still the Eternal Calm of Strife” (40). As Briggs himself explained to Gravett “Fungus is…like all of us, he wonders what he is alive for. It’s about the search for a role.”

Figure 2, Fungus the Bogeyman, 36

The transition in narrative and character development from Fungus the Bogeyman to Briggs’s following graphic novels Gentleman Jim and When the Wind Blows (in effect its sequel) is surprisingly smooth. Gentleman Jim relates the story of an unsophisticated ordinary Englishman whose job it has been for years to be the custodian and caretaking janitor of an outdoor but underground communal male lavatory (restroom)—a gentlemen’s “public convenience,” which was a once common British traditional urban landmark dating to the Victorian era. Jim, like Fungus, has for years got on with his daily chores dutifully and satisfactorily without grumbling, but he has reached a point when he starts to wonder if there is not more to life—maybe, he muses, he might be in a bit of rut. Accordingly, thinking about better job opportunities he embarks on a series of daydreams: active military life as a Royal Marine or a combat helicopter pilot, but his lack of any formal education is the first of many insurmountable obstacles (Figure 3, Gentleman Jim, 5); maybe an art school education because surely you don’t need much brains to be an artist (some Raymond Briggs self-deprecating dry humour?), but alas Jim learns that too requires higher education; or maybe a business executive, but…. Ultimately Jim decides on becoming, successively, a cowboy and then a Dick Turpinesque highwayman bandit. His first guise ends abruptly when he learns of the high cost of cowboy boots, a Colt .45 revolver (notwithstanding the lack of a firearms permit), and the airfare from Birmingham, UK to Texas. Unfortunately, Jim was more successful with his second (mis)adventure that saw him kitted out in a homemade cardboard tricorn hat, a kid’s toy dart gun, a rubber play sword, old hip waders as highwayman’s boots, one of his mother’s frilly white blouses, a red and black cape made by his patient and obliging wife, and a tired old donkey that came from an animal sanctuary.

Figure 3, Gentleman Jim, 5

To contextualize how the plot then unfolds especially regarding the darkly humorous travails of maintaining a donkey, now renamed Black Bess, in a dense urban environment, Briggs’ own words and fears as captured by Paul Gravett are again helpful. Noting that he himself had a “working-class obedience and fear of minor authority—like parking in the wrong place or not paying my rates [taxes] in time” we can better appreciate Jim’s worries over his conflicts with, respectively, a local city official (for allowing the donkey to graze in a public park); a traffic warden (for having an animal illegally parked on the street); an animal welfare officer (for inadequate housing and feeding the donkey); and a county council inspector (for erecting a donkey shelter without approvals).

These transgressions pale in comparison to the consequences of Jim in full highwayman’s dress and mounted on Black Bess while shouting “Stand and Deliver” and flagging down vehicles on the road in the dead of night, one of which happened unfortunately to be a police car. The subsequent arrest charges portrayed Jim as a drug crazed, sexually deviant, armed robber, a fraudulent extortionist, and a menace to society. The panels and speech bubbles depicting the ensuing court scene make clear that the only mentally disturbed person present is the psychotic bewigged judge who launches into a maniacal diatribe in which he sentences Jim to be “Hanged by the Neck Until Ye Be Dead” at which point a court official gets the proceedings back on track with the judge then ordering Jim’s detainment “during Her Majesty’s Pleasure” pending a psychological/psychiatric assessment of the accused. For his part, Jim is content to be in prison as he is quite honored to be there to please Her Majesty the Queen; moreover, his duties while incarcerated involve cleaning the toilets as he is deemed an “expert,” which is a label he is chuffed about. At the end of the day, Jim did learn his lesson as a common, uneducated, simple, hard working-class English bloke: don’t have ideas above your station in life—ouch! cringe! sigh!  The key theme relevant to this essay is that of mental illness, and how powerful agents of the State (representatives of law and medicine) often will pathologize what is essentially merely eccentric behaviour (pretty common among the British population at the best of times) as lunacy that at best needs to be treated but at worst is punishable. I’m guessing that Raymond Briggs was not familiar with the radical and critical writings of Michel Foucault French philosopher/historian, but they might have discovered common ground over this issue.

When the Wind Blows also features Jim, now freed and in retirement, and his plodding but benign wife, Hilda. At its core, this graphic novel is a searing indictment of the total inadequacy of the risible attempt by the British government to educate its population about the initial effects and catastrophic consequences of any war involving nuclear weapons (based on its 1980 official publication Protect and Survive). Briggs’ book’s title plays on the notion of a nuclear wind/fallout/winter, as p.3 of Protect and Survive states “The radioactive dust, falling where the wind blows it, will bring the most widespread dangers of all,” but also is an allegorical allusion to the nursery rhyme Rock-a-bye Baby (that would have been well known to Briggs based on his earlier award-winning Mother Goose Treasury project), ending cataclysmically with baby, cradle and all, crashing to the ground from the tree. The cover of When the Wind Blows also is influenced by that of the government pamphlet with both having a ghastly mushroom cloud as a central feature (see https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/protect-and-survive). Upon being informed by a civil defense radio announcement that within a matter of days the world would likely explode into war, Jim dutifully protects his property in compliance with the “Govern-mental Directive” with the aim of surviving the crucial 14 days after a nuclear attack (Figure 4, When the Wind Blows, 10). Jim and Hilda buoyed by their memory of the grand old days of World War Two in which the good guys (Churchill, Roosevelt, and even Stalin, along with the English wartime songstress Vera Lynn) and the bad guys (Hitler, Goering, and Mussolini) were easily identifiable, stock up on provisions, including a note to the milkman to deliver 14 pints of milk to last them until the ALL CLEAR announcement that all is well. As further recommended, they secure their personal health and other important documents in a convenient place, crawl into their makeshift in-house shelter (called officially the “inner refuge”), and place paper bags over themselves—and then just w-a-i-t.

Figure 4, When the Wind Blows, 10

The ensuing storyline and illustrations are predictably catastrophic, but no matter how many times one reads this book it still disturbs, and is unsettling. The naïveté and unquestioning blind faith in officialdom displayed by the protagonists might strain the credulity of some North American readers, but as a former Brit myself who has been familiar with British households that were run by World War Two-generation folks, Briggs is bang-on with his characterizations. While understanding what a bomb blast is, Jim and Hilda have no comprehension of radiation sickness so they emerged prematurely from their “inner refuge” knowing that they survived but believing they are safe. They resume their usual tasks and chores as best they can, even taking in a bit of sunbathing.  The panels following track their physical and mental deterioration, beginning with bouts of nausea. Then Briggs depicts their rapid demise in ghoulish tones of deadly paleness punctuated with blue blotches and crimson drops of blood; the ending has Jim and Hilda dying while praying but still together as a loving husband and wife. To elaborate on the themes of health, illness, and death would be redundant, if not gratuitous.

But how does a critically acclaimed author who has chillingly described a nuclear holocaust by personalizing it without caricaturing it proceed with a next project? Enter Wally Burke. Unlucky Wally and Unlucky Wally Twenty Years On were works that polarized Briggs’ loyal readership with some critics decrying them as “infantile,” “dreadful,” and not suitable for children, while others perceptively thought differently: they were “Rabelaisian” in humor, the focus of “love and domestic tenderness,” and immediately personally identifiable as we are all “Wallies and won’t admit it.” Again, to contextualize for a North American audience, the name of the main character is doubly coded as in British urban slang both the first and family names connote a fool or a loser albeit a benign one (perhaps akin to the Mr Bean character created and portrayed by Rowan Atkinson), maybe on par with the Yiddish term putz, yet not an objectionable schmuck or an American jerk. Wally is unlucky for oh so, so many reasons: bad breath, adulthood zits, noisy and smelly farts and other gastric indiscretions, ugliness, a speech impediment, and social incompetence along with extreme shyness.

But wait, there’s still more Wallyness further connecting with themes of illness, disease, and death! He failed his medical examination for entry into the army (in the hope that he might become more of a man), he has dandruff, boils on the back of the neck (recall Fungus the bogeyman’s great skill), warts, piles, and the Dhobi Itch (a fungal infection of the groin). After reading a fabricated library book titled Symptoms, Wally self-diagnoses as a hypochondriac necessitating frequent annoying visits to his doctor who is subsequently driven to distraction, drinking, smoking, pill-popping, and then an early death (Figure 5, Unlucky Wally, 43). Later in life (twenty years on), Wally frets that he might be homosexual after realizing that he has never had a girl; a wholly unsuccessful and embarrassing visit to a prostitute did little to quell Wally’s concerns over his hormonal distress.

Figure 5, Unlucky Wally, 43

Amidst all this over-the-top angst fuelled humor, the reader is jolted by the death of Wally’s parents both in the same year; Briggs specifically tackles the death of Wally’s mother in hospital. In an amalgam of bitterness, poignancy, and gallows humor Biggs writes how Wally “found his Mum lying on an iron trolley under a neon [i.e., florescent] light in a sort of annexe. There was packet of Kleenex and a carton of the powdered cleanser Vim (aka Comet) just by her head. Her jaw had been hastily tied up with gauze and her false teeth stuck out at the wrong angle. Wally had never seen anything so still. When he bent over to kiss her, his nose was running so much it dripped onto her face” (12). The full-page panel (7”x10”) accompanying the text depicts the undignified and ignominious institutional surroundings as described (additionally including stacks of garbage bags) with Wally in an almost praying posture saying “Cheerio Mum” (Figure 6, Unlucky Wally Twenty Years On, 15). Briggs wraps up the book on what is actually a positive note, if a little backhanded, for in the end Wally has no debts, his house is paid for, his funeral is insured, and despite all his ailments and complaints he is healthy, he has no father to boss him, no mother to embarrass him, and no a wife to nag him. The themes of illness, disease, and death are in no way peripheral to the development of the Wally character; indeed, no matter how absurd or exaggerated the health issues might appear they are essential to this work.

Figure 6, Unlucky Wally Twenty Years On, 15

Figure 7, Father Christmas, 21, panel 7

The 1998 memoir, Ethel & Ernest: A True Story, marked a departure from Briggs’ usual fictional characters as Ethel and Ernest were his parents, so this is their story as recalled and told by their son. Yet it is perhaps the thematic culmination of Briggs’ career as a graphic novelist as, with historical hindsight, a close reading and viewing of earlier works reveal clues, hints and resonances of what was to come in Ethel & Ernest. In Father Christmas, Santa Claus exchanges pleasantries with a milkman also on his rounds at 6 a.m.—a clear allusion to Briggs’ father who worked as a London milkman for decades; and for good measure the license plate on the electric milk float is ERB 1900 (Ernest Redvers Briggs who was born in 1900, Figure 7. Father Christmas, 21). Jim and Hilda of Gentleman Jim and When the Wind Blows were based on Briggs’ parents: “Not so much my father, really, but my mum was very much one for not thinking and getting on with the dusting, never challenging authority,” he explained. Likewise in Father Christmas and When the Wind Blows, several panels depicting, respectively, Briggs’ family home in the London suburb of Wimbledon Park (Figure 8, Father Christmas, 16) and its back garden with its World War Two outside bomb shelter (Figure 9, When the Wind Blows, 9) are reprised in Ethel & Ernest (Figure 10, Ethel & Ernest, 38); most dramatic and enigmatic is the almost identical drawing of the hospital death scene of Wally Burke’s mother but then recast as that of the death of Briggs’ own mother, Ethel. Other foreshadowing in the Unlucky Wally series is the statement that Wally’s mother and father died in the same year, as did Briggs’s own parents (in 1971).

Figure 8, Father Christmas, 16                                     Figure 9, When the Wind Blows, 9          Figure 10, Ethel & Ernest, 38

The subtitle to this family memoir, A True Story, is troublesome for me as a professional historian as memories can be as much about forgetting as they are about remembering, to say nothing of how they are then filtered through the minds of those recounting them. Gravett directly addressed this issue in his interview with Briggs who responded by noting that he could “remember so much—even the wallpaper pattern in the airing cupboard…. I had to focus so closely on every detail that sometimes I’d draw things I’d forgotten I knew.”  Without casting doubt on the sincerity of Briggs’ statement, it remains that his renderings of certain events especially as related to illness, disease, and death were likely refracted through the recollections of others, such as the depiction of his own birth at home in 1934. In these panels the attending doctor and nurse-midwife are portrayed as brusque power figures, with the former telling Ernest in curt terms that his son’s birth was “touch and go” and that his wife should not give birth again due to her age (38 years): “More children…no more wife…I’m sorry…Good day to you” (23).

Briggs’ discussion of his wife’s mental illness in Ethel & Ernest is surely based on firsthand testimony. When informing Ethel that the woman (Jean) he was going to marry suffered from “Brain trouble” and that “she goes in an out of the loony bin” his mother responds with “BRAIN TROUBLE! …You mean…she’s—mental?” (84) The significance of this exchange is underscored by the detail and length of discussion Briggs devoted to Jean in his interview with Gravett. “Jean was an artist too,” Briggs explained. “She was a schizophrenic. I knew about her illness when we married, but we were in love and you can’t not love somebody because they are a schizophrenic. …She was in another world anyway. It was bad enough for her to go in and out of the loony bin the whole time. …Jean was a painter. She exhibited at various galleries, but she didn’t do a job. Her moods were not always so great. You never knew what you were about to face. There’d be agoraphobia, claustrophobia, paranoia. But schizophrenia can have its positive side. She was also very emotional and very inspired and inspirational.” Although the British slang term “loony bin” is offensive to many, Briggs’ use of it helps capture the natural register of these exchanges in both casual conversation and in print.

Ethel & Ernest is divided into sections demarcating each decade of the protagonists lives together from 1930 to 1970, but the closing section is devoted to a single year when both died in 1971. Ethel is shown as suffering at home from some never disclosed illness, but then is rushed to hospital. Clearly, she is also suffering from dementia as she no longer can recognize her husband of almost 40 years, although her long-term memory is fully functional as she recalls the name of a movie star from her youth. In a series of five panels, it is the prevailing conditions following Ethel’s death that Briggs describes. She has been shrouded and is lying unceremoniously on a hospital trolley in what is tantamount to a storage room with garbage bags, a box of tissues, and a container of Vim beside her corpse. The speech bubbles convey Briggs himself as her son first enraged and screaming: “WHY IS SHE ON A TROLLEY?…BLOODY KLEENEX and VIM right by her FACE!” then weeping he turns to his father/her husband and whispers “They’ve put her teeth in crooked” (Figure 11, Ethel & Ernest, 95). In the few months after Ethel’s death Ernest is shown as grieving and trying to cope with living alone, which involves still setting two places at mealtimes along with talking to his absent wife. Within a short time, he collapses at home and then also dies in hospital with Briggs and wife Jean at his bedside.

Figure 11, Ethel & Ernest, 95

It is possible to contextualize these tragic events through Briggs’s own words. ‘[M]y mum died at Christmas, probably of cancer. They’d never tell working-class people what’s wrong with them. They’d just say ‘We’re going to do some tests.’ Years before, she had some kidney problems. We got a phone call from the hospital saying she was fighting for her life. By the time we got there, she was dead and she was dumped in some spare room on a trolley next to a packet of Vim cleaner. …Dad died nine months after her from stomach cancer. Obviously, he didn’t want to go on without her. He didn’t have the will to live, making tea [i.e., dinner] for one. Until the end, he’d still set the table for two.” Matching these comments to the corresponding panels and text of Ethel and Ernest is easy, but an additional remark by Briggs while revealing remains puzzling. Regarding the hospital situation of his mother immediately after her death, Briggs stated that it “took me a long time to draw that sequence in Ethel and Ernest.” Such sentiments are understandable, but the fact that he had drawn the identical scene in Unlucky Wally Twenty Years On published in 1989 almost a decade before Ethel and Ernest invites questioning and comparison. Unfortunately, now with Briggs’ own death we must leave this insight hanging unanswered.

Analyzing the graphic novels of Raymond Briggs from the perspective of illness, disease, and death is instructive as it suggests a certain coherence in an otherwise seemingly heterogeneous group of works. Similarly, considering them with an eye to British working-class attitudes to power and authority would be insightful. Overall, despite Briggs’s own self-assessment that he has “never felt optimistic about anything” and always has been “fairly pessimistic, miserable, grumpy and bad-tempered” his œuvre can be read as uplifting and inspirational.

Acknowledgement

This material was first presented orally at the Graphic Medicine annual conference held in Toronto, Canada in July 2023.  I am grateful to Kevin Wolf for inviting me to write this more formal essay, and for his subsequent encouragement. I am also grateful to my friend, colleague, and occasional co-author, Michael G. Rhode, for introducing me to the world of comics and medicine and guiding me through it over the years.

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J.T.H. Connor is John Clinch Professor of Medical Humanities and History of Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, and is also cross-appointed as a Professor of History, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Memorial University. He has published widely on science, medicine, and technology in the Victorian era and in twentieth-century North America.