British Illustrators 14: Raymond Briggs and The Snowman

If we’re looking for a challenger to Beatrix Potter’s crown as top British writer/illustrator, then we probably don’t need to look any further than Raymond Briggs. In fact, you could make a case that Raymond Briggs is more versatile than Beatrix Potter was, since he has proven he can write equally well for children and adults. Twice winner of the Kate Greenaway medal, he’s unlucky not to have won it a third time yet. Mind you, nobody else has won it three times either.

I thoroughly enjoyed making my copy from “The Snowman”. It was interesting to read that Raymond Briggs chose to use coloured pencils for the book because he wanted to do something quick, clean and fresh – his words. Personally, I found that as much as I enjoyed trying to imitate his style, it was by no means a quick process. Quiet a rewarding one, though. 

British Illustrators 13: Pete Sutherland and “The Tough of the Track”

Even growing up in the 70s as I did, there were still comic strips around which were hangovers from the golden age of the 40s, 50s and 60s. Sports stories were one mainstay of these – with the football based strip “Roy of the Rovers” being the most famous. I was never a fan of the adventures of the eponymous Roy Race, but I did really like a strip called “The Tough of the Track”, which chronicled the adventures of working class amateur athlete Alf Tupper. Alf Tupper was a sometime welder, sometime plumber, whose training methods consisted of not a lot more than a quick run around the block, and a diet of fish and chips. He was in a running battle with the ‘posh’ authorities in the Amateur Athletic Association, and the posh but inferior runners they selected to represent Great Britain ahead of indomitable Alf. The strip ran for about 40 years, all told, until the early 90s. It was drawn by many hands at different times, but is most closely associated with Peter Sutherland. Peter Sutherland joined the staff of D.C. Thompson in Dundee after serving in World War II, and he remained working at a prolific rate on a wide variety of strips until just before his death in 1977. He’s best remembered for “The Tough of the Track”, though.