reader-viewer by withholding precise information about the three games which are
central to the story, thus drawing attention to our dependency upon sufficient
information to bridge narrational gaps. Their story Monsters (1989), for example, is
essentially postmodernist and raises questions about the relationship between creator
and creation, the nature of reality, and of the creative process itself. Young thinkers can
cut their philosophical teeth on all of these multilayered works.
Raymond Briggs. Briggs has been consistently diverse in both graphic technique, and
in thematic range, particularly in the cartoon picture book. His work spans the concerns
of the complete age range. Fungus the Bogeyman (1978) is a tour of an alternative
society with a novella-length text delivered in hundreds of fragments of dozens of styles
of discourse. In The Snowman (1978) he uses a wordless picture strip form for his lyrical
account of a small child’s dreams, and the reality of the morning’s thaw. With gentle
satire he challenges the traditional view of Father Christmas, showing him at work and
on holiday. In other picture books, satire takes on an increasingly darker dominant mode,
notably in Gentleman Jim (1980), a bleak vision of consumerism and bureaucracy, and
the apocalyptic When the Wind Blows (1983). The theme of the power of irreconcilable
differences over love and goodwill, is shaped with wit and vigour for two distinct
audiences in The Man (1992) and The Bear (1994), both of which show the development
and inevitable deterioration of a pair of would-be friendships, and witness Briggs’s
refusal to sentimentalise. In The Man, a boy harbours a thoroughly demanding manikin
who challenges his (and our) assumptions over a range of social issues. In The Bear, for
younger beholders, a little girl tries but fails to domesticate her magnificent polar visitor.
Anthony Browne is a major international picture book maker. His pictorial style is
characterised by surrealistic and fantastic imagery, the recurring major image of a
gorilla and a mode of depiction which, with its intense care to selected details and
textures, gives the quality of non-photographic realism. Browne works on the very
boundaries of form, and theme, and his illustrations are rich with the visual equivalent
of transtextual and intertextual allusions. His visual interpretation of Hansel and Gretel
(1981) accords with a Freudian analysis of the tale, and employs a symbolic mode which
includes sets of images to represent the children’s conflicting feelings about their
mother, who shares the same facial features as those of the witch. His own tale of
transformation, Gorilla (1983) shows the complex psychological relationship between a
child and her father, while a picture book for the very young, Bear Hunt (1979) reworks
Crockett Johnson’s Harold and the Purple Crayon (1957) to social and political ends. In
Zoo (1992), Browne compares the behaviour of powerful animals rendered powerless,
and literally trapped in cages, with specimens of mankind, free but metaphorically
trapped in brutish responses to each other and the immediate environment.
Marcia Brown has made very individual versions of traditional tales in traditional
media. Cinderella (1954) a picture story book, illustrated in water colour and crayon,
has witty drawings, coloured chiefly in rose and blue, their spirit matched by the Bembo
text type. Once a Mouse (1961) is an Indian fable of transformations, illustrated in wood
cut, with colour. Intended for a young child, this is a distinguished picture book, rich in
visual interest and contrast.
John Burningham has provided a series of benchmarks of excellence. Borka, the
Adventures of a Goose with no Feathers (1963) is an exemplar of a painterly book, the
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