It was, he said, "clean, pleasant, fresh and wordless and quick". Most of the children who see Raymond Briggs' The Snowman this Christmas will have no idea that he drew the most terrifying cartoon in the language, nor the most deliberately revolting, Fungus the Bogeyman. Children's picture books – though Briggs is by no means just a children's author – traditionally end in happy resolution and sleep. Briggs can do that: in The Elephant and the Bad Baby, in print since 1969, the child learns to say please before bedtime (even though the elephant himself sets a poor example). After the 1970s his work acquired a more misanthropic and political edge, including a vision of a nuclear winter in When the Wind Blows. (Briggs is very good, perhaps better than Bruegel, at drawing winter.) His characters – tubby, prosaic and sketched in pencil and crayon – began to defecate, grumble and even die. But what could easily be crass scatology becomes, in Briggs' hands, tender and human. The short time the boy hero spends with the wordless Snowman before he melts conveys the wonderful brevity of the season. His Father Christmas is curmudgeonly, anxious to finish his round and return to a solitary TV dinner with a cheap red, and is all the more credible for it. Who could fail to believe in such a bad-tempered old man? At 77, Briggs now draws less than before. He must surely derive satisfaction from the thought that, each year, new children share the infantile joy of seeing Father Christmas sat on the loo.