Gentleman Jim

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First published in 1980, two years after The Snowman, Gentleman Jim has been unavailable for many years. He’d already produced The Snowman , but it would be several years before the animated version accorded him national treasure status. Not getting the quiet pathos, that struck me more reading it now some 30+ years later, but certainly the humour that Briggs brings to all his works. The jobs in the paper all seem to need O or A levels, and Jim doesn't know what 'The levels' are, so he starts to think of other occupations that he might enjoy. Another jokey meaning is revealed later, but this is the story of Jim Bloggs, a public lavatory attendant, who works cleaning the underground toilets in a street in Birmingham.

A darkly humorous, kafkaesque story about a British middle-aged man Jim Bloggs who has been working as a lavatory attendant his whole life and who dreams of a more exciting, adventurous job with more of a challenge.

Jim sets out to bring these dreams to fruition by accumulating various accoutrements, only to discover that the life of an executive, an artist, or a cowboy is more complicated and costly than it appears. But the authority figures look like cruel, vicious robots, and all largely the same as one another; utterly impersonal. Briggs’ social critiques would become more strident in later works, particularly the savage anger over the Falklands war displayed in the illustrated book The Tin Pot Foreign General and the Iron Woman . It is a protest against economic rationalism and the bean-counters, who refuse to take the total human experience when evaluating the living standards of those who work for a wage. The walls in his cubby hole in the public toilets are lined with books like “Executive Opportunities”, and “How to be a Diplomat”, but there are also books he has eagerly acquired from the local library, such as “Out in the Silver West”, and “The Boys’ Book of Pirates”.

Never forgetting he’s producing a children’s story, Briggs takes his first tentative steps at also appealing to adults as the bigger picture addresses the failures of British social systems, and the manner in which everyone is assigned a place and not expected to rise above it, still common in the late 1970s. Born in Wimbledon in 1934, he studied at the Slade School of Fine Art and went on to produce a treasure trove of work. Oddly too, because his work is read by people who do not normally read comics, the British comics industry tend to ignore his work, because they just do not consider what he does as proper comics.He had tried to get the right forms and permission, but time and time again he had fallen foul of the bureauocratic process.