The Snowman

This has it all. Every time I see the cover I think of the house where I grew up and I can picture the scene in the lounge on Christmas morning where I’m sorting the presents into piles for when my grandparents arrive, while watching this on BBC2. One year I got given it as a book, and it was a different experience to read it, but just as lovely.

The Snowman needs no introduction. And it also deals with bereavement in a more oblique way: the boy’s snowman melts in the final image of the final page, essentially dying. But the boy doesn’t feel the loss of an inanimate object, he feels the pain and loss of losing a friend with whom he’s shared games and adventures. The wordless narrative also allows parents to supply their own dialogue, or let the reader ask questions of their own. 

First published in 1987, I puzzled over The Snowman for years. Librarians called it a children’s book classic. Here’s the thing that bothered me, though. Briggs uses wordless comic panels to tell his story, and I never once heard it called a comic. This is before the term graphic novel was embraced by publishers, schools, libraries, and, finally, the public, so it took me a while to figure out that it was Briggs’s softly colored illustration style that wiped the word comics from most people’s vocabulary, but it is comics. A brilliantly executed wordless comic! And this book absolutely inspired… show more.

The famous animated film began life here, as a wordless picturebook. As with Wave and Sidewalk Flowers, it’s a very immersive reading experience, there is a real sense of being in the book and experiencing the child’s journey.

Briggs’ coloured pencil art is soft and beautiful, his storytelling humorous, often hilarious, and ultimately unsentimental. The snowman melts, as is the way of snowmen, but what a wonderful adventure the boy and he (and we) share before he does.