Gentleman Jim

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Whenever he has finished cleaning, and checked the toilet rolls, he has a break and reads newspapers while he sups his well-earned cuppa. As a tale of thwarted ambition, it is heartbreaking, but Briggs never succumbs to a dark kind of despair. But the authority figures look like cruel, vicious robots, and all largely the same as one another; utterly impersonal.

The satire and humour become more caustic at this point, as the target expands from the dumb naivete of the protagonist to the cold, harsh authoritarianism of the real world; if this is what the world is like, Jim's desire to escape into a boys' adventure book version of the world is understandable.His walls are lined with books like "Out in the Silver West," "The Boys' Book of Pirates," and "Executive Opportunities," which provide fodder for his ruminations on career change. The authority figures are faceless, patronising and uniform (with the exception of a splendidly splenetic judge) as Briggs plays with artistic techniques throughout. Jim's various run-ins with authority are amusing, but the humour gets progressively black as he ends up before a magistrate and ends up in jail, still cleaning the toilets (he's an expert, after all) and apparently oblivious to the fact that being literally imprisoned isn't much worse than the metaphorical prison he was in at the beginning of the book. And the supreme example of this inhumanity is the judge, terrifyingly obscured, with glimpses of harsh, sharp features.

His walls are lined with books like Out in the Silver West, the Boys' Book of Pirates and Executive Opportunities, which provide fodder for his ruminations on career change. The Cruelty man is going to do Legal Proceeding to me if it’s not up, and the Planning man is going to prosticute me if it’s not down. 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 . 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. Later in his career, Briggs shifted his focus from charming children's tales to more somber adult-oriented stories including Gentleman Jim, the tale of a working class hero, and When the Wind Blows, a story confronting the horrors of nuclear war.No tiene la profundidad de 'Cuando el viento sopla' compartiendo el mismo esquema: persona inocente que choca con el mundo real, pero el personaje es igualmente tierno y se lee con agrado. 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. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. It led to the much-loved animated short film, which is still broadcast on television every Christmas, and a musical adaptation which is staged almost as often. But the real world does not work like that, and increasingly he is subjected to an endless procession of petty officials marching into his life, and a succession of authority figures bringing all manner of threats, trouble and summonses.

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. He's pretty passive, as his supportive wife, who encourages him to follow dreams inspired by comics and adventure stories, to become a cowboy and other far-fetched schemes. Should he then become a cowboy - or a highwayman, just like the “Gentleman Jim” in one of his books, sitting astride his trusty steed, the charger “Black Bess”?First published in 1980, two years after The Snowman, Gentleman Jim has been unavailable for many years. Some full pages are quite beautiful, especially those where Jim fantasises about becoming an artist, or is avidly reading aloud the purple prose of his romantic adventure stories.

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.We see by the captions on the strip story, Jim’s painful spelling-out of the unfamiliar words and their context on the page. It's a sad, sweet little story about Jim Bloggs, an older fellow who wants to do more with his life than clean toilets, but finds himself foiled every time by cost, experience, and knowledge.