Since Petit Nicolas, which he created in 1959 with his friend René Goscinny (one of the fathers of Asterix), Jean-Jacques Sempé has published almost one album a year, signed a hundred front pages of the New Yorker and published dozens of boards in the Express and Paris Match, excelling in the art of understatement.

Like Chaval, Bosc and Savignac - his idols - and the Anglos-Saxons who invented cartooning in the 1930s, he created a world where drawing defied thought: "Tout se complique" (1963), "Des highs and lows" (1970), "A slight shift" (1977), "Vaguely competitive" (1985), "Staying the course" (2020).

Improbable musicians, Sunday painters, megalomaniac writers, mythomaniac bosses or butterfly collectors: Sempé's hero is a little fellow, like Marcellin Cailloux, the blushing little boy, or Monsieur Lambert, the office worker with narrow shoulders and high voice.

Their candor saves them from ridicule.

"I am a comedian, so I do not exclude myself from the humanity that I draw", admitted the designer with his neat and rare speech.

"I am close to my characters, they are my fellows. By making fun of them, I make fun of myself".

Silent about his talent, the man with large sensitive blue eyes spoke only of his "relentlessness" at work: able to stumble for two months on a single drawing without going out, this slender former sportsman, with British charm, compared himself to a "digger ".

"Drawing, I was not particularly good at it. I got away with it because I worked a lot".

His first album, "Rien n'est simple" (1961), set the tone for his entire career, which he went through with anguish.

After "horrible beginnings", the ordeal, he said, lasted more than fifteen years until 1978 when he was hired at the New Yorker.

"I was almost 50 years old and for the first time in my life, I existed! I had finally found my family!".

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Before that, however, he had published a dozen albums - "Saint Tropez", "Tout se complicate" and especially "Petit Nicolas", which has sold some 15 million copies today.

But then he sold few books, made a bad living from them and was constantly afraid of the blank page.

master of levity

A natural child, beaten and stuttering, "Jeannot" did not really have the childhood of his hero Nicolas whom he grew up with Goscinny in an idealized France of the 1950s. "You never recover from your childhood", confided he in Paris Match at 88 years old.

He was born on August 17, 1932 in Pessac, near Bordeaux, from an affair between a boss and his secretary.

As a child, his mother snatches him in extremis from an abusive nurse.

Then comes Monsieur Sempé, a seller of tin cans who adopts him but waters his meager sales a little too much.

"Come closer I'll give you a slap that the wall will give you another," his mother shouted at him.

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A storyteller to hide poverty, he leads the rows at school while being very shy.

Thanks to the radio, he escapes from the home and discovers Ray Ventura and Duke Ellingon, his masters for life.

Out of school for two years due to the war, he learned spelling in women's magazines and discovered humorous drawing there.

His dream is to learn the piano, "but it was easier to find a pencil and paper than a piano".

The upset music lover takes to drawing "like crazy, all the time" in the hopes of bringing home some money.

"I convinced myself that I wanted to. In fact, not so much, no. Even now, by the way," he confided to Le Monde.

Wine delivery man after leaving school at 14, he sold his first boards in 1950 to Sud Ouest, which he signed "DRO" (from "to draw").

Then, for lack of means of subsistence, he went to Paris and joined the army where he was often sent to the hole for indiscipline.

"I found the Parisians very cheerful. I was immediately enchanted by the metro, the buses, the fever of the city. And above all, I cycled a lot", until a stroke in 2007 which paralyzes him, except his right hand.

After that, "I was furious, I argued with the Most High. In which I don't believe, but you never know!", He joked in 2020, still at his work table in Montparnasse.

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Married three times and father of two children - a deceased son and a daughter, designer, "very hard" with him - he confessed to having worked too much and "not having been up to it".

The irony of fate for this master of lightness.

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© 2022 AFP