French designer Jean-Jacques Sempé died on Thursday August 11 at the age of 89, his wife Martine Gossieaux Sempé announced to Agence France-Presse. He was known for his illustrations of the adventures of the Little Nicholas and his humorous press cartoons.
“ The cartoonist Jean-Jacques Sempé died peacefully Thursday evening, in his 89th year, in his holiday residence, surrounded by his wife and close friends “said Marc Lecarpentier, his biographer and friend, in a statement to theAFP.
Great French master of humor and poetry, a mixture of derision and modesty, Sempé has traced from the 1950s until today a work full of bonhomie: drawings for the New Yorker, Paris Match Where The Express to the albums of Little Nicholaswhich has now sold some 15 million copies.
A natural child, beaten and stuttering, Sempé did not really have the childhood of his hero Nicolas, whom he raised with René Goscinny (one of Asterix’s fathers) in an idealized France of the 1950s. Born in 1932 In Pessac, near Bordeaux, the son of a delivery man, he himself became a bicycle delivery man, and first distributed wine samples to the major Bordeaux merchants at the age of 16. Sempé himself did not describe himself as a model employee, so at the age of 17, having stopped school and finding himself without a job, he first joined the army in falsifying his age on his papers before his success as a draftsman.
“I am close to my characters, they are like me”
In total, Jean-Jacques Sempé has published a dozen albums in his career. He sold his first boards in 1950 to South West that he signs “DRO” (from “to draw”). Since Little Nicholas which he created in 1959 with René Goscinny, Jean-Jacques Sempé published almost one album a year and signed a hundred front pages in the press, excelling in the art of understatement.
At the time, I was doing a cartoon for a Belgian newspaper, which represented a child. And one day, they told me that they had to find a name for him. I didn’t really know. And then a bus passed with an advertisement for Nicolas wines.
How did the name “Little Nicolas” come about?
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’m a humorist, so I don’t exclude myself from the humanity I draw “, admitted the draftsman to the neat and rare word. “ I am close to my characters, they are like me. By making fun of them, I make fun of myself. »
In each of Sempé’s works, we find his favorite themes: the smallness of man in nature, his loneliness in the city, his arguments, his ridicule and his excessive ambitions, the limits of team spirit.
► Read also: Jean-Jacques Sempé, designer without borders
(With AFP)