Le Petit Nicolas illustrator Jean-Jacques Sempé dies aged 89 | Teen books

Jean-Jacques Sempé, who illustrated the much-loved Little Nicolas sequence of French kids’s books, has died aged 89.

In addition to his work on Le Petit Nicolas, an idealised imaginative and prescient of childhood in Fifties France which grew to become a world bestseller, Sempé illustrated extra New Yorker journal covers than every other artist.

“The cartoonist Jean-Jacques Sempé died peacefully [on] Thursday night, 11 August, 2022, in his 89th yr, at his vacation residence, surrounded by his spouse and his shut associates,” mentioned Marc Lecarpentier, his biographer and good friend, in a press release to Agence France-Presse.

Sempé, who initially wished to be a jazz pianist and had a troublesome childhood, dropped out of faculty at 14 earlier than mendacity about his age to affix the military.

Military life didn’t agree with him, nonetheless, and he began selling drawings to Parisian newspapers.

Whereas working at a press company, he befriended cartooning legend René Goscinny of Asterix fame and collectively in 1959 they invented Little Nicolas.

As we speak the books are worldwide bestsellers with greater than 15m copies offered in 45 nations, they usually have been tailored into a preferred movie and cartoon sequence.

However in 1959 they went largely unnoticed, and Sempé continued to promote drawings to newspapers to make ends meet, an early profession he described as “horrible”.

It was solely in 1978 when he was employed by The New Yorker that he discovered sustainable success. “I used to be virtually 50 and for the primary time in my life, I existed! I had lastly discovered my household,” he mentioned.

Sempé was born close to Bordeaux within the village of Pessac in 1932. His paternity was a thriller that he mentioned haunted him. “You don’t know who you’re, what you’re constructed on,” he later mentioned.

He lived in an abusive foster house earlier than his mom took him again, solely to topic him to additional violence.

“The Nicolas tales have been a solution to revisit the distress I endured whereas rising up whereas ensuring all the pieces got here out simply advantageous,” Sempé mentioned in 2018.

In his work, Sempé put diminutive characters in an outsized world of sentimental strains, revealing amusing and typically caustic truths concerning the world with out ever resorting to mockery.

However the kindness that Sempé confirmed his topics was in distinction to the distress of his personal upbringing. “You by no means recover from your childhood,” he revealed properly into his 80s, having prevented the topic for many years.

“You attempt to type issues out, to make your reminiscences prettier. However you by no means recover from it.”

For a few years Sempé refused to imagine in his personal expertise, attributing what he had achieved to laborious work and sacrifice.

The artist mentioned he might spend so long as three weeks not getting a single drawing proper and that he was able to “not bathing, not sleeping” to complete work on time.