Jean-Jacques Sempe (August 18, 1932, Pessac) died on the night of Friday the 11th, after a long illness. France he loses the happiest, most luminous and most triumphant «resistant» of his darkest and most tragic years.
Sempé was married three times, to Christine Courtois, Mette Ivers and Martine Gosseaux. His first sonJean-Nicolas he died prematurely. His daughter, Igna Sempé, will watch over a considerable inheritance: the dozens of books and millions of copies give the cartoonist’s heroes a solid monetary immortality.
Little Nicholas is the most famous and emblematic character of Sempé, cartoonist, “humorist”, whose work took on a cosmopolitan and international dimension through the covers of the New Yorkerfrom 1978, installed at the top of the “joke” and the French, European cartoon, through South West, Le Figaro, L’Express, The new observer, Paris Matchamong other publications.
Sempé published drawings and comic strips in the provincial press (Bordeaux) during the 1950s, when he came across Rene Goscinny, already relatively famous, in the Paris offices of a Belgian press agency, World Press. A great friendship and a legend was born.
Goscinny, one of the parents of the future Asterix, and Sempé, imagined a character, Little Nicolas, who would soon become a legend, destined to grow for more than half a century and twenty volumes, sold by millions of copies in five continents.
Through his drawings, Sempé remembered his childhood. Through his stories, Goscinny recounted the metamorphoses of a France that had emerged from the tragic trauma of the Occupation during World War II and was transforming at a dizzying pace.
The collaboration between Sempé and Goscinny lasted many years. Both creators had many other lives, personal and creative. Asterix and Obelix burst onto the mythological scene of the great characters of their time. ANDl Little Nicholas he remained a child, for eternity. But Sempé created many other characters, most of the time without names, who are always different faces of the same man or woman, who is still a child, walking, alone, crossing, Olympic, the loneliness of life, the dramas of history, without ever, ever losing a bright and happy smile.
“I have never become an adult”
This Olympic dimension of Little Nicolas and of all Sempé’s characters is perhaps a unique case in the history of French culture of our time, not only graphic, visual.
“Over the years, I have managed to be reasonable, occasionally. But I have never become an adult«, confessed Sempé years ago, summarizing his life and his work with twelve words.
Sempé was a natural child, born before his mother’s marriage. His adoptive father, Monsieur Sempé, was an unlucky trade representative. The Sempé child had an unlucky or unlucky childhood. His parents fought loudly, with barely contained violence, very often, insulting each other and saying horrors in the presence of the child.
The school was a kind of «refuge» for the Sempé child, a poor student with little or no interest in «culture», much more fascinated by popular music (orchestra de Ray Ventura), police novels (Fantomas), “feminine” magazines, where she discovers cartoons, “splendid” illustrations, so far removed from the sad reality of poor, modest, humble, gray and black France, where she begins to become in man.
That unhappy family childhood ended with the “flight” to Paris, where he enlisted in the army with false papers, taking refuge in “military service” to escape to other more or less unpleasant realities. His first jobs, in the south, as a distributor of many different products, by bicycle, had been a failure. His first drawings, in Bordeaux, were much more stimulating.
Like the Zazie of Raymond Queneau and Louis Malle, the Sempé boy, in Bordeaux and the Pyrenees, the young Sempé, in Paris, is a vagabond at all times marveling at his discoveries of the mysteries of Paris. That rebellious child, irresistibly happy and optimistic, is the physical and spiritual matrix of the entire life and work of Sempé, undefeated witness and protagonist of all the crises in France and other countries.