Riad Sattouf

Riad Sattouf was born in Paris, to a Syrian father and French mother, and spent his childhood in Libya and Syria, then returned to France to spend his teenage years in Brittany, studying in Rennes. An avid reader of cartoon books and periodicals, sent to him by his grandmother, he was fascinated by them. Although he was studying to become a pilot, he applied to study at École Pivaut and then Gobelins L'Ecole de L'Image to study animation. The famous cartoonist Olivier Vatine noticed his talent and introduced him to Guy Delcourt, the owner of Delcourt, a publisher specializing in cartoons. Delcourt published Sattouf's first book Petit Verglas based on a story line by Éric Corbeyran.

In a unique personal and humorous style, he narrated his own adolescent life observations in Manuel du puceau and Ma Circoncision published by Bréal Jeunesse Publishing House owned by Joann Sfar. The books were later reprinted by L'Association Publishing House. In Ma circoncision, he denounced circumcision as a cruel and absurd act, superimposed on the context of the socio-political life in his ancestral Syria in the 1980s.

He then published the Jérémie series in the cartoon collection Poisson Pilote published by Dargaud, resulting in three books of the series. Jérémie is the story of a young sentimental and unstable youth growing to adulthood and is very autobiographical. It also appeared in No sex in New York in 2004 on the initiative of the French left-wing daily Libération.

In 2005 he published Retour au collège, an observational study of adolescents in a Parisian middle school, which was a big success. Meanwhile, Sattouf developed the fictional character Pascal Brutal, an embodiment of pure virility. The comedic Pascal Brutal series imagines France of the near-future as an anarchic, neoliberal dystopia where the hero's outlandish machismo is given free rein.

From 2004 to 2014, he published a weekly strip in the satirical French weekly Charlie Hebdo entitled "La vie secrète des jeunes", recounting anecdotal observations of young people in public places. He likened the strip to a fly-on-the-wall nature documentary, and rendered the speech of his subjects with careful attention to sociolinguistic variation. The strips have been republished in three volumes, one in 2007, the second in 2010 and the last one in 2013. In late 2014, he left Charlie Hebdo and moved to Le Nouvel Obs, a weekly magazine, with a new strip called Les cahiers d'Esther (Esther's notebooks), based on true stories told to him by Esther A., a girl who was 9 years old when the strip started.

Sattouf also experimented with film dubbing by giving his voice to a cartoon character in Petit Vampire designed by his friend, cartoonist Joann Sfar. ...

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