French cartoonist Jean-Jacques Sempé, who illustrated the much-loved 'Le Petit Nicolas' ('Little Nicolas') collection 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 Nineteen Fifties France which grew to become a world best-seller, Sempé grew to become identified for his distinctive model of droll humour, and illustrated extra New Yorker journal covers than some other artist.
Sempé’s spouse, Martine Gossieaux Sempé, introduced the dying to AFP alongside an announcement from his biographer Marc Lecarpentier.
"The cartoonist Jean-Jacques Sempe died peacefully (Thursday) night, August 11 (2022), in his 89th yr, at his vacation residence, surrounded by his spouse and his shut associates," mentioned Lecarpentier.
French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne led the tributes to the cartoonist, stating that "Sempé was the drawing and the textual content. It was smiles and poetry. It was generally tears in your eyes since you had been laughing, and tonight, it is tears of emotion."
French President Emmanuel Macron wrote that “the jazz, the tender irony, the refined intelligence … We will be unable to overlook Jean-Jacques Sempé.”
Sempé, who initially needed to be a jazz pianist and had a troublesome childhood, dropped out of faculty aged 14 earlier than mendacity about his age to affix the military.
Military life did not agree with him, nonetheless, and he started promoting 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'.
"The Nicolas tales had been a strategy to revisit the distress I endured whereas rising up whereas ensuring all the things got here out simply superb," Sempé mentioned in 2018.
At present the books are worldwide best-sellers with greater than 15 million copies offered in 45 international locations, and have been tailored into a preferred movie and cartoon collection.
The newest manufacturing impressed by the works, Amandine Fredon and Benjamin Massoubre’s Little Nicholas – Joyful As Can Be, gained the highest prize on the Annecy Worldwide Animation Movie Competition in June.
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