Riad Sattouf

Riad Sattouf Arabic رياض سطوف born 5 May 1978 is a French cartoonist comic artist and film director Sattouf is best known for his awardwinning graphic memoir hexalogy LArabe du futur The Arab of the Future and for his awardwinning film Les Beaux Gosses The French Kissers He also worked for the satirical French weekly Charlie Hebdo for ten years from 2004 to mid2014 publishing drawing boards of one of his major works La vie secrète des jeunes 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 LEcole de LImage 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 Sattoufs 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 LAssociation Publishing House In Ma circoncision he denounced circumcision as a cruel and absurd act superimposed on the context of the sociopolitical 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 leftwing 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 nearfuture as an anarchic neoliberal dystopia where the heros 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 flyonthewall 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 dEsther Esthers 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 Source Article Riad Sattouf from Wikipedia in English licensed under CCBYSA 30