Sempé-bus66

This spring day in Paris in 1954 should go down in comic and literary history. The later Asterix author René Goscinny met the draftsman Jean-Jacques Sempé that day, and as Sempé later recalled, Goscinny “had just come over by ship from the USA, which impressed me greatly at the time”.

However, by that time, after his years in New York, Goscinny had settled in Europe again, initially in Brussels. Sempé probably let his memory down on this. However, what is undeniable: “We became friends. (…) He was my first friend in Paris. If not my first boyfriend ever. It was humor that bonded us.”

While Sempé had already started drawing humorous pictures with a little boy as the hero before this encounter, Goscinny then made up the stories to go with them. This is how the “adventures of little Nick” came about, initially as a comic strip, later as illustrated stories, with which even more than Goscinny Jean-Jacques Sempé, who died in 1977, became world famous. The very first, published on September 25, 1955 in the Belgian magazine “Le Moustique”, indicates what would later follow in hundreds of Nick stories. Little Nick gets a drum as a gift. His facial expression is beaming with joy, naive, resolute; the helplessness, especially as far as the adults are concerned, is not yet recognizable. But Sempé’s cheerful, subtle character line certainly does. Of course, Nick tries the drum. What disturbs and frightens the parents, and the neighbors even more, to the extent that the adults have loud discussions – and little Nick loudly asks for quiet.

You can’t help but like little Nick, admire him for coming to terms with the malaise of everyday life, wish him luck even when he messes up. The comedy here is often naturally cheerful, and yet there is always something behind it, something unnameable, without it becoming gloomy or even black. First and foremost, little Nick was always about friendship, says Sempé. But in the subtext there are always family quarrels and the longing for being protected, being cared for. Which was not the case in Jean-Jacques Sempé’s childhood and adolescence.

Born in Pessac near Bordeaux in 1932, the boy grew up in disorderly circumstances: with a mother who constantly had money problems and an alcoholic stepfather who tried to support the small family as a grocer.

His childhood mainly consisted of “fights, arguments, debts and hasty moves,” Sempé said in interviews. He was expelled from school, the Collège Moderne in Bordeaux for bad behavior, then struggled through with various jobs to be drafted into military service at the age of 18 and ended up in Paris. The teachers at his school had already noticed his marked talent for drawing, and the young Jean-Jacques Sempé then began to work in Paris as a caricaturist for press agencies and magazines, including “Paris Match” and “Marie Claire”, tirelessly and enormously productively. He remained loyal to little Nick, his best friend, for a long time, even after the volumes had long since become classics of children’s literature. In the case of magazines, however, he only made an exception for the “New Yorker”, for which he drew more than fifty covers and countless caricatures.

The books that this life-loving Frenchman has done with his compatriot, the writer Patrick Modiano, “Catherine, the Little Dancer” and with his publishing colleague Patrick Süskind, “The Story of Herr Sommer” are also great. Both are stories of small, not particularly happy, but brave people who bravely struggle through life.

“I think,” Sempé once said, “people are very brave. Life is actually too hard for us. We always have to overcome fears. We draw tremendous strength from these fears. And these powers can be very weird. I hope that my drawings will not be misunderstood as an expression of glee. It’s not my aim to make fun of people.”

The volume that Diogenes Verlag is now releasing as a kind of Sempé’s legacy (it’s from 1990) confirms the sentences above: it’s called “Final Holidays” and is full of summery drawings and scenes by the sea, all in a soft, pale, almost milky tone light bathed. The people who can be seen in the pictures enjoy the holidays, they almost get lost in the respective surroundings. There is always a slight melancholy, a hint of loneliness, and yet one notices the great sympathy that Sempé has for them, how much he allows them their holidays. Jean-Jacques Sempé died Thursday at his holiday resort in southern France, just days before his 90th birthday, his biographer Marc Lecarpentier said.