For most of his life, the French cartoonist Jean-Jacques Sempé, who has died aged 89, would draw a line at talking publicly about his chaotic and unhappy childhood. He was well into his 80s when he finally admitted that the cheerful schoolboy character who would become his most famous creation – Le Petit Nicolas – was a way of dealing with a period in his life that he described as “a little tragic”.
The adventures of Little Nicolas and his band of oddly named friends, all firmly anchored in 1960s France, were “a way to revisit the misery I endured while growing up while making sure everything came out just fine,” Sempé said. “You never get over your childhood. You try to sort things out, to make your memories prettier. But you never get over it.”
