Jean-Jacques Sempé

Jean-Jacques Sempé

Jean-Jacques Sempé (or simply Sempé, as he signs his work) moved to a Paris that had always fascinated him at eighteen, where he worked as a wine dealer. However, his illustrations were called to colonize children's libraries around the world, and soon he parked the bicycle he used for the deals. His first steps as an illustrator came from the hand of French magazines and newspapers such as Paris Match and L’Express, which found in their cartoons the perfect vehicle for criticism and social satire. His watercolors, covered with lyricism and apparent simplicity, ended up crossing the borders of Gallic journalism to reach the literary, and today has more than forty books behind him. Special mention deserves Catherine (Blackie Books, 2014), who signed with the Nobel Prize Patrick Modiano, and the hilarious adventures of Little Nicholas, the character he created with René Goscinny and which has been translated into more than thirty languages. But Sempé is a wonderful cartoonist who also writes wonderful stories. Like this, Marcelín, about a child who can't help but blush. Maybe the same thing happens to its creator, who knows, because he once said: "I draw my own weaknesses."