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 award-winning graphic memoir hexalogy L'Arabe du futur (The Arab of the Future) and for his award-winning film Les Beaux Gosses (The French Kissers). He also worked for the satirical French weekly Charlie Hebdo for ten years, from 2004 to mid-2014, 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 L'Ecole de L'Image 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 Sattouf's 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 L'Association Publishing House. In Ma circoncision, he denounced circumcision as a cruel and absurd act, superimposed on the context of the socio-political 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 left-wing 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 near-future as an anarchic, neoliberal dystopia where the hero's outlandish machismo is given free rein.