How Riad Sattouf uses his cartoons to draw a window into the Middle East

One early evening in December, the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad run away his country as rebel forces advanced on Damascus. In France, three days later, one of the country’s most watched TV news channels turned to a cartoonist for expert opinion on the news.

“Do you think this could happen so quickly?” a news anchor for the channel, BFMTV, asked the cartoonist, Riad Sattouf, whose smiling face appeared on a giant video wall.

Over the past decade, Mr. Sattouf, 46, has become one of France’s biggest literary stars, thanks in large part to his masterpiece, “The Arab of the Future”, a series of graphic memories. In more than six volumes, the series tells the story of Mr. Sattouf’s childhood, which was split between the Middle East and France, and the disintegration of the marriage between his French mother and his Syrian father.

The books – in a genre known as “bandes dessinées” in France – have sold more than three million copies and have been translated into about 23 languages. Although told from a child’s perspective and drawn in a deceptively simple style, they touch on some of the thorniest questions about the compatibility of the Western and Arab worlds. They are also laced with subtle but wry social satire.

For Mr. Sattouf, this stance informs not only his art, but the way he interprets the world. In his television appearance in December, he told viewers that the fall of Mr. al-Assad was a moment of “immense hope” for Syria. But when asked to predict what might happen next, he warned that he tends to see things “extremely pessimistically”.

“I have my fingers crossed,” he said, “that a terrible dictatorship will not be replaced by another dictatorship.”

Mr. Sattouf, who was born in France, grew up enamored of the American cartoonist’s brutally honest and sometimes offensive work. Robert Crumb. His work also follows in the tradition of comics that offer readers an intimate view of characters living through pivotal historical moments, including “Mouse” by Art Spiegelman and “Persepolis” by Marjane Satrapi.

For years, Mr. Sattouf wrote a cartoon strip for Charlie Hebdo, a French satirical magazine. He stopped contributing a few months before January 2015, when the magazine’s offices were targeted in a deadly terrorist attack for its depiction of the Prophet Muhammad. Mr. Sattouf did not draw Muhammad’s cartoons; his strip had been focused on funny, and sometimes depressing, scenes of everyday life that he encountered in the streets and in the metro of Paris.

In “The Arab of the Future,” Mr. Sattouf paints a complex portrait of his father, who made his way from a small rural village in Syria to the Sorbonne University in Paris, where he received a Ph.D. in history and met the woman who would have become Mr. Sattouf’s mother. The cartoonist also portrays his father as sliding, over the years, in a state of permanent bitterness towards the West and an embrace of strong anti-democratic Arabs.

Some of the most interesting pages in the series depict Mr. Sattouf’s experience as a child in Ter Maaleh, his father’s village. He moved there in the 1980s, while he was in primary school, and lived there during the dictatorial rule of Mr. al-Assad’s father, Hafez al-Assad.

Mr. Sattouf’s memories of Ter Maaleh are vivid and coruscating. French journalist Stéphane Jarno recently described depictions of the city as “a few buildings surrounded by emptiness, a micro-society steeped in blind piety and power struggles, seemingly with little love but much violence.”

This willingness to pull no punches about his experience in Syria puts Mr. Sattouf in a loose but important category of French public figures with roots in the Arab world who are not afraid to criticize. It can be a fraught position.

Algerian author Kamel Daoud, who now lives in France, recently won the Prix Goncourt, France’s most prestigious literary award, for a novel that dealt with the complex history of Algeria’s civil war. In the past, Mr. Daoud, who openly discussed sensitive religious topics, was the subject of a death threat by an Algerian imam. More recently, Mr. Daoud has he complained that he was punished by elements of the French left because “he is not a good Arab, who is in a permanent state of de-colonial victim”.

Somehow, Mr. Sattouf largely avoided that fate. He has been a vocal critic of French media since at least the mid-2000s, when, as a young man, he published what he called “sexual and provocatively funny” comics. At the same time, he said in a recent interview, he had never faced a reaction from Islamist groups.

“Never,” he said, smiling. “Because my comics are so good.”

The line was delivered with some kind of joke, not joking.

Mr. Sattouf met for the interview in Rennes, the capital of Brittany, at the end of last month. He comes across as both goofy and serious, with a calm voice that oscillated in the interview between French and a functional English he said he learned by binge watching “Seinfeld.”

He insisted, as he has in the many interviews he has given since the flight of Mr. al-Assad, that he is not an expert on the Middle East. “It’s very complicated for me,” he said. “My books are about Syria, but in my books I tell stories about my family. I tell my memory, my point of view as a child.

The books describe a childhood of heartbreaking change, with a love for drawing and cartooning as a refuge and a constant.

When he was 12, he left Ter Maaleh, returning to Brittany with his two younger brothers and his mother, as his parents’ marriage had begun to crumble. He has not returned to Syria since.

In France, he said, he found freedom of expression crucial to his job. He also saw with concern that some French leaders appeared to embrace Mr. al-Assad. He made a specific note of the 2008 decision of Nicolas Sarkozy, then the French president, to invite Mr. al-Assad to Paris for the Bastille Day.

When the revelations of the Syrian regime’s atrocities came to light, Mr. Sattouf said he felt a sense of vindication.

“We saw that the story I told in my books was closer to reality than what you can see in the media,” he said.

Mohamed-Nour Hayed, 22, a Franco-Syrian activist and writer who received asylum in France. the civil war in Syriarecalls first reading “The Arab of the Future” at the age of 15. He said he was concerned that Mr. Sattouf’s negative portrayal of Syria might reinforce stereotypes among readers who only see a depiction of “a Syria very closed.”

But Mr Hayed also praised the series and said it had influenced him when he wrote his first novel, which is set during the war. Like “The Arab of the Future,” Mr. Hayed said, it is written from a child’s perspective.

In addition to writing “The Arab of the Future,” Mr. Sattouf directed two films. “The beautiful children,” or “The French Kissers,” a coming-of-age comedy, won a César for best first film. At the end of last year, he published the first volume of “I, Fadi, the stolen brother” a series spin-off to “The Arab of the future”, based on the interview with his younger brother, who, Mr. Sattouf said, was taken from France in Syria by his father brother was a child.Mr Sattouf, in the interview, described it as kidnapping.

When asked to fill in exactly what happened to his brother later, Mr. Sattouf refused, saying that he did not want to give the rest of the story, to be published in later volumes.

The first four volumes of the “Arab” series were translated into English; Fantagraphics, a US-based comic book publisher, plans to publish versions of the final volumes, as well as the new series. Many French bookstores currently feature large cardboard displays showing Mr. Sattouf’s books, along with a photograph of his face. Outside Rennes station recently, a middle-aged man recognized Mr. Sattouf and ran to shake his hand.

And the French media continue to turn to him to learn about the fall of the Assad regime.

Mr Sattouf told regional newspaper Ouest-France that holding democratic elections “in a country fractured by 13 years of civil war required immense political will, but also international support”.

He told the conservative newspaper Le Figaro that living under Assad’s rule in Syria had imbued him with “a certain paranoia, let’s say, a mistrust that has become part of my personality.”

He also spoke to La Croix newspaper about returning to Syria one day.

“But this can only happen in a peaceful and democratic Syria,” he said. “For now, it’s still a distant and fantastic prospect.”