She was one of the two mothers of Tom-Tom and Nanathe magazine’s flagship comic strip i like to read has lent his pen to Jacqueline Cohen’s screenplays for more than three decades. Bernadette Després, the designer and co-creator of the series, died on Tuesday, November 19, at the age of 83. She leaves behind a wealth of works, which have left their mark on generations of young readers, reaching, over the years, issues and albums, a much wider audience than that of the magazine published by Bayard.
We no longer feature Tom-Tom and Nana, the two children causing the despair of the parents and the joy of the customers at La Bonne Fourchette, the family restaurant that they liven up with their arguments, pranks and, rarely, with their punches. . of genius. The life of Bernadette Després, and especially her work before the series, remains largely unknown. Born in 1941 into a large Catholic family, Bernadette Després was an average student, saved by a passion for drawing, which she discovered as a teenager. Her parents, whom she had thanked all her life for their open-mindedness, let her enroll, after first grade, in a drawing class for girls on rue Beethoven in the 16th arrondissement of Paris.
Four years later, she released: “She lived on the rue de Villersexel, not far from the rue Saint-André-des-Arts, where the offices of La Farandole editions were located, says Christophe Meunier, a children’s literature researcher, one of his friends. He presented them with a project, they said yes immediately. » It doesn’t matter that the publishing house is part of the communist galaxy. Annie goes shopping, published in 1965, it tells the story of a young girl who, with change of bread, enters a hair salon and indulges in a Brigitte Bardot haircut. “It was a feature very far from that of Tom-Tom and Nanabut we find the spirit of transgression, the desire to create a burlesque situation every time”notes Christophe Meunier.
School life tables
In the 1970s and 1980s there were three illustrated books without text about the school world, published by Bayard-Centurion. On large double pages, images of school life from that time are presented, a kind of silent reports about children’s day: my little school in 1976, my school party in 1985 and Pinou the rabbit from my school, in 1986. To create them, Bernadette Després moved into her children’s school, observed, captured and recorded the micro-events of the day: a burst of laughter, a runny nose, a pot of paint that spilled, a fork which falls the tiles of the canteen. “His sketchbooks are rich and abundant, each painting is constructed with great patience, nothing is left to chance. She created hundreds, thousands of scenes in schools, shops, homes”points out Christophe Meunier.
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