Bart with a French accent becomes a schoolboy superhero
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Your support makes all the difference.Move over Tintin and Astérix. The love affair with picture books in the French-speaking world has spawned a new superhero – a sex-obsessed, bald, under-achieving 10-year-old called Titeuf.
Sales of cartoon albums of all kinds, from the comic to the erotic and the macabre, reached a new high of 30 million copies in France last year. The popularity of stories told in pictures, or bandes dessinnées, will be celebrated this weekend at the 30th cartoon book festival in Angoulême in south-west France.
Crown Prince Philippe of Belgium is to rename a street in the town after Hergé, the Brussels-born creator of Tintin. The adventures of the boy detective helped establish cartoon books in the French-speaking world of the 1950s.
The talk of this year's festival is Titeuf, a kind of Francophone Bart Simpson. Of the 12 bestselling cartoon albums in France last year, 10 featured Titeuf. His total sales of just over three million comfortably outdistanced Harry Potter.
Titeuf – rebellious, lazy, a lover of women's breasts and hater of maths and spinach – is the creation of a Swiss cartoonist known as Zep. Like Bart Simpson, he has spawned phrases that have swept playgrounds all over France. Life is either bad (overmegamortel) or good (megagénialtop).
His constant refrain is the tedium of the education system. "They say school is there to open up your mind and then they stuff us with maths formulas and dates of battles which close our brain-cells down ... let go of our knickers."
Titeuf's creator, whose real name is Philippe Chapuis, said many of his ideas had been garnered in the days when his studio overlooked a school playground. Mr Chapuis, 36, said: "I'm immature compared to other people of my age. I suppose Titeuf is me."
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