One early evening in December, the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad fled 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, reports The New York Times.
“Did you think that this could have happened so rapidly?” 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 largely to his masterwork, The Arab of the Future, a series of graphic memoirs. Over six volumes, the series tells the story of Mr. Sattouf’s childhood, which was jarringly divided 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 some 23 languages. Though 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 suffused with a subtle but withering social satire.
For Mr. Sattouf, this posture informs not only his art, but the way he interprets the world. In his TV 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 tended to see things “extremely pessimistically.”
“I keep my fingers crossed,” he said, “that a terrible dictatorship won’t be replaced by another dictatorship.”
Mr. Sattouf, who was born in France, grew up enamored with the brutally honest and occasionally offensive work of the American cartoonist 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 Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis.
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 over its depiction of the Prophet Muhammad. Mr. Sattouf did not draw the cartoons of Muhammad; his strip had been focused on amusing, and sometimes depressing, scenes of daily life he encountered on the streets and metro in 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 Sorbonne University in Paris, where he received a doctorate in history and met the woman who would become Mr. Sattouf’s mother. The cartoonist also portrays his father as sliding, over the years, into a state of permanent bitterness toward the West and an embrace of anti-democratic Arab strongmen.