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 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.

“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.

Some of the most arresting 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 grade school, and lived there during the dictatorial reign of Mr. al-Assad’s father, Hafez al-Assad.

Mr. Sattouf’s memories of Ter Maaleh are vivid and coruscating. The French journalist Stéphane Jarno recently described the depictions of the town as “a few buildings surrounded by emptiness, a micro-society steeped in blind piety and power struggles, with apparently little love but a lot of 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 unafraid to criticize it. It can be a fraught position.

The Algerian author Kamel Daoud, who currently lives in France, recently won the Prix Goncourt, France’s most prestigious literary prize, for a novel that addressed the complex history of the Algerian civil war. In the past, Mr. Daoud, who has openly discussed sensitive religious issues, was the subject of a death threat from an Algerian imam. More recently, Mr. Daoud has complained that he has been castigated by elements of the French left for “not being the good Arab, who is in the permanent state of de-colonial victimhood.”

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

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

The line was delivered with a joking-not-joking sort of flourish.

Mr. Sattouf met for the interview in Rennes, the capital of Brittany, late last month. He comes across as both impish and serious-minded, with a quiet voice that toggled in the interview between French and a workable English that he said he had learned from bingeing “Seinfeld.”

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

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

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

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

As revelations of the Syrian regime’s atrocities have come to light, Mr. Sattouf said that he felt a sense of vindication.

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

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

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

In addition to writing “The Arab of the Future,” Mr. Sattouf has directed two feature films. “Les Beaux Gosses,” or “The French Kissers,” a coming-of-age comedy, won a César award for best first film. Late last year, he released the first volume of “I, Fadi, the Stolen Brother” a spinoff series to “The Arab of the Future,” based on interviews with his youngest brother, who, Mr. Sattouf said, was taken from France to Syria by his father when his brother was a child. Mr. Sattouf, in the interview, described it as kidnapping.

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

The first four volumes of the “Arab” series have been translated into English; Fantagraphics, a U.S.-based comics publisher, is planning to publish versions of the final volumes, as well as the new series. Many French bookstores currently feature big cardboard displays showing off Mr. Sattouf’s books, along with a photograph of his face. Outside the Rennes train station recently, a middle-aged man recognized Mr. Sattouf and ran up to shake his hand.

And the French media continue to turn to him for insight into the fall of the Assad regime.

Mr. Sattouf told the regional newspaper Ouest-France that organizing 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 rule in Syria had imbued him with “a certain paranoia, let’s say, a distrust which has become part of my personality.”

He also spoke to the newspaper La Croix about going back to Syria one day.

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