Bernadette Després, the designer of the comic strip “Tom-Tom and Nana”, is dead

The illustrator Bernadette Després, who made young readers laugh thanks to her pencil strokes in the comic series “Tom-Tom and Nana”, died at the age of 83 on Tuesday, announced Bayard editions. “It is with immense sadness that the Bayard Jeunesse teams learned today of the death of illustrator Bernadette Després,” said the youth branch of Bayard in a press release. His teams will pay tribute to him during the Youth Book and Press Fair in Montreuil (Seine-Saint-Denis), at the end of November.

“One day, a child told me that with my stories, I was taking revenge on adults and that’s very true. I don’t like adults. They impress me with their seriousness,” admitted the cartoonist in the newspaper The Cross in 2019. With the adventures of “Tom-Tom and Nana”, scripted by her accomplices Jacqueline Cohen and Évelyne Reberg, Bernadette Després has always wanted to make young readers laugh. With the antics of the heroes, Tom-Tom the big brother with his striped T-shirt and Nana the little sister with blonde braids, it was a successful bet.

These characters with joyful adventures have “an unprecedented track record in children's publishing”, recalled Bayard Jeunesse, including 34 volumes in edition, more than 3000 original plates published in the form of episodes in the monthly “J'aime lire” since 1977 and an animated series adaptation for television. She put “in images always with humor texts relating to the daily life of children and the family”, underlined the publishing group.

Born in Paris in March 1941, Bernadette Després began her career as an illustrator for the Bayard Jeunesse newspapers and then worked for various publishers. In 1976, Bayard Jeunesse asked Bernadette Després and Jacqueline Cohen to create a monthly comic strip: “À la bonne fork” would officially become “Tom-Tom et Nana” in 1990.

The renowned designer won the Fauve d'Honneur at the Angoulême International Comics Festival in 2019 for all of her work and was elevated to the rank of Knight of the Legion of Honor in 2021.