Memories of a Childhood Split Between France and the Middle East

“My main language is comics,” the French graphic artist Riad Sattouf says. “I have made movies, but when I think, it’s in drawings, so that’s how I first had to tell this story.” Sattouf’s story, which he chronicles in his multivolume autobiographical memoir “The Arab of the Future,” is one of a childhood split between France, his mother’s native country, and the Middle East, where his father, a Syrian academic, moved the family when Sattouf was two. They lived first in Libya, where his father took a university position, and later returned to the Syrian village where his father had grown up. Sattouf says that, though he’d had the memoir project in mind for many years, it was the crisis in Syria that prompted him to undertake it. “At the beginning of the civil war, in 2011, I was convinced that the country would go to complete destruction,” he said. “I tried to help a part of my family leave and come to France—there were endless difficulties getting the authorizations. To address any of this in a book, I had to tell the story from the beginning—so that’s why I started ‘The Arab of the Future.’ ”