Jean-Jacques Semp, French New Yorker cover illustrator, dies at 89

What I love so much about cartoons is how they can quietly express certain ideas, Mr. Semp said in a book 2014, That’s life! The wonderful world of Jean-Jacques Semp. It’s a way of talking about yourself without really seeming to.

Mr Semp, who died on August 11 at 89, said he was thrilled as a boy in Paris listening to jazz greats such as Duke Ellington and Count Basie and how their music could convey feelings without words. Mr. Semp seemed to borrow some of the same sensibilities. He used captions and puns sparingly, allowing his ink and watercolor images to comment on life’s timeless wonders, foibles and pleasant absurdities.

He often preferred a distant vantage point, artistically surveying scenes from above or across large cityscapes of New York or Paris, his two main points of reference. The hard edges of reality have been brushed aside. All that was left were little reminders to pay attention to special moments when they arose.

Her New Yorker cover for the January 5, 1987, issue was a view from a chandelier of two couples still dancing after a New Year’s Eve party ended. Students in a dance class surround a piano, seen at through a window on a city street, for the cover of January 5, 2015. For the August 21, 2006 issue: A smiling man walks through a park, seen from treetops, with his collar undone and his tie fluttering in the wind as if to celebrate the release of the grind.

Cyclists were a recurring theme that Mr. Semp enjoyed cycling, as were the juxtaposed scenes of lone figures amid huge backdrops. A concert pianist crosses a wide stage toward a grand piano on a 1999 cover of The New Yorker. (Mr. Semp titled it Slight Anxiety.) A cover in 1979 shows cyclists on a tandem bicycle rolling through a grove of trees.

France pays tribute to beloved cartoonist Jean-Jacques Semp

In New York, at the intersection of 47th Street and 9th Avenue, a faded fresco signed by M. Semp shows a man carrying a woman on a bicycle, being dragged by a boy on his own bicycle.

If God were a cartoonist, this is what his cartoons would look like, wrote Mexican political cartoonist Francisco Paco Caldern.

But Mr. Semp also knew how to draw with a bite. A 1963 panel shows a stage prop tree that has just flattened an actor. There were unruly schoolchildren and gruff teachers, frustrated Parisian traffic cops, unhappy tourists and self-absorbed intellectuals. When he depicts cats, however, they are always content and in control.

Mr. Semp gave most of his work, particularly the depictions of Paris, a heavy veneer of nostalgia: the city’s traditional mansard roofs, roads full of Citroëns and baguettes sticking out of shopping bags.

For me, the modern world lacks charm, he said The Independent in 2006. I’m not saying that things were always better in the past. They weren’t. But things seemed better, or at least more interesting, to me.

Jean-Jacques Semp was born on August 17, 1932 in Passac, France, near Bordeaux. He described doodling and daydreaming as his childhood passions partly as an escape from a turbulent family life that included an abusive and erratic stepfather.

I wanted to be like the others. I was tired. Poverty was appalling, he says News in France earlier this year.

He was expelled from school at 14 for not playing by the rules and tried to get jobs as an apprentice civil servant, but failed the tests. With few options, he hawked toothpowder as a teenage salesman and managed to sell cartoons to French newspapers, signing his work as DRO as a rough phonetic English translation for the French cartoonist, or draw.

It wasn’t enough to live on, though. He enlisted in the French army at the age of 17 in 1950 by lying about his age. The only place that would give me a job and a bed, he said later.

He was discharged from the army after the ruse was discovered about his age. Next stop was Paris to try his hand as a self-taught illustrator in the comics industry. His natural talent was recognized with a Newcomer Award in 1952, which opened doors for him to work in magazines such as Paris Match.

His circle included a growing friendship with writer Ren Goscinny, who would later co-create the world of the Asterix cartoon. They collaborated on The little Nicolas, which began as a comic strip in 1956 about the smallest boy in class Nicolas and his friends in a largely idealized version of post-war France.

The first book based on Nicholas’ stories was published in 1959 and later gained an international following in the United States and elsewhere with readers amused by Nicholas’ childhood views on adult oddities. Film adaptations followed.

Le Petit Nicolas is timeless because when we created it, it was already out of fashion, said Mr. Semp.

In 2004, Goscinny’s daughter, Anne discovered dozens of unpublished Nicolas tales and created a 600-page volume of the work. Mr. Semp provided the illustrations.

His anthologies include Nothing Is Simple (1962), Everything Is Complicated (1963), Sunny Spells (1999) and Mixed Messages (2003). Graphic novels include Monsieur Lambert (1965), about friends in a bistro; Martin Pebble (1969), about a boy who cannot control his blushing; and The Musicians (1980), about the world of musical performance.

Survivors include his wife of five years, Martine Gossieaux Semp, and his daughter Inga Semp from his second marriage, to Mette Ivers. His first marriage, to Christina Courtois, also ended in divorce. Complete information about the survivors was not immediately available. Martine Gossieaux Semp announced the death but did not give further details. No cause was given.

Mr. Semp, who was widely known only by his last name, lived and worked in the Parisian district of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. He was brilliant in satire, capturing a gesture, an attitude, a moment, bicycles, smiles, cats and musicians, wrote Le Monde in a tribute after his death.

Mr. Semp was introduced to New York in the 1970s by illustrator Ed Koren, which was his first guide through Manhattan and beyond. Koren also brought him to The New Yorker, where Mr. Semp hoped to join idols such as Sam CobeanSaul Steinberg and James Thurber on its pages.

Mr. Semp first cover appears in August 1978 half-man half-bird in a suit perched on a window sill, apparently hesitating to take flight.

New York art editor Francoise Mouly said the magazine plans to reissue one of Mr. Semps’ covers for the Sept. 5 edition. It will be his 114th coverMouly told Agence France-Presse.

Mr. Semp has always felt like himself in New York and felt a special connection to its people, she said. After a revival of Mr. Semp, there was still buzz in the offices of The New Yorker.

Half of my colleagues said to me: ‘It’s me, it’s me, said Mouly.