Le Petit Nicolas (Little Nicholas) is a series of French children's books created by René Goscinny and illustrated by Jean-Jacques Sempé and it was first published on 30 March 1959. The books depict an idealized version of childhood in 1950s France. History The work started out as a comic strip, which initially ran in the Belgian magazine Le Moustique between 1956 and 1958, drawn by Sempé and written by Goscinny. The series was quick to draw attention. A few years later Goscinny began to write Le Petit Nicholas in short story form, with illustrations by Sempé. The first Nicholas story, L’œuf de Pâques, was published 29 March 1959 in the journal Sud-Ouest Dimanche. The authors hadn't initially planned to continue the series but the sudden popularity of the comic kept them going. Thus, they continued to publish the comics in Sud-Ouest and Pilote until 1965. Thirty years after Goscinny's death, his daughter Anne decided to publish his unreleased stories, creating new books out of ten stories. Sempé, who was unaware of this material, obliged by providing the illustrations. The illustrations got turned into a feature film, Little Nicholas: Happy As Can Be from France’s Foliascope and Luxembourg’s Bidibul Productions that released on 16 December 2022. Amandine Fredon and Benjamin Massoubre (I Lost My Body) directed the feature based on the bestselling French children’s book series Le Petit Nicholas. Concept The books are told from the point of view of Nicolas himself, which gives the book a distinct and personal sense of humour. The narration is a pastiche of childish storytelling, with run-on sentences and schoolyard slang used in abundance, and much of the humour derives from Nicolas’s misunderstanding of adults' behaviour. At the same time, adults are as much a target of the book's satire as children, as the straightforward and uncomplicated worldview of the child narrator exposes the flaws of adult perception. This subversive element in Le Petit Nicolas made it an early example of modern children's literature that is centred on the experience of the child's interpretation of the world, rather than an adult's. Characters The characters from the French edition include (with names from Anthea Bell's English translation in square brackets): Nicolas (the main character) [Nicholas]: He is sensitive and attached to true values like friendship, love of one's parents, and has some sense of justice. He is not good at arithmetic and is the smallest in