'Oscar', from Le Parisien Libéré.
Jean-Léo was a Belgian cartoonist and journalist, who gained some popularity in France with his pantomime newspaper gag strip 'Les Mille et Une Aventures d'Oscar' in Le Parisien Libéré (1947-1966). He was also co-founder of the Belgian satirical magazine PAN.
Brussels years
Jean-Léo was the pen name of Jean Léopold Rostagni, who was born in 1922 in Brussels as the son of parents with Italian roots. In 1939, he published his first drawings in the local newspaper La Gazette. Still in the Belgian capital, he joined La Mine Souriante, an association of humorous artists from several generations, founded in 1930 by the cartoonist and illustrator Marcel Antoine. He also exhibited his work at the group's annual Salon des Humoristes. During World War II, Jean-Léo performed in Bruxelles cabaret shows, together with his friends Marcel Antoine and Léon Campion. In 1945, those three men co-founded the satirical weekly PAN, and served as its first editors.
'Oscar', from Pep magazine in the Netherlands (1965).
Oscar
In late 1947, Jean-Léo was in Paris, creating his pantomime comic strip 'Les Mille et Une Aventures d'Oscar' for the newspaper Le Parisien Libéré. The strip featured the daily adventures of a bald bourgeois man with a moustache, hat and glasses, who tries his luck in all sorts of odd jobs. Its type of absurd humor was comparable to that of other popular French newspaper strips of the time, for instance André Daix's 'Professeur Nimbus' and Bozz's 'Monsieur Subito'. Over a course of 20 years, Jean-Léo created about 6,000 episodes with his 'Oscar' character, aided by the gag ideas by Martine Martin (born in 1921). Because of its apparent popularity, the feature was also picked up by the Opera Mundi agency, which distributed it to newspapers from Paris to Antwerp and from Saigon to Bogota. In the Netherlands, the strip ran in the comic weekly Pep (1965-1966). In France, Jean-Léo's drawings also appeared in Le Rire, Ici Paris (1952), Fou-Rire (1953-1954) and Samedi-Soir (1954).
'Les Pipes en Terres Françaises' and 'Le Baron Brisse'.
Later years
By the time 'Oscar' came to an end in 1966, Jean Léo left the field of cartooning. He continued his career as a journalist and bibliophile, publishing studies on all sorts of subjects, for instance 'Les Pipe en Terre Françaises' ("French Clay Pipes", 1971), 'Le Baron Brisse, un Gastronome du Second Empire' ("Baron Brisse, a Gastronome of the Second Empire", 1992), 'Le Cirque et la Foire dans la Caricature Politique 1565-1995' ("The Circus and the Fair in Political Caricature 1565-1995", 1999) and 'Napoléon III et la Belgique' ("Napoleon III in Belgium", 2003). In 1984, he was also a founding member of the Académie Internationale de la Pipe in Paris, an Academy dedicated to education in the economic and social history of tobacco and pipe smoking worldwide. By 1991, Jean-Léo ran the antique bookstore Le Grenier du Collectionneur in Brussels, a name he already used as his publishing imprint. Throughout his later career, he has continued to use the Jean-Léo pen name.
Jean-Léo, drawn by Michel Douay.