Riad Sattouf was born in Paris, to a Syrian father and Breton mother, and spent his childhood in Libya and Syria, then returned to France to spend his teenage years in Brittany, studying in Rennes.

In a unique personal and humorous style, he narrated his own adolescent life observations in Manuel du puceau and Ma Circoncision published by Bréal Jeunesse, an imprint directed by Joann Sfar.

The comedic Pascal Brutal series imagines France of the near-future as an anarchic, neoliberal dystopia where the hero's outlandish machismo is given free rein.

Sattouf also experimented with film dubbing by giving his voice to a cartoon character in Petit Vampire designed by his friend, cartoonist Joann Sfar.

In 2018, Riad Sattouf disclosed a "family secret" about his father, the main character of L'Arabe du futur, being fiercely antisemitic and working in Saudi Arabia, supporting the death penalty, pan-arabism, and the authoritarian Ba'ath movement of Hafez al-Assad.

[3] From November 24, 2018, to March 11, 2019, the Pompidou Center in Paris hosted a major retrospective of Sattouf's work, entitled L'écriture dessinée (or Illustrated Writing, in English).