When she was younger, Natacha Ratto could not find her daily life in the fictions that were offered to her. That of a youth in a middle-class family of “quiet residential suburb”, in this case the one around Montgeron, in Essonne, where you hang out with people you have known since primary school. That of those teenagers who seem to have come out of a song by Orelsan, who sometimes deploy treasures of creativity to overcome boredom.
So it’s quite naturally that the 29-year-old self-taught cartoonist decided to take over this universe to tell stories. In his webtoon (comics on smartphone) Sex, Drugs & RER, her very first series, she tells how Léon, a student from Poitou goes to study in Paris and lands in a roommate in Ile-de-France. After the cold shower and the disappointment of not moving into an apartment with a view of the Eiffel Tower, Léon joins a group of long-time friends and discovers the pangs of pendular migration, between transport strikes and fiestas cut short in disaster for catch the last RER.
Published with one episode each week between March 2020 and April 2023, the series has since accumulated more than 21 million views on the Webtoon platform (owned by the South Korean giant Naver) which hosted it. It is in this capacity that Natacha Ratto is signing, alongside other French-speaking authors, until July 16, at the Paris-Nord exhibition center, in Villepinte (Seine-Saint-Denis).
Natacha Ratto claims to be like this “of the first generation of French webtoon authors and designers”, a format born in Korea about twenty years ago. She hadn’t specifically planned to make comics her profession. As an architecture student, she was content to publish small stories, a few cartoons which already carried the seeds of her series, on her Instagram account. At the time of launching its application in France, Webtoon seeks, to complete its catalog made up of Korean works translated into French, local talents. The platform approaches the young woman on the basis of her publications on the social network.
Filled with humour, his series constructed “a bit like a sitcom” prances at the top of the best comedy series of the application. “As humor is often poorly exported, we French people have slipped into this categoryshe explains. In romance or adventure, it’s really harder to compete with Korean authors. » Around the series, a small community has also federated SDR (For Sex, Drugs & RER) of readers, in the comments they leave under each chapter first, but also on a Discord server of some seven hundred people. A community that she has used, in particular to find a soundtrack to integrate into her webtoon; one of the characters, Felix, being a rapper.
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