Artcurial Beurret Bailly Widmer opens its Basel saleroom to comic-strip art today, staging the first auction ever devoted entirely to Titeuf, the blond-tufted schoolboy created by Genevan cartoonist Philippe Chappuis — known as Zep — more than three decades ago. All forty lots in the sale come from Zep's own hand and together chart the character's journey from a 1992 debut to a fixture of Francophone pop culture. The sale's headline lot is the cover project for "À fond le slip!", the series' fifteenth volume, estimated at 15,000 to 25,000 Swiss francs (about €16,100–26,900). Original pages from the very first album, "Dieu, le sexe et les bretelles" (1993), are expected to make several thousand francs each, and the sale also ranges across later material, including original boards from the 2005 off-series volume "Petite Poésie des saisons," reissued in 2019 as the series' sixteenth book. One lot carries a civic note: an illustration made for an International Day of Older Persons poster, in which elderly figures retreat to a treehouse while Titeuf and his young friends look on from below. Reproductions of the image have been visible on Geneva's streets in recent days; the original itself is estimated at 4,000 Swiss francs. The sale underlines how thoroughly bande dessinée has entered the auction mainstream. Zep won the Grand Prix at Angoulême in 2004 and later reached an international audience with "Le Guide du zizi sexuel," and original comic art has become a fixture of European salerooms. For the Artcurial group's Basel house, dedicating an entire auction to a single comics character is a first — and a test of how deep collector appetite runs for the medium's originals.