Jean-Paul Walravens, quickly fascinated by drawing, studied at the Institute of Fine Arts Saint-Luc. In 1960, he contributed his work as a caricaturist and cartoonist for many newspapers and magazines around the world including National Lampoon and The New York Times . During this period, he adopted the pseudonym Picha.





In 1975, he co-directed the film Tarzoon: Shame of the Jungle, a raunchy parody of the Tarzan stories by Edgar Rice Burroughs. The film was a huge success in its home country France, but ran through troubles with the Edgar Rice Burroughs Estate when the estate sued the creators of the film for plagiarism. The estate lost the case when the creators stated that the film was a parody. However, when the film was released in the U.S., the estate demanded that the film title and main character "Tarzoon" be changed due to the film's nature degrading the Tarzan name. In 1979, the now R-rated film was released under the title Shame Of The Jungle, and was rewritten by Saturday Night Live writers Anne Beatts and Michael O'Donoghue and was dubbed by John Belushi, Johnny Weissmuller, Jr., Bill Murray, and several others.





