Gayboy:
I remember reading one edition I believe that was French before Peter Pan went to Neverland.
That's doing the thing that has already been talked about elsewhere about Tintin - why would that author want to sexualize the character and his story in that way, and add such a tale of seediness to what actually is a personal tragedy in Barrie's own life? I can't see the point, when the actual history of the character is far more interesting (I think it's the comic adaptation by Régis Loisel of which you speak, by the way).
Although the Lost Boys may certainly be the Davies brothers - one of them was called Peter, one of them (not Peter!) was a model for the famous statue, and they certainly acted as inspiration for elements of the
Pan story (they appeared in a photographic pirate adventure which was made on a family trip to Barrie's holiday home) - Peter Pan himself is most plausibly based on Barrie's brother David, who died young in an ice-skating accident in Kirriemuir in Scotland, where they lived.
As such, although David was his older brother, James Barrie was acutely aware that David was a "boy who would never grow up" (indeed his mother told him so), and always be young as he himself grew old.
Their mother was profoundly affected by the tragedy, and it is thought that young J.M. Barrie tried to adopt some of his brother's mannerisms and habits to fill the void, to keep him alive, as it were - which led to him immortalising David as Peter Pan.
Barrie first introduced the character in a slightly different form, as a week-old baby who went on magical adventures with a girl called Mamie (the prototype of Wendy) in
The Little White Bird (where it appears as a story within a story); he then revised the character again for the stage version of the Peter Pan section, dropping the other parts of
The Little White Bird, turning him into a small boy.
The statue in Kensington Gardens is based on pictures of Michael Llewelyn Davies, aged six, although the boy in the play and the later book (which went through several revisions over the years by Barrie) seems to be about twelve or thirteen, the age of his dead brother.
He is never properly described in Barrie's works, everything being left vague and to the reader's imagination, so that they can make the character appear as they want; however, I think that Loisel may have taken the character a step too far!
Interestingly, Peter Pan enjoys special protection under British Law, to protect and maintain in perpetuity the copyright in the work which Barrie donated to The Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children (GOSH) (it has similar status to Crown Copyright in as much as it will never expire in the U.K., along with text of the The King James Bible and
The Highway Code). Income continues to be generated for the hospital to this day, and again acts as a reminder that the character arose from the unfortunate death of a child.
It lead to the use of Wendy by Alan Moore for a pornographic comic being refused in the U.K. by the trustees, although the comic was published abroad (it also lead to some cries of derision when Mr. Moore was outspoken about other hands writing adventures for the
Watchmen characters, when he saw nothing wrong in his own co-opting of many other writers' characters for purposes the original authors such as Barrie would never have countenanced...).
Disney have also become mired in controversy over the fact that they seem to have decided that, in spite the countless hundreds of millions of dollars they have made from licensing the characters from GOSH, and continue to make from merchandise, Tinker Bell movies and all that kind of thing, that they have paid enough, and don't want to pay any more.
I remember liking the story well enough when we were read it as a class in primary school (I
think we got
Peter Pan, rather than
Peter and Wendy or
Peter Pan and Wendy, as previous version had been titled by Barrie), but I can't say it lived with me.
However my Mum loved it, always kept a copy in the house (she favoured
Peter Pan and Wendy), and still described it as one of her most favourite books just before she died in her eighties, so you are not the only one to be a devoted follower!