(Paris) The comic book author Bastien Vivès, whose exhibition at the Angoulême Festival was canceled after he was accused of promoting child pornography, apologized Thursday for his most virulent remarks.
The International Comics Festival, the largest annual comic book event, announced on Wednesday the cancellation of the exhibition which was to be devoted from the end of January to this 38-year-old French designer. He invoked “threats” which targeted the author and the organizers.
Critics of Bastien Vivès accuse him, among other things, of having launched calls for violence on Facebook, under a pseudonym, against the feminist cartoonist Emma in 2017.
“Today I realize that beyond my works, it was above all my words that shocked,” he wrote Thursday on Instagram.
“I sincerely regret some of my remarks, and more particularly those against the designer Emma posted on my Facebook wall to which I would like to apologize. It was gratuitously violent, disrespectful and above all outrageous,” he added.
The controversy also relates to the books of this author, which mix pornography and minors.
“They are part of a humorous burlesque genre. This provocative tone, it happened to me to take it up sometimes, in an awkward way, in my interviews, “explained the author of Little Paul.
This comic, which presents a child with an oversized penis arousing the lust of women, and other titles like The melons of angerwhere a teenage girl is raped, and The Mental Dumpwhich depicts sexual relations between minors and an adult man, are the subject of a debate on their conformity with the law.
“But at no time did I want to hurt victims of crimes and sexual abuse. And I obviously want, if my words may have offended these people, to offer them my most sincere apologies, ”added Bastien Vivès.
On Tuesday, the Minister of Culture Rima Abdul Malak had considered that “certain remarks” past by Mr. Vivès were “not acceptable”.
Faced with accusations of child pornography, two French bookstore brands, Cultura and Gibert Joseph, had stopped selling Little Paul.