The largest French-language comics festival in the world will begin Thursday in Angoulême, in the southwestern part of France, and it will honor Quebec and its national capital by devoting part of its space and programming to them. ; quite proud if we consider that the event – which is to comics what Cannes is to cinema – is celebrating its fiftieth anniversary this year.
An anniversary marked, moreover, by controversy since an exhibition devoted to the author Bastien Vivès, which was to be presented during the Festival, had to be canceled, the author having been accused of promoting incest and pedophilia in some of his albums.
And if we also accused, in 2016, the festival of being sexist (no woman was part of the official selection), we resumed last year by highlighting the work of Quebec author Julie Doucet , who thus became the first Canadian, and only the third woman, to receive the Grand Prix d’Angoulême, a hailed and well-deserved honor.
Moreover, Doucet signs one of the three official posters of the festival this year, the other two having been designed by the Frenchman Riad Sattouf and the Japanese Hajime Isayama.
“An alignment of the stars”
The consecration of Julie Doucet is partly what explains Quebec’s presence at the Angoulême International Comics Festival, but it is not the only factor according to Thomas-Louis Côté, general manager of Quebec BD, an organization based in Quebec dedicated to promoting the 9e art from here. “This is not the first time that Quebec has been honored at the Angoulême festival. It was in 2000 and also during the 1980s. But, for this year, it is really an alignment of the stars that allows this presence. There is the current vitality of our comics, which means that publishers are more and more tempted to distribute what is created here towards Europe. »
Still, Julie Doucet’s consecration is there, by his own admission, obviously for something, just like the fact, he says, “that we find more and more Quebec albums nominated for different awards, which was a rare phenomenon before.
It is really an alignment of the stars that allows this presence.
Indeed, if we analyze the list of nominations, we notice that the album legged fish (Pow Pow), by Blonk, is nominated for two prizes, either in the Official Selection and in the Fauve Selection category for high school students. The author of the children’s album Félixe and the house that walked at night (The City Burns), Sophie Bédard, finds herself in the Youth Selection category and, finally, the editions of the Watermelon are nominated for the album The little escape European authors Marzena Sowa and Dorothée de Monfreid.
In addition, the Franco-Quebecois author Jean-Louis Tripp will receive, on the sidelines of the festival, the BDGest’Arts Jury Prize, awarded by the BDGest site, for his album The little brother (Casterman). Not to mention that Anne-Marie Saint-Cerny and Christian Quesnel will preside over the jury of the Éco-Fauve Raja, prizes they won last year for Megantic. A train in the night (Ecosociety).
The age of maturity for Quebec comics
In all, around thirty authors from here will be present in Angoulême, in addition to the presentation of projects like PopUp Limoilou, a virtual reality experience in this popular district of Quebec.
Still according to Thomas-Louis Côté, it’s not for nothing that Quebec is doing so well this year. He believes that the Quebec comics market has reached a certain maturity, thanks in part to the publishing houses dedicated to the genre that have appeared over the past twenty years. “General mechanics, La Watermelon, New address/Front Froid, for example, which were born in the early 2000s, made sure to bring more authors to take an interest in comics. This led to a greater media presence. We saw other publishing houses devote themselves to the genre, afterwards. »
He adds that the fact that Michel Rabagliati, author of the series Paul, was named Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters in France last year, has made comics more talked about in Quebec. “It’s a spinning wheel. It only remains to hope, now, that this fine trend will continue.