The Angoulême festival in France, the largest annual comic book event, announced on Wednesday that it was canceling an exhibition devoted to a cartoonist accused of promoting child pornography and threatened.
“Physical threats were made against Bastien Vivès. It is therefore not possible for the event to consider that its programming could pose such risks to an author and, potentially, in a few weeks, to its festival-goers,” wrote the management of the International Comics Festival. of Angoulême (FIBD) in a press release.
The exhibition In the eyes of Bastien Vives was to open at the end of January in the city in the south-west of France on the occasion of this festival, the most important for the world of French-speaking comics.
The FIBD deplores “the need to cancel this exhibition”, after “intimidation against members of the Festival team”. He highlights “freedom of expression” to defend Bastien Vivès, a 38-year-old French author who has found success with a variety of works, including pornographic comics with minor characters like Little Paul.
The personality of Bastien Vivès is also controversial because of provocative declarations on incest or virulent attacks against a feminist cartoonist, Emma.
Tuesday evening, the Minister of Culture, Rima Abdul Malak, interviewed by the daily The Parisianhad considered that “certain remarks” past by Mr. Vivès were “not acceptable”.
The author himself reacted to the controversy in The Parisian, Monday. “No, I’m not a pedophile and no, it’s not my fantasy. If you want to read my works honestly, you realize that easily,” he said. He claimed to have filed a handrail after the threats received, and to have “ample enough to file a complaint”.
“We denounce the trivialization and the apology of incest and pedocrime organized by the cartoonist of comics Bastien Vivès through his works and his dangerous remarks”, says the text of a petition asking for the deprogramming of the exhibition. It had exceeded 100,000 signatures on Wednesday.
The most controversial comics by Bastien Vivès depict minors facing sex, with sometimes incestuous patterns. In A sister in 2017, a realistic fiction adapted for the screen (Falcon Lakecurrently in theaters in France), a 13-year-old boy has sex, while on vacation by the sea, with a 16-year-old girl.
Much less realistic, The Melons of Anger in 2011, as well as The Mental Discharge and Petit Paul in 2018 show sexual relations between minors and adults.
Faced with accusations of child pornography, two French bookstore brands, Cultura and Gibert Joseph, had stopped selling Little Paul.