Your 2015 Festival De La Bande Dessinée Prize Winners
The various prizes endorsed by and related to the Festival De La Bande Dessiné have all been announced by now, late on the festival's final day. Riad Sattouf took home the biggest prize not the festival presidency with the first volume of his L'Arabe Du Futur. The only North American I noticed on the prize list was Chris Ware, who won the Prix Spécial Du Jury for his Building Stories. A prize named after the Charlie Hebdo publication went to the five comics-makers killed in the publication's offices January 7.
Congratulations to all the winners and the nominees. I'll cluster these as the festival web site separates them.
Remember That Today Is Hourly Comic Day
I don't even know the exact provenance of this one (wait, now I do), but the gimmick is pretty easy to suss out -- a bunch of people are making a strip an hour and posting them in various ways, some immediately and some later. Here's a tweet tag. I can't imagine anyone's will be much more fun to read than those from Eleanor Davis.
FFF Results Post #406 -- Grand Prix
On Friday, CR readers were asked to "Name Five Comics-Makers You Think Would Make Deserving Winners Of The Grand Prix At FIBD." This is how they responded.
Winner Of The Week
Katsuhiro Otomo. So very deserved.
Loser Of The Week
Poor Jim Wheelock! I hope there's some progress there.
Quote Of The Week
"After the war, he was behaving oddly. He began to torture animals. His grandparents sent him to military school because that was the only way they thought they could deal with that kind of behavior. These days we know about PTSD, we know about childhood traumas like that. You know, he probably, in this day and age, he would have received years of therapy... I think I understand where he comes from. I do not agree [with] his actions. I do not agree with his ideology. But I do understand." -- Nina Bunjevac, on her father
*****
the comic image selected is from the brief but notable 1970s run of Seaboard/Atlas
Go, Read: Profile Of Kevin Necessary
I enjoyed this pretty standard local cartoonist profile of Kevin Necessary for a few reasons. The first is that the professional path you can put together from the piece for the 35-year-old cartoonist and journalist is pretty brutal, just a real wasteland in terms of jobs even for the enthusiastic and talented. I like that that wasn't whitewashed. Another is that the cartoonist is presented as providing a service to the community that isn't available from traditional sources any longer. We sometimes forget in comics that an entire region can lose a certain voice if there are no home editorial cartoonists of any kind. It's not that Necessary replaces a Jim Borgman, but it must be nicer than it isn't to have someone out there in the area doing cartoons like this. Yet another thing I liked about the piece is that it looks like his current job is working for broadcast media but in their digital iteration -- a common space that television and newspapers both wish to utilize. He's pretty up front about making his cartoons work when read on the phone, too, which is something I hadn't thought of before now but makes total sense.
Ferzat resides in Kuwait, following his 2011 experience of a brutal attack by pro-regime thugs directed at him stopping his editorial cartoons. In fact, I'm not sure I've seen a Ferzat cartoon made since that time. As a famous Syrian refugee, Ferzat seems a fine choice to speak out on the issue.
The top comics-related news stories from January 24 to January 30, 2015:
The Syrian cartoonist Ali Ferzat 
