Angouleme Changing Its Prizes Again

On the eve of the Angouleme Festival's formal yearly press conference, CR's "Conversational Euro-Comics" columnist Bart Beaty caught this news story that indicates that the festival will be moving away from its recent experiment in a more general honor roll of essentials and back to something that indicates a reflection of reader preferences by group. I guess there had been some speculation that this was going to happen. The article cites bookseller concerns when it comes to how to translate the longer list that came out of the recent process into sales and sales promotion.

Bart writes:

At this point I don't even know what to say about the Angouleme prizes, which have repeatedly changed forms and even names, to the point that they seem to have permanently damaged their brand. They began as the Alfreds, changed to the Alph-arts in 1989, changed in 2003 to the "Official Award" of the FIBD (horrible), and then in 2007 to the "Essentials".

The idea of the Essentials, introduced by Lewis Trondheim, was to get rid of all the little awards by category and just list 50 great books, and then choose a greatest from among them (and four runners-up). I loved this idea. I thought it brought maximum attention to a lot of good books, and made the winners seem like genuine winners because they emerged from such a tough competition.

Now, for the third time in a decade, they're starting again. I throw up my hands in dismay.

I'm with Bart in that I really liked their recent way of doing things, and thought it better reflected the state of the art form. I would also add that the French-language has so many awards I can't imagine any kind of comic really being left out. This moves reminds me of my beloved state of Indiana giving up its all-inclusive basketball tournament so that more teams could win trophies. I disliked that, and dislike this.
 
posted 10:00 am PST | Permalink
 

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