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December 15, 2006


Angouleme Overhauls Awards System

imageThe Festival International de la Bande Dessinee de Angouleme had its traditional December press conference yesterday. With the usual news of the forthcoming major festival, perhaps the most important in the world, which this year has a lot to do with who is showing and where everyone will be as renovations in the town begin to reshape the festival a bit, came word that the Festival Awards will be handled in dramatically different fashion.

Rather than categories there will be a pool of 50 eligible works. Six will compete for the Prix du patrimoine (the Heritage Prize), while the 44 others will compete for one "Best Of" prize, six Essentiels d’Angouleme designations, and one new or breakout work designation. This is to eliminate unnecessary divisions of labor being a bigger part of the awards than entire efforts, and to assist people in helping to build comics libraries. There's even a new mascot.

You should really download and look at ActuaBD.com's PDF of the nominees; a great model for the kind of clip and save service that such awards can provide. Dirk has the nominees listed at Journalista, if you want to check them out in list form.

Books from North American authors on the list include Black Hole (Charles Burns), Buddy Does Seattle (Peter Bagge), Frank (Jim Woodring, Fun Home (Alison Bechdel), Ganges (Kevin Huizenga), Ice Haven (Dan Clowes), La Perdida (Jessica Abel), New Frontier (Darwyn Cooke) and Wimbledon Green (Seth).

There's also a lot of European work and authors familiar to North American audiences (Jason, Gipi) and early front runners from other awards like recent prize-winner Lucille (Ludovic Debeurme).
 
posted 12:16 am PST | Permalink
 

 
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