Home > Bart Beaty's Conversational Euro-Comics

Angouleme 2005: Flat With Few Surprises
posted February 8, 2005
 



By Bart Beaty

After 32 years, the Festival Internationale de la Bande Dessinee in Angouleme (France) finally started showing signs of its age this year. Despite being overseen by one of the youngest honorary presidents in years, the ultra-popular Swiss cartoonist Zep, the festival's focus on bigger proved to be the undoing of better. The end result was a flat festival with few surprises. To many it seemed that this was the year that Angouleme figured out that if it just puts up a few tents downtown, people will come even if you put no other effort into the planning.

The big change this year was the reduced risk of being hit by a bus. The two largest tents each year at the festival are housed on the Champ de Mars, which for years has been the town's central bus depot. As thousands of people flow from the north tent to the south each year, buses regularly pulled in and out, attempting to maintain life as normal. However, this year the town re-routed much of its traffic in a new circulation plan, moving the bus depot from the Champ de Mars. The festival took advantage of the new space offered by the loss of the buses, expanding the two largest tents. There is some concern, however, about the future of the event, as next year the town will begin building a new open air market in the space. Great for the people of the town, but potentially disastrous for the festival, who may lose much of their central area.

The Champ de Mars Nord tent, as has been the case for several years, housed the largest publishers, including Glenat (publisher of the million-selling Titeuf series, by Zep), Soleil, Delcourt, and Panini (Marvel's publisher in Europe). Additionally, this year saw the addition of a manga/manwha area with its own specific programming in this tent.

The Champ de Mars Sud tent continued to house Casterman, Humanoides Associes, Dargaud, and Albin Michel at the front, as well as the smaller presses (L'Association, Seuil, Requins Marteaux, Cornelius) at the back. One notable absence in this area this year was Fremok, the avant-garde comics publisher based in Paris and Bruxelles, who finally realized that the show had very little to offer to a publisher like them.

The third major tent was largely unchanged this year. The tent on the Place New York continued to house used book and collectible dealers, original art merchants, and, in the back, the fanzine area. As always, this year's festival found fanzine dealers from around the world, including America's Alternative Comics (represented by Sarah Varon, Ellen Lindner, and Gabrielle Bell) and Buenaventura Press, Slovenia's Stripburger, and dealers from Sweden and Finland. Indeed, two Finnish publishers won the prize for best fanzine, marking the first ever prize for cartoonists from that nation. I'll post a review of the winners in the coming weeks.

So far, so much the same. Publishers and artists dealing books new and old is one of the central pleasures of the festival, and while there were few books generating must have buzz this year, the festival can't be faulted for setting up the same type of market that it does every year.

One innovation that Zep brought to the festival was a huge hit. The musical illustration shows were an innovative way to bring comics production to large groups. Starting Thursday morning, a small group of artists (Zep, O'Groj, Dupuy and Berberian, Blutch, Stan and Vince, and others) performed creating a comic live on stage to improvisational musical accompaniment. Two drawing table were set up on stage, with cameras mounted above them. One by one, the artists would come on stage to draw a single panel of a newly created Little Nemo strip, which was projected live on the screen above the stage. As the first artist reached the halfway point, the second would start, so that two artists were drawing at all times (three when Stan and Vince came out, as they drew their panels simultaneously). By the end of the weekend, these shows had become standing room only events, and the final concert (on Saturday night) drew a standing ovation at the end, as the artists and musicians had the routine down so well that even the participants were amazed by how well things went.

But the pleasure of Angouleme has always been found in the exhibits, which are one of the hallmarks of the festival. This year was a massive disappointment on this front, with a series of uninspired offerings this year. The highlights:

* Zep. Hosted at the Centre Nationale de la Bande Dessinee et de l'Image (CNBDI), Angouleme's famed comics museum, this exhibition took place over two floors. The ground floor featured original Titeuf art and enormous models of the characters in an exhibit targeted at young fans of the mega-selling series (more than 800,000 copies of the new book sold so far). Upstairs was a change of pace. One series of drawings featured Zep producing images of some of the best-loved characters in the history of Franco-Belgian comics, while another had well known cartoonists from Joost Swarte to Enki Bilal drawing Titeuf. While the first floor confirmed my fears about Zep, the second floor was a lovely surprise. The highlight was a wall featuring Zep's sketchbook work (mostly watercolors) that demonstrated his astonishing range, something not witnessed in the Titeuf books.

* OuBaPo. Downstairs, the CNBDI also featured an exhibition of works by the experimental comics group OuBaPo. This exhibit mainly collected pages from the four OuBaPo publications (L'Association), as well as OuBaPo inspired books by Killoffer and Jochen Gerner. The highlight would be the three dimensional comics produced by Jean-Christophe Menu, Lewis Trondheim and others that were originally shown at the Galerie Anne Barrault in Paris in 2003.

One disappointment was the fact that the majority of the space at the CNBDI was still occupied by their Imaginary Museums exhibition, for the third year in a row. Staging the exact same exhibition for three straight years was one sign to many that the CNBDI has lost its way. Or at least its funding.

* Uncle Scrooge. In keeping with the children-friendly nature of this year's festival, a tent was set up to feature the life of the character the French know as Picsou. This was a disappointing effort, filled with merchandise, photocopies of original art (mostly Barks and festival guest Don Rosa), and models of the number one dime and other accoutrements of the Scrooge stories. A wasted opportunity.

* Hugo Pratt. Now that Casterman has revived the Corto Maltese adventure series with new artist Wazem, the festival featured an exhibition of Pratt's work alongside that of Wazem, and some photos of Wazem's research trip to Ethiopia. While I love Wazem's work for Atrabile, he's no Pratt. But who is? This exhibition was too small, but was one of the few exciting moments for many visitors as the opportunity to see original art by one of the medium's absolute masters is all too rare.

* Dave Cooper. The best exhibition in the festival featured the work of Canada's master of the psycho-sexual bizarre. Featuring original art, a few (far too few) paintings, and reproductions of some of Cooper's paintings, this exhibit was revelatory for many French visitors, as Cooper has been only sporadically translated in French.

* La Maison des Auteurs. The home of local and visiting cartoonists and animators, the Maison again hosted the work of the artists who had worked in the atelier over the year, including Quebec's Jimmy Beaulieu, who is producing a massive graphic novel. The highlight here were more than a dozen oil painting portraits of the Biarritz rugby team by Fabrice Neaud. Commissioned by the team, these portraits were highly charged and lovely to see. I can't imagine what the players thought of them.

* Blake and Mortimer. A too small exhibition, this was highlighted by EP Jacobs' pencil roughs. The original art was highly appealing, largely because it included no text. Stripped of the over-writing, the Blake and Mortimer series looks really great.

Other smaller exhibitions included the work of Claire Wendling, David Prudhomme, Mix and Remix, and the illustration group Clafoutis. Over all, there were no truly memorable shows to rival past highlights (Moebius in 2000, Musee Ferraille in 2003).

Finally, the prizes. Always one of the most discussed aspects of the festival, this year offered few surprises. This year was hailed as the year of internationalization because the Best Album award was contested by two Japanese artists, two Americans, one Canadian, one Swiss, and an Iranian woman now living in France. In the end, the award went to Poulet aux Prunes, Marjane Satrapi's first foray into fictional comics. Nonetheless, internationalism was the rule of the day as Japan was rewarded with the prize for best drawing, for Jiro Taniguchi's masterful Le Sommet des dieux. Germany won a prize for Ralf Konig's Comme des Lapins, and America won Best First Album for Alex Robinson's Box Office Poison translation, De Mal en pis, while Frenchman Lewis Trondheim won the award for Best Series, for the final Lapinot book, La Vie comme elle vient.

The big news, of course, was the naming of the new president for next year. This year's winner, Georges Wolinski, was a surprise to many. Best known for his editorial cartoons rather than his comics, Wolinski was a hugely influential figure of the 1970s generation, not so much for the quality of his comics, but for the way that his comic sensibility helped to redefine French culture in the wake of the events of May 1968. Few would count Wolinski as a great visual technician, and the award seemed to signal a retreat into the past generation after a tentative step towards the present with the selection of Zep. With many observers predicting a non-French president to highlight the turn towards internationalism, with favorites for the prize being Art Spiegelman (one of the festival's biggest stars this year) and Jiro Taniguchi, Wolinski seemed to indicate a backing away from some of the risks of the past couple of years. The question arises: By turning to the previous generation again is Angouleme continuing to show its age, or will a turn to the past next year bring a new vitality after a disappointing installment in 2005?

Next time: A look at the most talked about book at the Festival.