Bart Beaty at Angouleme 01: The Prize Race Handicapped



In their 36-year history, the prizes given out by Festival International de la Bande Dessinee have changed their names at least four times. They started as the Alfreds, changed that to the Alph-Arts, then changed that (briefly) to the Prix d'Angouleme (need to get the brand name out there!) and now they've changed again, to "The Essentials," which is probably as bad a name as I could imagine for a book prize.

Moreover, the rules have changed too. This year, a whopping 50 books have been nominated as "Essentials" and eight of them will win prizes. One will win the main prize as best book (the Essentialist Essential, I suppose) and then there will be six Essential runners-up, and one book will win the special prize for best "heritage" book (Essential Reprint). And I'm pretty sure one of them will win "Essential Book from a New Talent." Of course, all of this was undertaken in order to make the whole awards process less confusing. Job well done.

With 50 books in the running it is almost impossible to handicap the nominees. The jury can go pretty much any which way (there are seven jurors, I suppose that they could all just pick one book and pretty much call it a day), and there are pretty much no clear criteria other than the jury should pick a bunch of really good books.

The pre-selection committee did a generally nice job. It's hard to argue with a list where the English-language books nominated are: Black Hole, Hate, Frank, Fun Home, Ganges, Ice Haven, The New Frontier, La Perdida, and Wimbledon Green (and the French version of the giant Little Nemo book is nominated in the Heritage category). Imagine the day when the Eisners or Harveys have an equivalent line-up of Euro-comics nominated for their main prizes. Odds are the one or two of these books is walking away with a prize. In fact, I will predict three American comics will win prizes, and that one of them will be the Little Nemo collection winning the Heritage prize. I would imagine Jessica Abel and Kevin Huizenga are strongly in the running for the Newcomer award.

Manga is also well-represented by Avant la prison (Kazuichi Hanawa), Gyo (Junji Ito), In the Clothes Named Fat (Moyoco Anno), Jacaranda (Kotobuki Shiriagari), Ki-Itchi (Hideki Arai), Non Non Ba (Shigeru Mizuki), Sorcieres (Daisuke Igarashi), and Zipang (Kaiji Kawaguchi). I'm not sure which of these seven series is available in English (I'm sure Chris Butcher or Dirk Deppey can help us there). I will say that Hanawa's prison material is fantastically good, and that Ki-Itchi is by far my favorite contemporary manga series. I've never read In the Clothes Named Fat, but it looks interesting. Manga has also done well in the Heritage category, where Golgo 13 (Takao Saito) and Hato (Osamu Tezuka) both appear. I will go out on a limb and say only one award for manga this year, and I'm predicting that the prize goes to Hanawa. Outside chance: Shiriagari for Jacaranda.

The rest of the nominees are all European, a mix of small presses and established houses. From the biggest and most commercial publishers we get: Daniel Goossens' Georges et Louis (a humor comic from Fluide Glacial), Kinky & Cosey by the Flemish artist Nix (Lombard), Julien Neel's children's series Lou (Glenat), Magasin General by Loisel and Tripp (from Casterman, about a Quebecois general store), Le Marquis d'Anaon by Fabien Vehlmann and Matthieu Bonhomme (from Dargaud, a story of an Enlightenment-era adventurer), Pascal Brutal, a satire by Riad Sattouf (Fluide Glacial), Les Passes-Murailles by Stephane Ory and Jean-Luc Cornette (Humanoides, Ory is an interesting artist), Le Photographe by Emmanuel Guibert (discussed here recently), Pourquoi j'ai tue Pierre by Olivier Ka and Alfred (Delcourt, which, I believe, is about rape), Le Sang des Voyous by Loustal and Paringaux (Casterman, everything by this duo is probably worthy of an award -- do they ever miss?), Universal War One by Denis Bajram (Soleil, not my type of thing at all!), and Wizz et Buzz by Winshluss and Cizo, which I haven't read but which will find me racing to Delcourt for a copy. I've got to imagine that at least two of these books will walk away with prizes. I'm strongly pulling for Le Photographe, and Magasin General is a good bet as it is regularly praised. Almost inevitably, however, each year a book that I know nothing about wins a prize, and it will probably come from this group. Possibly Pourquoi j'ai tue Pierre.


The final category would be books published by the smaller presses. These range from the genuinely small to the increasing mid-range and well-funded publishers that are the bread and butter of the type of work that I tend to read and review here. A few of these nominees I haven't read yet, so they're books that I'll take a close look at later this week. The nominees include Canetor by the late, great Charlie Schlingo and Michel Pirus, Capucin by Florence Dupre la Tour (an artist I don't really know at all), Comment ca se fait by Nadja (one of Cornelius' several nominations), L'Homme qui s'evada by Laurent Maffre (someone I've never even heard of -- a first book based on the true story of a convict's escape from a penal colony), They Found the Car by Gipi (who won the grand prize last year), I Killed Adolf Hitler by Jason (expect this time-traveling adventure soon enough from Fantagraphics), Luchadoras by Peggy Adam (about the 400 women murdered in Juarez), Lucille by Ludovic Debeurme (which I recently reviewed), the final volume of Frederik Peeters' amazing Lupus, Michel by Pierre Maurel (about a sound artist), Olivier Schrauwen's amazing Mon Fiston (also recently reviewed here), L'Oeil Prive by Blexbolex (who is amazing beyond words), Orage et Desespoir by Lucie Durbiano (I went back and forth on buying this when I was last in France -- seems I made a mistake in passing it up), Panier de Singer by Jerome Mulot and Florent Ruppert (the hyper-talented duo behind Safari Monseigneur), and La Volupte by Blutch. Additionally, two L'Association collections (Touis and Frydman's Sergent Laterreur and Gebe's Service des cas fous) are nominated in the Heritage category. How many awards do I have left to hand out? Two? I'm going to give them to Blutch and Frederik Peeters, just on a whim.

Frankly, I don't have a clue what is going to win. I've read just about half of the nominated titles, and there's none that I haven't liked and admired to at least some degree. There are few books on the list that seem to be absolute locks (except for the Nemo book), so nothing is going to surprise me. In all fairness, despite some omissions that seem inexplicable to me (World Trade Angels, the entire Fremok line), the list of nominees is very good -- far better than I've ever seen in a comparable American awards. So, good luck to the nominees! The awards are handed out on Thursday (I think), the opening night of the Festival. I'll be back then with a look ahead at the Festival as a whole. -- Bart Beaty

*****

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posted 10:05 pm PST | Permalink
 

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