Go, Read: Matt Madden On Angouleme Festival Weekend

Go, here. The cartoonist Matt Madden had something of a ringside seat for the whole weekend and has the ability to draw on the perspectives of numerous comics-making friends, both English- and French-language.

One nice thing about the report is the extra details. The ceremony was icky in a couple of ways past the lengthy, fake-awards opening; primarily there was a board for cartoonists to provide a drawing in order to receive their awards, which had uncomfortable connotations for a lot of the artists in the room in terms of their value. He also notes from fundamental difficulties in getting information on certain winners to the press on a basic level. I agree with Matt that there were multiple levels to many of these events: minor snafus, major snafus and then a sort of derisive, angry arrogance in terms of how criticism of events was greeted by organizers.

I join Matt in hoping that improvements are made by the smart, comics-loving people in charge, from the angriest response to much more general issues like how older artists' work can show in a sophisticated way that does honor to past and present. My particular worry is that when people get close to a rhetorical stalemate they see that as work actually done on an issue or a concern instead of its avoidance. Let's hope that's not the case here. We all have things we can work on, it's just most of us don't have our missteps play out in public like this.
 
posted 10:25 pm PST | Permalink
 

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