Grasping Angouleme’s Meaning

With the first full weekend after Europe's largest comics festival in our rear view mirror, many more witnesses are finding the time to weigh in on the just-past Angouleme and its overall meaning in the larger pictures of state of the industry/state of the art form.

* Paul Gravett's festival report is as lengthy and interesting as you might expect. He brings in an armload of publishing trends into his analysis, so many you almost want to him to slow down and pick one. He discusses the festival's Essential books in terms of their relationship to the traditional album format, which is an angle that hadn't occurred to me.

* I'm sympathetic to the notion in this article at du9 dealing with festival prize-winner NonNonBa that manga authors like Shigeru Mizuki are treated less as individual cartoonists and more a representatives of a tradition or an iteration of form, one which many people in the French-language market may see as harmful or threatening and many people out may see as a simplistic expression of consumer culture rather than art. The bulk of the article's complaints, about some specifics of culture, are out of my experience, and I can't comment.

I found the lead-in extremely disappointing, though, if I'm reading it correctly. Suggesting that articles noting or identifying the winner as manga are somehow dehumanizing or insulting the author in a "Charles Burns wins this prize, but 'manga' wins that prize" way, that seems to me grandstanding at best, strident nonsense at worst. Sometimes an aspect of an award-winning book's category or origin (small press, on-line, female author, publisher, manga, non-album format) is the compelling news story, for all sorts of legitimate reasons including but not limited to historical importance and a window into present trends and attitudes. Two, Mizuki simply isn't a well-known author, like, say, Jiro Taniguchi, which frequently sends reporters to descriptives and contexts that are broader rather than more specific and allows for less of an impression by the individual's pre-existing life narrative on the article itself.

* Via afNews.info comes word and/or outright hosting of Laurent Melikian's photos, Gud's sketchbook diary, and Guido Vogliotti's gallery.
 
posted 2:02 am PST | Permalink
 

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