If It’s Fall, It Must Be Time For Angoulême Ramp-Up Drama

The French-language comics industry news clearinghouse ActuaBD.com has up its seemingly annual article on backstage machinations at the Angoulême Festival. As usual, a lot of it seems like a series of minor aspersions cast that mean a lot more to those that know the principals than they do to the rest of us cut with a healthy dose of general, committee-style bloviation, the kind of thing that happens when you have to raise money annually and there are multiple institutions involved: the festival itself, the various government agencies that provide some funding, corporate sponsors, publishers and permanent institutions within the city that participate in a major way during the show's January run.

Other stuff is more curious. From my surface reading of the piece I'm not exactly sure how a festival with potentially 200,000 people attending doesn't generate more money from ticket sales and publishing space fees than seems to be acknowledged in the article. It also strikes me as worth noting whenever a major publisher or two backs out of a show long in advance, as seems to be the case here -- although I think that's happened a few times in the last few years, too. Art Spiegelman will be presiding over the 2012 Festival, so I would expect a bit more than is usual year to year from English-language pre-press, including the various awards announcements in late Fall that serve as a more benign unofficial-but-traditional precursor to the Festival itself.
 
posted 4:30 am PST | Permalink
 

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