Last words on Angouleme

This is an edited version of my report to the Copyright Agency Limited Creative Industries Career Fund. If you are an Australian working in the literature field, the CAL fund is well worth a look. Hey, they supported me!
(The post was originally written in February 2011.)

What is the Angouleme Festival?
Any mention of comics and France inevitably leads to the same response: “Ah Asterix! Ah, Tin Tin!” The Festival International de la Bande Dessinee d’ Angouleme is Europe’s biggest comics event, attracting between 200,000 and 250,000 visitors, over four days. I went to the festival to see how comic book culture is presented and promoted in France. Angouleme, a large regional centre, is 2 ½ hours from Paris by train. Perhaps not coincidentally the SNCF, France’s national railway, is a major sponsor of the festival. It is the French comics industry’s major event and 2011 was the 38th festival.

Marketing and public awareness
The festival is both a celebration and a masterful promotion of la bande dessinee. (Bande dessinee means, literally, drawn stories.) Prizes highlight a wide range of themes and audiences, and are awarded on the final night,. The shortlist of 51 titles in a range of categories are heavily promoted in bookshops and beyond. The national retailer FNAC (think JB HiFi meets Borders meets Ticketmaster), is a major sponsor, devoting considerable shelf space and marketing muscle to the Prix d'Angouleme. National newspapers and magazines across the political and cultural spectrum run cover stories and some offer quite lavish supplements as tie-ins with the festival. Radio staion France Info broadcasts from the festival. The industry, its artists and readers, are taken seriously. News that Art Speigleman was this year’s Grand Prize winner, and therefore next year’s festival president, was widely reported in press and online.

Angouleme is not a convention, or a fan-meet.
In addition to major exhibitions of French and international comic book artists, there is also a rights market; meetings with artists; film screenings and projections, book signings; book sales (oh, my suitcase), and an incredible buzz throughout the town. Add to that an exhaustive schedule of in-conversations, panels and debates. 'Is Temeraire a little Nazi?'; 'Teaching BD in art school'; 'Lesbians and bande dessinee' 'Violence and manga'; 'Mainstream or indie - is it necessary to choose?' The signature event is the series drawing concerts, or Concert de Dessiné, where major illustrators draw live in concert with well known international music acts. The drawing concerts that I attended were strongly supported and appear to be an excellent way to broaden the audience for comic books and illustration. Four days was not enough to see and do everything this event has to offer.

Being there
The town of Angouleme is taken over by the festival. It impossible to forget why you are there unlike, say, a writer’s festival in a major city. Hotels are also impossible to obtain as they are reserved each year for publishers, exhibitors and professionals. Visitors to the festival can stay outside the town and ‘commute’, or do as I did and stay with a local family, booking via the tourist bureau. Staying with a local family actually proved very enriching - though I can see the potential pitfalls.

So, where are the Australians?
Despite the challenges of accommodation I urge and encourage other Australians to go to this festival. There appeared to be very few Australians at the festival. One young French publisher I spoke to believed that Shaun Tan is an American, despite the fact the Tan had won the Angouleme Prize for best album (book) in 2008 for The Arrival. An Australian stand in the Nouveau Monde marquee would be an excellent opportunity to display Australian output in comics and graphic novels. I believe it would be an opportunity for Australian comics producers to see what the rest of the world is doing. I know they will find this festival an invaluable window onto the broad church of comics today, in the same way that the Bologna Children’s Book Fair does for children’s authors and publishers.

This festival is not only about French and Belgian comics: it is an opportunity to see the world of comics. I met Finnish, Romanian, Italian, English, Belgian, Dutch, Hong Kong Chinese, and of course French exhibitors. I saw American, African and Spanish musicians performing as part of the Concert de Dessiné. Books from Italy and the United States won major prizes.

Maybe not so different
While France has a strong and successful comics culture and industry, it also faces the same issue as Australia: how to navigate between the rock and the hard place of superheroes and manga. The diversity of storytelling, the artistic nuance in independent comics, the reworking of traditional forms, the audacious subject matter, is all clear evidence of how comics can exist beyond the fringe, the cult and the bland commercial mainstream. Australian comic creators and publishers could benefit from an engagement with this festival. I hope that in the future a small Australian team could exhibit in the Nouveau Monde space, alongside the plethora of other nations. I believe that Australian comics and graphic novels could be greatly enriched by exposure to and engagement with the pluralistic European comics culture.

Language barrier?
My French language skills are far from fluent, though having studied for the past four years (privately and at the Council of Adult Education). You might say that I have ‘high school French’. While there was some frustration, my skills were more than enough to let me engage with the festival program, the books, exhibitions, and literature. The Hong Kong exhibitors had a translator with them. Mastery of French is not a prerequisite for exploring this festival.

The town accommodates the festival in diverse exhibition spaces and in massive marquees housing a ranged of themed halls: edgy international content (Le Nouveau Monde), to commercial mainstream publishing (Les Bulles, packed!), to young new talent (Pavillion Jeunesse Talents), manga, collectors, meet the artist sessions, debates and more. In addition to the programmed exhibitions, independent and DIY artists, also staged events in a sort of undeclared fringe festival. The fact is that in four days one could not possibly see everything.

I wanted to experience the diversity of publishing in the field of comics, and to see how the festival presented the creators and their work. In both of these areas - content and presentation - Angouleme was like a four-day masterclass. Curatorial standards in exhibitions are extremely high. For writer-illustrator Baru, the honour of being this year’s festival president was evident in a generous retrospective that included original artwork, large panels, a documentary film, objects including a period car, pinball machines, music and more. But this was just one of numerous exhibitions. Also on show was an elegantly packaged touring show on the history of comics in Hong Kong; a French colonial history; the Middle Ages in comics (in the late gothic town hall); a Christian BD show (in a cathedral); homage to rock and rock record covers with soundtrack; a magna show; 60 years of Peanuts and Snoopy; a youth prize show and more. The Hong Kong show was a major part of the festival and the curatorial standard was equal to anything a major cultural institution in Australia might have in permanent exhibition. This show was designed for touring and I have been speaking with the Melbourne Writers Festival director about bringing it to Australia.

In addition to these (and many other) temporary exhibits, Angouleme is home to la Musee de la bande dessinee, a permanent exhibition on the history of comics. The stylishly designed museum includes comics from all over the world, not just France.


I hope that my experience is just the beginning of wider engagement for Australian creators with European comics. It’s a big world out there, and there is more to French comics than Asterix and Tin Tin.

Heavy Trash unload in France

This post is dedicated to the team at Rock Town Hall.

One of the highlights of the Angouleme Festival de la Bande Dessine were the Concerts des Dessines. Here's a taste of Heavy Trash, led by Jon Spencer, getting down to business.



Jon Spencer speaks not only the worst French you have ever heard, but forgets the name of one of the premier illustrators. But heck, c'est la vie, c'est la pierre.



The dignified guy with the silver hair is Baru, festival president. I have fallen just a bit in love with his work, which depicts working class men and their lives in an un-sentimental way, like the love child of Raymond Briggs and Paul Kelly. I like the way he draws, very tentative, feeling his way through to the character, nothing formulaic. Baru is joined by Chauzy and Flao.

Tour Baru's fantastic exhibition here.

But there is nothing stopping Jon Spencer, and when it all comes together at the end, well, it is indeed a very rock and roll moment. Or as the French say, un pur moment du rock and roll.



This year the festival presented three concerts with drawing. I was lucky enough to see all three. Fatoumata Diawara, the Malian singer and her polished, nimble band appeared with illustrator Clement Oubebrerie, his gentle watercolour and ink pen lines occasionally showing something stronger and darker.

There is more video and Concerts des Dessines at the festival website. Areski Belkacem, sorry - I'm drawing a blank, led a band through a story titled Coup de Foudre (a sudden blow to the heart/falling heavily in love) that involved masked wrestlers, femmes fatales and cross-dressing to audience heavily loaded with school kids. Who loved every biff and clinch. The music was a slithery, rhythmic set that offered endless twists and surprises, a kind of rootsy, moorish funk.

Comics and music: who knew they could be so damned groovy?

Streets of Angouleme

Not all the artwork is found indoors, in galleries or in books during the Festival International de la Bande Dessinee.

Here's a selection of street art and a couple of festival surfaces. Most of the street art was taken late on Saturday afternoon during a little walk through the town's narrow, winding streets. Even with the buzz of the festival, Angouleme is an attractive historic town. Limestone is the dominant building material and its widespread use makes the town feel ordered and calm. For me, having grown up around Fremantle, I found all this limestone quite evocative.

Let's start with the big one. Rue Hergé is the main street of the town. Here's the man it's named after.

Cheating a bit here as the illustration is part of the festival imagery, but part of the flavour.

Again, the festival uses BD images to good effect.

This one on a postbox appeared to be permanent. 

But not all course not all of the artwork is state approved.

Someone I met while walking the ramparts.

Another rampart dweller.

Artists' studio doors

Paste-up on the window of an empty yard.

And another, part of a cluster of paste-ups.

This is found near the corner of Rue Froid and Rue du Soleil. 

At night the limestone walls of the Hotel de Ville became a giant projection screen.