Autoroute detail by Baru

A symptom of this was a strange dissonance in the programming material. Two of the main exhibitions, the one showcasing Belgian artists Dominique Goblet and the retrospective of the work of festival president Baru (reviewed here), were not mentioned on the official site of their venue, the comics center and museum, Cité de la Bande Dessinée et de l’Image (CIBDI), and the extensive programming offered there was given less attention than usual in the festival program.

Didier Pasamonik, writing for the French-language news site ActuaBD, offers the contours of the larger conflict behind this unusual discrepancy. In short, a dispute over funding between the city of Angoulême and the festival’s organizing body 9èmeArt+ broke out in 2009, immediately following the changes brought about by the construction of a shopping mall in the city’s largest square, the traditional commercial locus of the festival. The city wanted to reduce its financial contribution to the festival, insisting the organizers appeal elsewhere for increased support. The latter seemingly succeeded in securing a three-year funding plan to the tune of €2.1 million, with substantial contributions made by the state, as well as the Regional Council and Department of Commerce of Poitou-Charentes.

Now it turns out, however, that this agreement, contrary to statements made in December by 9èmeArt+ director Franck Bondoux, was never signed by the Regional Council, supposed to contribute €225.000 of the budget. Its chairman, Michel Boutant, amongst whose responsibilities is the CIBDI, refuses to sign until a more equitable agreement between the center and the festival can be reached.

From the Dominique Goblet exhibition at the CIBDI's Castro Building

The exact nature of disagreements between the two remain unclear, but it surely relates to funding. The CIBDI contributes crucially to the success of the festival, lending to it the city’s largest exhibition spaces and conference halls, and yet receives about the same amount of public support annually as does the four-day festival. Boutant absented himself from all events relating to the festival in protest, while minister of culture Frédéric Mitterand visited the festival and the awards ceremony on Sunday, strengthening the position of 9èmeArt+ in the conflict.

Although this may have serious consequences for the festival in the future, it mostly provided a bit of background noise to the sensitive visitor, who was otherwise treated to a fairly solid festival, if one that had turned its attention further inward than any in recent memory.

The only major non-Francophone guest was Rose of Versailles creator and shoujo veteran Ikeda Ryochi, who appeared for a brief, overcrowded on-stage interview (I couldn’t get in, unfortunately). A major catch for a festival that has struggled with manga for years, it was a real shame that her presence was not consolidated with an exhibition or other events. In fact, the only Japanese exhibition this year was a small show of women’s so-called “underground” manga, which was severely underexposed (it’s not even mentioned on the festival website!) Tellingly, the so-called “Manga Building” exhibition space of previous years, had reverted to its old name, the Espace Franquin…

Not to slight the work of such North American creators as Charlie Adlard, Michel Rabagliati, Dash Shaw, or John Pham, but they are not exactly headline material for an international comics festival of Angoulême’s caliber. That left us with 70s dinosaur Philippe Druillet, his Métal Hurlant colleague Moebius — currently consecrated by a major retrospective in Paris — and Christophe Arleston, writer of the French-language Science Fantasy phenomenon Lanfeust de Troy. Of these, only Moebius can lay claim to international fame, and any non-francophone guest who might be interested then faced the usual problem of the on-stage interviews not being translated (of course, it did not help that the interview was also abysmally conducted). In fact, it is quite bizarre that a festival that proclaims itself international in its very title and attracts thousands of guests from all over the world makes so little effort to communicate with those who do not speak French. Everything, from exhibition labels to the official program, is grindingly monolingual.

Jeffrey Lau Wan-Kit drawing live in the Hong Kong exhibition

On one account, however, the festival’s international ambitions bore real fruit: this year’s guest country, Hong Kong, presented what is perhaps the most convincing exhibition and manifestation of its type that I have seen at Angoulême. Organized with considerable public support, notably from the Hong Kong Arts Centre, the centerpiece was a terrific exhibition, called The Kaleidoscope. It presented the history of Hong Kong comics from the 1960s to now in a suite of fold-out boxes on wheels containing a judicious mix of explanatory text, original art and comic books displayed in drawers, video screens showing both animation and documentary footage, large reproductions presenting select slices of comics history, and lots of actual comics for the visitor’s perusal. A breezy, informative and inspirational walk through half a century of fascinating comics, accompanied by an well-written and finely illustrated catalog lucidly laying it all out for the layperson.

Additionally, more than a dozen contemporary creators were in town. Amongst them were a few which I gather are fairly big time in their home country, such as Laitattatwing, Kai, and Jeffrey Lau Wan Kit, as well as a couple of the more alternative-minded artists that have wowed art comics audiences around Europe, such as Chihoi and Yeung Hok Tak. Participating in an extensive program of live drawing, signing, on-stage interviews and colloquia around the festival, they were ubiquitous. A textbook example of how an event such as the FIBD can open international doors both ways, despite the general cultural myopia of its organizers.

From the Moebius interview

The awards, handed out after closing time on Sunday afternoon yet again this year, confirmed this sense, dividing its ten prizes between five nations. And the nominations this year were remarkably international in scope — I cannot quite shake the impression that this reflects the relative lack of notable French/Belgian/Swiss books out this year.

Whatever the case, the winners present a solid, if somewhat middle-of-the-road field, high in quality, if less so in boldness, and with a distinct focus on the kind of realism seen in jury president Baru’s own work. The honors accorded the French editions of Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza and David Mazzucchelli’s Asterios Polyp were welcome if also obvious, while the awards for Brecht Evens’ The Wrong Place and Ulli Lust’s Heute ist der letzte Tag vom Rest deines Lebens (reviewed here) seemed like no-brainers in that they have unquestionably been the art comics buzz books of the year in Europe (along, arguably, with Olivier Schrauwen’s latest book, passed over by the jury).

The Fauve d’Or (comic of the year) was given to the young Italian cartoonist Manuele Fior, for his latest book Cinq mille kilomètres par seconde. I have not read it yet, but am familiar with some of his earlier work. He is ambitious and very talented, and needless to say, this is a major recognition of his still fairly modest production. We shall inevitably expect strong work from him in the future.

From the exhibition area

Originally published at TCJ.com on 3 February 2011.

Originally published at TCJ.com on 30 January 2011.

From the Frémok/Cinquième couche show

The programming has also been popular. This morning, I tried in vain to get into the CIBDI lecture hall to hear the talk by Ikeda Ryoki, the creator of the still-to-be-translated-into-English classic Rose of Versailles. I did manage to get a seat for the similarly mobbed on-stage interview with Moebius last night, even if it turned out I needn’t have bothered. Arriving late to a sweaty, overheated lecture theater, the aging maestro was given very little to work with by the interviewer, who simply let him go on and on about the trivialities of how his current retrospective at the Fondation Cartier in Paris came to be, and how he has recently returned to his classic creation Arzak. Very little effort was made to discuss the intricacies and themes of this or other works, or his thoughts on why this was a good moment to return to a character who had his day in the late 70s, or the fact that the book in question is amongst the sloppiest-looking he has turned out in a long time.

This is symptomatic of a general problem at Angoulême, which I believe I’ve addressed once or twice before: for such a high-profile international event, the on-stage interviews and panels tend to be really badly moderated. Interviewers often seem entirely unprepared and make very little use of the visuals at their disposal, and whether or not they know their subject, the resultant conversations are often dull affairs concentrating on the kind of puff press banalities one would expect from industry shills like the recently, and mercifully, dissolved Wizard. This is simply not good enough for a festival of the size, reach, and ambition of the FIBD. I don’t know what’s to be done — it hasn’t improved in the decade sine I started going and I’ve seen enough great opportunities (Clowes, Simmonds, Crumb, Burns, etc.) wasted that I think I shall simply refrain from spending my time on them in the future.

Fortunately there are so many other things to do here, and the exhibitions this year are generally solid, even if the overall slate isn’t as exciting as in previous years. The Belgian group show, which showcases three important artcomics publishers/collectives, 5ème Couche, FRMK and Employé du moi, is well curated, although it is hard not to shake the impression of a certain asymmetry: the mediocre work on display in certain sections finds itself upstaged by the Frémok people, especially Dominique Goblet, who supplements her great solo show with a selection of comics pages and two enormous, shimmering landscapes drawn with Bic pens, and Vincent Fortemps, whose selection of scratched-and-rubbed-chalk-on-perspex originals from his astonishing recent book, Par les sillons, is mesmerizing.

Now, it’s dinner time, then Saturday night in Angoulême. Always a blast.

Originally published at TCJ.com on 30 January 2011.

The L'Asso stand

To go with this very French past-time, serendipitously, festival president Baru’s exhibition has a decidedly political focus. A master of social realism in comics, the exhibition hall is dotted with documentary videos, props (pinball machines, and billboards connoting a working class environment. The main attraction, of course, is Baru’s originals: a healthy serving from his early autobiographically inflected Quéquette Blues (1984-86), a similar number of pages from his fifties flashback Les Années Sputnik (1999-2003), plus assorted. Most impressively, however, the entirety of his manga masterpiece L’Autoroute du soleil (1995) is mounted in a massive hanging display. They are immaculately crafted things — daringly laid out, yet fluid in their storytelling and with hardly any corrections visible.

The Autoroute display

The second of the old CNBDI two punch is the Dominique Goblet show upstairs. Mixing work from her books with unpublished work and very large pencil drawings, it is a beautiful display of an artist especially attentive to subjective, emotional reality. Her images of Northern lights, rendered in colored pencil and Bic pens, stand luminously on the page; her dark log cabins and furtively glanced men on the hunt, instill a symbolic, Lynchian sense of helplessness before power; and her and daughter Nikita Foussoul’s portraits of each other, published last year in the decade-long narrative of a relationship, Chronographie, for all their varied quality of execution exhibit deep engagement with life beyond outward appearance.

Goblet gave a talk to a small audience, first in the nearby auditorium, and afterwards in the exhibition itself. She stressed the importance of truth in comics: how the ellipsis of paneling allows montages of emotionally resonant elements that may not necessarily be factually true as represented, but instead synthesize into a more significant inner truth, for artist as well as reader. Faire semblant c’est mentir, as her great 2007 book is entitled: “To pretend is to lie” — postulating Truth in autobiography is bound to fail.

Time to go. Moebius is giving an auditorium talk in half an hour. Should be fun. More tomorrow.

Originally published at TCJ.com on 28 January 2011.