Du kan lytte her og læse mere på Nummer9.

Hermed et uddrag:

Åbningshistorien er den stærkeste: Forfatterens fiktive stand-in, Karla, får sin niårige niece Herle på besøg i lejligheden i Berlin over julen. Da hun er broke, stjæler de kyllinger i det lokale supermarked, som de siden forkuller i ovnen, fordi de har for travlt med den ligeledes stjålne champagne og smøgerne. Karlas ven og samvittighed, den pruttende bullterrier Dexter, må klare ærterne og sende den pludseligt livløse Herle på intensiv, mens den skamfulde Karla tager på BDSM-sexklub. Anarkistisk løssluppen, hylemorsom undergrundshumor.

Læs helheden her.

Illustration by Trondheim of the Angoulême mascot (designed by him) and Bill Watterson's Calvin

I’ve been covering the festival off and on since 2001 for different media, and much of this coverage is online. Unfortunately, most of it remains consigned to more or less inoperative domains, such as my old mag Rackham and the “Classic” TCJ site that fell through the cracks when the new, much improved version went operative. I’ve therefore decided to assemble links to our (mine and Thomas Thorhauge’s) complete online coverage here, and — as you may have noticed from glancing at the flow of the blog today — even to import to the Bunker all of my TCJ coverage, just to have it accessible closer to home.

Here’s the timeline:

2001-2006 (Rackham):
The Complete Rackham coverage (in Danish)

2007 (The Metabunker):
The Metabunker coverage

2008 (The Metabunker):
On the Bunker’s non-presence at Angoulême 2008
The French “Comics Mafia” and other Follies
Shaun Tan Wins Book of the Year at Angoulême
Dupuy & Berberian — Grand Prix d’Angoulême
A Cornucopia of Cliché — review of Shaun Tan’s Book of the Year Winner The Arrival

2009 (The Metabunker):
The Metabunker coverage
Take Two: An Interview with Ruppert/Mulot

2010 (crossposted between TCJ.com and The Metabunker):
Angoulême
Angoulême 2010: Friday
Angoulême 2010: Saturday
Angoulême 2010: Aftermath
Angoulême 2010: The Flix!
“Everything I do, I do at an increasing risk” — An interview with Fabrice Neaud

2011 (TCJ.com, with additions at The Metabunker):
Angoulême 2011 at The Comics Journal.
Angoulême 2011: Friday
Angoulême 2011: Saturday
Angoulême 2011: Art Spiegelman Grand Prix
Angoulême 2011: Aftermath
Angoulême 2011: Flix!

Time Machine Go.

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.

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.

From Sol Carrelus

They both come from a fine arts background, but quickly turned to comics once they were out of art school, publishing short pieces in various anthologies, most notably Férraille Illustré, in the early 2000s. This led them to the seminal French alternative publishing house L’Association, where they released their book debut Safari Monseigneur : an examination colonialism through cartoon vaudeville : in 2005. The next year, it was followed up by Panier de singe (“Monkey Cage”), which weaves gruesome humor from body language and optics, and Le Tricheur (“The Trickster”), a heavily symbolic heist procedural, and Sol Carrelus, a gothic masquerade in 2008. American readers might know them best for their grand stairway in Kramers Ergot 7.

In 2009, they published the first in a multi-part series, Irene et les clochards (“Irene and the vagabonds”), which contrasts one woman’s personal rage and isolation with the issue of homelessness endemic to any big city, filtered through a meta-layer in which the artists themselves are contracted to narrate her experiences. More emotional in tone, it promises a new direction for them.

There is an element of performance to their work, a playful complicity with the reader that lures one into uncomfortable places. This interaction is often quite concrete: Gogo Club (2007) in part collects a number of cartooned encounters based on conversations with readers at their signings, while “Le Championnat de bras de fer” is an online effort uniting a number of the cartoonists’ colleagues for small jam strips based around a virtual arm-wrestling tournament. Their most complex work in this vein to date was the “Maison close” (“The bordello”), a controversial online jam comic commissioned for the 2009 Angoulême festival by its presidents that year, the cartooning pair Dupuy/Berberian, in which Ruppert and Mulot united a large number of cartoonists in a virtual whorehouse — the women playing prostitutes, the men their johns. (It was published in book form in late 2010).

The present interview is a second take. It was conducted at that same festival, but because of technical problems, it was written down from sparse notes and memory, ably assisted by Ruppert via e-mail. It was originally published at tcj.com on February 1st 2010.

—

I’d like to start by getting an idea of what led you to comics. You both went to art school : what did you do there?

R: We didn’t do comics, at least not in school. I was primarily involved in contemporary dance, but also video installation and performance.

M: I did a variety of things, including video, sculpture and installation art.

Why did you choose comics as your medium instead of some of those activities?

R: Comics is a comparatively free medium to work in, less encumbered by history. It seems open as a form, with lots of material to work with and explore. And the comics world is smaller and more accessible, more pleasant and fun than the contemporary art world.

Your comics are clearly comics, making use of traditional contour line drawing and clear panel-to-panel storytelling, but at the same time you make use of these elements to do things that have rarely if ever been seen in the form. Would you ascribe that, partly, to your other artistic interests?

R: Sure, it’s always an interesting challenge to integrate into comics unusual elements. We’re interested in storytelling, but we emphatically want what we do to be clearly recognizable as comics. We want it to be clearly legible.

You share this sensibility with a lot of contemporary cartoonists who are simultaneously innovating within the form. Chris Ware would be an obvious example, or David B. Why are you interested in working within the traditional cartoon language of comics, rather than something entirely different and more related to the other pictorial arts?

R: We think this form has a lot to offer and want to work within the tropes of the traditional cartoon, even if simultaneously our work is experimental with an ambition to invent new ways of storytelling. When you look at the comics of Hergé or Winsor McCay, there’s a whole conception of the world on display there, with much thought and care put into it. We want to achieve something similar : to create something that is solely possible in comics.

In that respect, you seem very much to be in accord with the school of thought that looks back at the early classics. Art Spiegelman had that memorable line “the future of comics lies in their past.” Would you agree?

R: Yes completely; I’m not saying that the past is always better, blahblahblah, but it’s obvious for me that comics staked out a special form of expression early on and it’s important to understand that it is a young medium and that the form it has now is different of what it’s going to be in the future. The earliest comics had this energy of being movable in the making.

I was specifically thinking of your storytelling approach, which uses only what in film would be called total and half totals, no close-ups or dramatic shifts in perspective. This is very much in the tradition of the early newspaper strip.

M: Yes, we’re not interested in cinematic effects. Instead of presenting a conversation between two characters in shot-reverse manner, we prefer to have them both be there, fully visible, next to each other. That way, you can make use of their body language. We would like it to seem much more like a stage play in a small theater than a film.

And you seem fascinated with movement, both natural and performative. Especially in Le Tricheur and parts of Panier de singe, where you break down physical actions into their component parts, using many more individual panels than one would normally see, or need in a traditional comic. I was wondering whether this might in part stem from your background in dance?

R: Of course. We’re interested in how body movement can convey emotion, how emotion can be conveyed in this more external way, inviting the reader to interpret what is going on.

Yes, you have this almost voyeuristic approach to mise-en-scène. It’s as if we’re given a kind of ‘God’s eye’ perspective on your characters.

R: Yes, we find this much more fascinating than spelling out what each character is thinking or feeling. We want the reader to invest in the story, to bring his or her own interpretations as to what is going on.

You’ve mentioned a connection to Greek drama and its use of masks?

M: Yes, when we draw our characters, we draw them with a simple ‘V’ instead of a face. We don’t want the distraction of facial expression, pinning down whatever emotion the character has. Usually in comics, the face is were all the emotions are written; that’s why a lot of cartoonists work with close-ups. When you talk to someone you look at the face and you perceive the movement of his body. We try to work with neutral faces and concentrate on what is expressed by the body.

R: In Greek theater, the mark of a good actor was to inhabit the imaginations of the spectators, to invite their own experience, interpretation and emotions and channel them, rather than convey specific motives or emotions. The mask is an important means of achieving this : it obscures the specificity of the actor’s appearance and expression and it is where the spectator must write his own emotions, while taking cues from the actor’s body movement and expression.

In this sense, you’re making an interesting connection, I think, because traditional comics seem to me to be one of the few narrative forms that retained the archetypical models of ancient theater through modernism, where contemporary drama, the novel and eventually film were more concerned with realism, or at least naturalism.

R: Yes, we’re not naturalists, but we draw bodies in realistic proportions.

Yes, you even make this a central part of the premise in Sol Carrelus, where the participants in the masked ball turn into the archetypes from classic horror stories.

R: Yes, we like the little masquerades we all play.

I don’t know whether you agree, but to me there’s a certain coldness to your presentation; it can seem almost clinical. The reader is placed at a distance from the action, as if he or she were looking at microbes in a petri dish.

R: We like to maintain a certain distance between the reader and our characters, and as you said, today’s cultural representations are more about making the viewer project himself into the characters, to empathize. Our concerns are a bit different: we like to create little human objects with human behavior, and we are, of course, mostly interested in the dark aspects of human nature, which might lead to the impression you’re talking about.

From Irene et les clochards

R: You have to make a choice somewhere, and we find these aspects of being human the most interesting. The instances where we misunderstand, deceive, betray, hurt, and kill each other are the most relevant and therefore worthy of exploration.

You seem very much attracted to traditional storytelling genres and formulae : Safari Monseigneur works with colonialist tropes, Sol Carrelus is a combination of the classic haunted house story and the classic American film monsters, and Le Tricheur is police-interrogation-based caper story.

R: We like those forms because there’s a lot of truth in them. They have been used to tell so many stories and have accumulated a lot of cultural baggage that one can make use of. They offer a kind of shortcut to interesting issues, a means of exploring them.

I was wondering in this context about the “Maison Close” jam project. Choosing the kind of premise you did : female and male cartoonists drawing themselves interacting in a whorehouse, the former acting the part of the prostitutes, the latter that of their johns : one would assume that one of the most natural themes to raise would be the one of gender roles in comics, as well as the world at large. And I guess you do address this, to a certain extent, but only subliminally. You don’t seem to be interested in going for obvious, or dare I say difficult themes, but rather treat… not subversively, necessarily, but with a certain deadpan irony.

R: Well, the “Maison Close” was a collaborative project involving over two dozen cartoonists. We merely provided the premise and drew the scenery in which they had to interact. And we appeared as characters here and there. But really, the individual storylines were left to the participants themselves. Mostly they worked in pairs, creating the story of their own interaction. There was a certain consulting with us, but really, we had no control over the story.

Yes, but you chose the premise, the setting, and that in itself dictates a lot of what is going on. It’s an uncomfortable premise.

R: Yes, absolutely. We wanted to put the participants in this slightly uncomfortable situation of devising a story in which they participated in this kind of encounter. It was a way of eliciting interesting and difficult choices from them, of making them deal with it. We think that’s more interesting than comfortably letting them do whatever they want, and in any case, we needed a premise to make the project cohere.

It’s also a premise that was bound to draw criticism, I guess, but I was surprised that someone like Chantal Montellier took such offense. I mean, it’s pretty obviously not an attempt to perpetuate sexist stereotypes…

M: Yes, I had expected her to have a more nuanced view. It seemed a bit of a knee-jerk reaction.

Was there an element of provocation in the project?

R: Definitely, yes : we of course wanted to provoke the contributors to do interesting work.

Speaking of collaboration, I wanted to ask about how you work and how you build your books. Obviously a lot of thought goes into their conception…

R: It’s hard to tell you one thing, because each project is different. It usually starts with some kind of idea or concept that we want to try out, and then we develop it from there. Le Tricheur for example, is based on the duet as a model. It’s structured around three duets of characters that interact and reflect each other’s relationships. Often it starts with individual scenes that we find interesting, and only later do we provide a unifying structure.

M: Yes, Sol Carrelus, for example, started with a number of separate situations that we found interesting and drew out. By doing this, we gradually developed a set of characters that we figured would work well together. We then pasted up the individual scenes on the wall and began figuring out how we could tie them together, by providing a structure and creating a story.

R: Yes, and that phase obviously is more about planning, but it’s not always the case from the start.

Self-portraits from Irene et les Clochards

R: Well, it’s complicated, and we always try to make it look homogenous, as if it were drawn by one person. [Picks up Le Tricheur] But, for example, here I drew Cravate and Jerome drew Batman, and here I drew Bonnet and Jerome drew Casquette, and then we put it together.

I assume you work next to each other?

M: Yes.

It’s clearly very homogenous work, but do you recognise individual differences between yourselves, that can be used to your advantage? I was thinking that the fact that you are two different individuals might at times be used actively for artistic purposes. Is there a kind of division of labour in this sense?

R: This is not something we think it makes sense to talk about. We do the work together. It’s Ruppert and Mulot together. We get this question a lot, and so do Dupuy and Berberian. They refuse to talk about it at all : we talk about it a little, but really it doesn’t make sense. There’s a tendency amongst journalists to want to put things into neat boxes, like “this guys does the characters and this guy does the backgrounds” or whatever, and that’s both rigid and reductive. So it’s not really something we want to talk about in detail.