Comix Influx Blog: Angoulême 2009

A mural in the Dupuy-Berberian Exhibition

Angoulême 2009 started off with a national strike on the railways, and concluded with an act of political protest. How appropriate for the presidency of Dupuy-Berberian, arch chroniclers of the vicissitudess and hypocricies of modern French life.

I attended the Angoulême Festival this year with high anticipation. Obviously expectations were high for the presidency of Dupuy-Berberian – the first time the festival has had joint presidents, a recognition of the indivisibilty of their contributions to the Dupuy-Berberian ouevre. However I was also very excited to meet and chat with publishers about Comix Influx and to show them our recently launched Snip-Its!

I talked to many of the more-independent artists and publishers, such as Cambourakis, Ego Comme X, La Cinquième Couche, Atrabile, La Pastèque, and the responses were uniformly positive. I decided to approach that sort of publisher partly because they tend to be closer to my sensibilities (although translations of any comics, from and to any languages, are equally welcome on Comix Influx), but mostly because I thought that they would be more sympathetic to the cause.

Choi Juhyun and Joanna Hellgren
dédicacing at the Cambourakis table

I find that the new Comix Influx Snip-Its! make it much easier to communicate the aim of Comix Influx. As well as showing the necessity of owning the original comic – thus avoiding anyone thinking that we are doing scanlations, and could diminish sales – Snip-Its particularly highlight the opportunities for publishers, such as making copies available to foreign publishers, to help foreign publishing deals, and also passing out review copies, as well as the more obvious opportunity to sell copies at international comics festivals such as Angoulême. I hope that this will lead to greater interaction with publishers over the next few months, so we can really try to take Comix Influx in directions that will benefit them, as well as the comics readers, hungry for international comics.

Thursday, the first day of the festival, was slower than normal this year, as many people struggled to get to Angoulême due to a national rail strike. But despite this, most publishers I spoke to seemed to have done a very good trade this year. For the people who did make it in for the Thursday, the tents (where the publishers sell their wares, and creators inscribe elaborate dédicace) and the exhibitions were unusually empty, giving a great opportunity to see as much as possible before the crowds descended.

Dupuy-Berberian model in the CIBDI

Possibly the highlight of the festival was the Presidents’ exhibition at the newly renamed CIBDI (Cité Internationale pour La Bande Dessinée et de l’Image). It was a huge exhibition, showing a massive range of Dupuy-Berberian’s work over nearly 20 years. It also displayed a great variety of content: sketches, original art, prints, models, and ephemera. Great ephemera.

Dupuy and Dupuy

The centre-piece of the exhibition was an enormous – at least 12 foot tall – mechanical model, showing crude but recognisable charicatures of Dupuy and Berberian jointly operating a machine which moved a gynormous pencil across a piece of paper, illustrating the collaborative nature of their work. Smaller versions, a few inches tall, of these have been shown before (and were included here, although they were not operational) but this was the first time one of this scale has been shown.

A nice touch, the exhibition also included items from their personal collections, including pages of original art from various other creators. Another treasure was the complete original art from a batman comic given to Charles Berberian for his 40th birthday. While the story was a very straight Batman story, each page was drawn by a different giant of the French comics scene – Avril, Stanislas, Killoffer, Trondheim, and several others.

As one would hope, the exhibition included a large number of originals. The quality of work, control and expressiveness of their line is breath-taking, I could have stayed there for hours, but with so much to see I reluctantly had to move on.

Dupuy-Berberian and Ruppert-Mulot draw each other

Within their exhibition, Dupuy-Berberian had invited Ruppert & Mulot to devise a mini-exhibition of their own. Typically inventive and challenging, they devised the Maison Close, a representation of a brothel, where invited cartoonists contributed drawings – female cartoonists were asked to draw the ladies of the bordello and the males as their clients. Unsurprisingly this created the controversy that Ruppert-Mulot had no-doubt intended, but the exhibition itself was a bit of a let-down. To see the art one had to look through tiny peep-holes, which were embedded in the walls of a small room with pink, quilted walls. Although great fun to watch people crouching down, faces pressed against the pink fabric squinting to see the tiny pictures, it wasn’t a terribly satisfying – nor shocking – experience. All the comics are on the web, where they are much easier to see and be offended by. There’s a lot there, and it’s well worth checking out.

Staying with controversy at the CIBDI, the South African exhibition was more impressive and far more shocking than La Maison Close. The exhibition showed the work of the two artists from Bitterkomix (a magazine that is no stranger to censorship) – Joe Dog and Conrad Botes – as well as two other South African cartoonists. The exhibition was small, but packed in a lot, including giant posters showing highly graphic sexual content as political satire. For those with the stomach for it, this was a controversial and uncompromising, but rewarding, exhibition.

A Korean comics artist
at the Sai Comics exhibit

Across the river from the hotbed of controversy that was the CIBDI, the South Korean independent publishers Sai Comics had an exhibition at the Paper Museum. South Korea were the official invited country back in 2003, and every festival since has seen a strong contingent of enthusiastic South Korean cartoonists. It was a great exhibition, showing the huge range of styles that Sai put out, and with two or three artists contributing to huge comics installations throughout the festival.

And then, a little further down the road at the Centre Margelis, there was the Winshluss exhibit. Winshluss’ last exhibit at Angoulême – a sprawling, free-wheeling fictional history of their Monsieur Feraille character, and really a satirical history of 20th century pop culture – was loved by just about everyone who saw it. Expectations for his exhibition this year were high to say the least. Fortunately, Winshluss managed to subvert and meet those expectations. The actual installation itself was undewhelming – a few pieces of original art on the walls of a room containing several large graves of Winshluss, his frequent collaborator Cizo and of his publishers. Nothing to compare with the M. Ferraille-land scale model, complete with mechanized death-trap rides. However, I understand that this was because they had spent most of their budget on making a film called Villemolle ‘81, shown at one end of the room in the Crematorium Cinematorium.

Villemolle ‘81 was universally hailed as a triumph. It started as a spoof travelogue, showing the highly eccentric charms of the small provincial French town of Villemolle, before abruptly morphing into a zombie film. The travelogue presenter was played by Blutch, and the mayor was Frankie Baloney, publisher of Les Requins Marteaux. Overall, it was a bit like a mix of Waiting For Guffman and Shaun of the Dead. It was interspersed with pieces of really wonderful animation, and packed with film references. Anyone who didn’t see it inevitably had to endure conversations with people who had rehashing their favourite moments. Hopefully it will get a DVD release – it has all the makings of a cult classic.

Ellen Lindner at the
Flemish comics exhibit

Belgian comics obviously have a huge role in the history of Bande Dessinée, and this year celebrated the latest clutch of Flemish cartoonists. There was a large stand, decorated like a Belgian Brown Bar, selling a huge range of books from Belgium as well as an exhibition of the latest hot artists. This latter divided opinion somewhat – while everyone appreciated the imaginative presentation of the works, others felt the exhibition too light on detail about the artists and how they created their work, and also of the cultural context. In most other years this would have met with universal acclaim, but this year we were spoilt for high-quality, lively exhibitions.

This year, the annual prizes were announced on the Sunday afternoon of the Festival. This was an unpopular decision with some festival-goers, particularly the large numbers who leave on the Sunday morning; it was apparently arranged in order to capitalise on the media coverage in the Sunday evening tv news, and Monday’s papers. Anyway, despite the somewhat sub-optimal timing (as perceived in some quarters) the prizes themselves were very well received (in the quarters I hang around in, anyway).

The Grand Prize, and hence the President for next year’s festival, was presented to Blutch. He also won a Prix D’Angoulême for Le Petit Christian 2, so an outstanding festival for him. This was an unexpected decision. Although recently prolific, with books published by Dupuis and Futuropolis, Blutch is generally seen as a non-commercial artist, and something of a cartoonist’s cartoonist (his earlier work in particular, such as Peplum and Mitchum, were particular favourites of many American alternative cartoonists).

Winshluss won the prestigious Best Album award for his beautifully packaged, blackly comic retelling of Pinnochio. A very good year for him too. Another notable winner was Posy Simmonds for Tamara Drew, her re-telling of Hardy’s Far From The Madding Crowd. And also nice to see that two creators with books available on Comix Influx, Étienne Davodeau and Émile Bravo, were in the prizes – we clearly have our finger on the pulse! The complete list of winners is as follows:

    Grand Prix winner (next year’s President): Blutch

    Best Album: Pinnocchio by Winshluss
    Heritage Prize: Opération Mort by Shigeru Mizuki
    Best Newcomer: Le Goût du chlore by Bastien Vivès

    Prize-Winners:
    Lulu femme nue by Étienne Davodeau
    Martha Jane Cannary by Blanchin et Perrissin
    Le Petit Christian by Blutch
    Spirou et Fantasio, Le Journal d’un ingénu by Émile Bravo
    Tamara Drewe by Posy Simmonds

Apart from all that, the familiar delights of Angoulême were there as ever. Many late nights, catching up with old friends, and meeting new people. Lots drunk in the Chat Noir and the Mercure.

Dupuy-Berberian in shadow

The last night of Angoulême 2009 saw a party in the Town Hall. The freely flowing cognac was enough to get the large number of comics creators in attendance rocking the Hôtel de Ville until the early morning. Eventually spirits turned to treasonous thoughts, and a small group started attempting to dislodge a framed photograph of Nicolas Sarkozy from its pride of place on the wall. The cheers from the cognaced party-goers inspired the revolutionaries to keep going until the portrait was knocked clean off. The revelry quickly crescendoed until the frame was broken and the two ripped halves of the photograph were tossed in the air. As quickly as the mood had peaked, it was again subdued: the Town Hall security rushed in, the lights came on and the party was over. As was, for me at least, Angoulême 2009.

And so we left Angoulême’s unseasonally balmy climes the next morning, and return to the unusally thick snow falling in London. Lots of leads to follow up on, lots of work to do!