100 days before the festival takes place, the official selection for the Festival International de la Bande Dessinée has gone up on the Festival’s website, and it’s impressive. As an Anglophone who only occasionally dips her toes into Francophone waters, most of the titles are French and utterly unfamiliar to me, but the list proves that the French are only too willing to embrace good comics from other countries. It’s good to see James Kochalka’s American Elf on the list, along with Adrian Tomine’s Shortcomings (a superb work from last year which was strangely underrated; sadly, the French title Loin d’être parfait does not preserve the pun in the original), Posy Simmonds’ Tamara Drewe, Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie’s Lost Girls, Tony Millionaire’s Uncle Gabby, Dash Shaw’s Bottomless Belly Button…
…and Mark Millar’s Wanted.
One of these things is not like the others.
(the French edition of American Elf published by Ego comme X, (c) James Kochalka)
There’s some manga on the list as well, notably one by Junji Ito (creator of Uzumaki), but considering that about one-third of all comics published in France are manga, I was expecting a bigger Japanese presence. For the most part, the list is a celebration of the greats of contemporary French comics, and even though I haven’t read most of the nominated albums, I recognise a lot of the names: Blutch, Chabouté, Emmanuel Guibert, Christophe Blain, Etienne Davodeau… Just listing them makes me wonder if the Francophone comics readers consider themselves to be living through a golden age, just as Douglas Wolk suggested we Anglophones are. I think I might have to conquer my shyness about my subpar French and go to Angoulême next January. There’s a lot to see, if you’re in the right place to see it.
Katherine Farmar, when not trying to work out how much she can bring back in terms of BD and aromatic fromage from Angoulême, writes regularly on comics and culture from around the world, you can read more on her comics blog Whereof One Can Speak.
October 23rd, 2008 at 8:00 pm
One thing I learnt from my visit to Angouleme: their English is pretty good, and they’ll usually help you out when it’s obvious your French is crap. And another: the town is full of great looking women, thanks to the School Of Music up on the hill. Magnifique!
October 24th, 2008 at 8:42 am
Bon! Of course, being sophisticated, liberated chaps we mean this in the spirit of “isn’t it nice to see so many women taking part in a comics event” and not just us being drooling cavemen… Honest.
October 26th, 2008 at 12:55 am
Uh, oh aye.