Written by Motoichi Takemoto, the forty-page dossier entitled “Japanese comics” and published in Angoulême and bubble comics in 1982, marks the official beginning of the meeting of manga with the International Comics Festival (FIBD), the first edition of which dates back to 1974.
Despite some difficulties, this is establishing itself as the main meeting place for the 9e Art and arouses the interest of mangaka who first go there as individuals. This is particularly the case of Osamu Tezuka and Yoshihiro Tatsumi who made the trip in 1982, the second returned there in 1984.
It was not until the turn of the 1990s with the beginning of the manga breakthrough that the FIBD took an interest in Japan and made it the guest of honor at the 1991 edition. On this occasion, Thierry Groensteen published The Universe of manga, an introduction to Japanese comics at Casterman, historical publisher of Tintin.
Perception. If we can see retrospectively in the latter makes a kind of handover between the Franco-Belgian comic strip and the manga which is true today, this is not the case at the time. Especially since the perception of Japanese works in cultural circles in France is far from positive. In the foreword to his book, Thierry Groensteen deplores that “many Europeans regard manga as uniformly mediocre” and believes that “the first justice to do to them is nevertheless to recognize them as multiple, heterogeneous, pushing their advantage in genres and to very diverse audiences.
But he does not fail to add that “true successes are obviously the exception, in a plethoric production of which nine tenths have no other destiny than to be thrown away after consumption”.
Under these conditions, the true recognition of the manga by the FIBD will only be expressed when the way in which it is viewed changes in French society, that is to say at the turn of the new millennium. This is when the works of Jiro Taniguchi and the films of Hayao Miyazaki will begin to be praised by the media who were asking, like Telerama, in 1996, “Should we burn manga? “.
When the same magazine invites its readers, ten years later, to “dive into emotion” by discovering “the masters of Japanese comics”, we feel that the atmosphere has changed. The awarding, for the first time, of the Fauve d’or, the FIBD’s highest distinction, to a manga, in this case NonNonBa (1977), by Shigeru Mizuki, in 2007, opened a new era confirmed by the enormous popular success in Angoulême of the exhibition dedicated, in 2022, precisely to Shigeru Mizuki.
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