The Angoulême international comic book festival announced this Friday its prize list of the year – well less gendered than usual – in a complex context: the festival itself was postponed to June, but hundreds of authors have already pledged not to go.
The 48th edition of the Angoulême International Comics Festival (FIBD) will probably go down in the annals, but not only for its Fauve d’Or for once very feminine and awarded this Friday among others to Loo Hui Phang, Léonie Bischoff or Maurane Mazars by a jury chaired this year by screenwriter and specialist Benoit Peeters (see the list below): not only the Covid pandemic has forced the organizers to duplicate the event – the prizes and rare exposure …
The 48th edition of the Angoulême International Comics Festival (FIBD) will probably go down in the annals, but not only for its Fauve d’Or for once very feminine and awarded this Friday among others to Loo Hui Phang, Léonie Bischoff or Maurane Mazars by a jury chaired this year by screenwriter and specialist Benoit Peeters (see the winners below): not only has the Covid pandemic forced the organizers to duplicate the event – the prizes and rare exhibitions open this Friday, the festival itself has been rescheduled from June 24 to 27 – but they now face an impressive rebellion from authors, mainly French: they are now more than 700 to have signed a forum of the collective “Autrices et authors in action “(AAA), created last year, and in which they reiterate their intention of a” total boycott of the festival “. In question: the endemic and galloping precariousness of their profession … while comic book publishing has never done so well! The GFK institute thus announced this week the figures of comic book publishing in France for 2020; despite the pandemic, containment, re-containment and a general shift to “Clique & Collecte”, the comic book has more than performed well: + 6% in turnover (591 million euros) and + 9 % of the number of copies sold (53.1 million albums, including a top trio made up of the latest volumes of Lucky Luke, Blake & Mortimer and L’Arabe du Futur). Flourishing figures but whose profits do not concern the majority of authors, who see their copyrights stagnate at 8%, sales volumes continue to fall (we want more and more different albums, more than 5,000, but fewer and fewer copies per album), all without being paid for their presence at festivals while the Covid crisis hits them hard, between postponed albums and ancillary income (festival clothes, neck drawing, workshops) and that the year 2020 should be, in France, that of comics, between major events and a “Racine report” (commissioned by the State, and which concluded that more than a third lived under the poverty line) which had to be followed by effects … There were neither effects nor large-scale demonstrations. The fed up, him, seems to have reached its climax. To the point of threatening the very holding of its biggest international festival? Answer next June, if all goes well.
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