ANGOULEME FESTIVAL. The author of The Arab of the Future was awarded the Grand Prize at the 50th edition of the Angoulême International Comics Festival. Who is Riad Sattouf and what are its works?
[Mis à jour le 26 janvier 2023 à 16h32] This Wednesday, January 25, on the occasion of the opening night of the Angoulême Festival which is held until Sunday January 29, the author Riad Sattouf was awarded the ultimate reward for a comic book author: the Grand Prix of the Angoulême International Comics Festival, which is awarded to a comic book author for his or her entire career at the end of an online vote by industry professionals, including designers, screenwriters and colorists. From the height of his 44 years, Riad Sattouf has 35 works to its credit and yet appears among the youngest laureates to win the top honour. He succeeds Canadian author Julie Doucet, 56, pioneer of alternative and feminist comics.
Riad Sattouf is best known for his autobiographical series The Arab of the future, started in 2015 and whose 6th and last volume was released in November 2022. His saga has met with great success, translated into twenty languages, with more than three million copies sold. All of Riad Sattouf’s work, in an autobiographical and humorous vein, has the particularity and the merit of addressing the greatest number, even the readership furthest from comics. “I started as an author of very trashy humorous comics, with a limited audience of aficionados. I then tried to make comics for people who don’t read them, taking as my first dream reader my Breton grandmother, who didn’t really like comics,” he told the Monde.
Who is Riad Sattouf, Grand Prix of the Angoulême Festival in 2023?
Riad Sattouf was born in Paris on May 5, 1978, from a Syrian father and a Breton mother. But very quickly, his parents moved to Algeria. Then he spent his childhood in Libya and Syria. After receiving a Muslim education in a village school in Syria, he returned to settle in France with his parents, at Cap Fréhel, when he was 12 years old and had to return to sixth grade. After the divorce of his parents, he moved to Rennes where he obtained his baccalaureate and continued his studies in applied arts in Nantes. He then joined the regional school of fine arts in Rennes and then the Pivaut school. He finished his career at the Gobelins school in Paris, in the animation section.
The one for whom the discovery of Adventures of Tintinat the age of 5, “determined the continuation of [s]on existence”, really began to draw for a publishing house in 2000, at the age of 22. His collaboration with the publisher Guy Delcourt earned him his first series, Little Ice in three volumes (between 2000 and 2002). In 2002, Riad Sattouf opened his Parisian studio with designers Christophe Blain (Quai d’Orsay), Mathieu Sapin (Space sardine) and Joann Sfar (The Rabbi’s Cat). In A Virgin’s Handbook (2003) et my circumcision (2004), he enjoys narrating the adventures of his adolescence on behalf of Bréal Jeunesse in a collection directed by Joann Sfar.
In parallel in 2022, he publishes in the new collection “Poisson Pilote” from Dargaud editions The Poor Adventures of Jeremy, recounting the tragicomic daily life of a thirty-year-old Parisian who works in a video game company, inspired by one of his collaborators from the Gobelin school. The first volume of the saga won the 2003 René-Goscinny Prize for its screenplay. For the same publisher Dargaud, he publishes the one-shot No sex in New York in 2004, where he performed on a trip to New York.
He then published with Hachette back to college in 2005, the saga Pascal Brutal (2006-2009) at Fluide Glacial and The Secret Life of Young People, between 2007 and 2010, for L’Association. In 2009, he directed his first film The Beautiful Kids, which received the César for best first film. In 2010, volume III of Pascal Brutal was awarded the Fauve d’or for best album at the Angoulême festival. In 2015, he was again awarded the Fauve d’or at the Angoulême festival for the first volume of The Arab of the future. In 2016, he began the series of Notebooks of Esther published by Éditions Allary, which recounts the daily life of a middle-class Parisian pre-adolescent girl, with a lot of humour.
Who is Julie Doucet, Grand Prix of the Angoulême Festival in 2022?
Julie Doucet was born on December 31, 1965 in Saint-Lambert, Quebec. She made her debut in the world of underground comics in the 1980s, collaborating on number 2 of the magazine Tchiize! (until)then to magazines The Organ et Rectangle. Between 1988 and 1990, she created her own fanzine Dirty Plotte, in which she tells in black and white, in a bold line, her daily life as a woman, and her aspirations, without taboo. This diary was then published in 1990 in the form of a comic-book by the publisher Drawn & Quarterly in Montreal. In 2021, a 400-page anthology of his Dirty Plotte see the day, titled Maxiplotte. The journalist Frédéric Potet from Monde explains in 2022 that this anthology “transgresses all the themes of North American Puritanism by using a desperate and uninhibited humor, which has made her a leader in underground comics”.
Who is Chris Ware, Grand Prix of the Angoulême Festival in 2021?
In 2021, the Grand Prix went to Chris Ware, born in 1967 in Omaha, Nebraska in the United States. In 1993 he started publishing the series Acme Novelty Library then from 1995 to 2000, Jimmy Corrigan, his main work. In 2000, Chris Ware was critically acclaimed for the adventures of his cult character oscillating between depression and fantasy in Jimmy Corrigan : the smartest kid on earth. The work was crowned best Angoulême album in 2003. In 2012, he published his book-object Building Storieswhich received the Special Jury Prize at the Angoulême Festival in 2013. In 2019, he published his latest work, Rusty Brown. Chris Ware has been awarded many times in the United States. Chris Ware’s works respect a real geometry at the level of the boxes of varying sizes, with minimalist designs, rounded characters and great freedom of narration. “For 25 years, it is thus an original work, which oscillates between a gentle melancholy and a deep sadness, that Chris Ware has been offering, always endeavoring to look under the microscope the daily life of his characters and their most ridiculous gestures”, announced the Angoulême Festival to France Info.
Who is Emmanuel Guibert, Grand Prix of the Angoulême Festival in 2020?
In 2020, Emmanuel Guibert won the Grand Prix. He is particularly known for his youth series including The Sardine of space or The Professor’s Daughter in collaboration with Joann Sfar. His early career had been marked more by works inspired by history such as Brunea work that depicts the rise of Nazism, then Alan’s Wara comic book series about an American soldier who arrived in early 1945 on European soil.
Between 2003 and 2006, the series of three documentary comic books The photograph (published by Dupuis), mixes his drawings with photographs by Didier Lefèvre which tell the story of a humanitarian mission in Afghanistan in 1986. Emmanuel Guibert was recently crowned, in 2017 with the Prix Goscinny in Angoulême and in January 2018, the Festival international comics strip had already dedicated an exhibition to him. “Each of his albums is a divine surprise”
summarized the French journalist specializing in comics Patrick Gaumer. Emmanuel Guibert was in 2020 in competition with the French Catherine Meurisse and the American Chris Ware. in 2019it’s Japanese Rumiko Takahashinicknamed the “Princess of manga” and author of Maison Ikkoku (Juliet I love you) et Ranma 1/2who won the prize.
You will have the opportunity to discover the work of Marguerite Abouet, the screenwriter ofAya of Yopougon, the work of the Grand Prix of the international festival of the comic strip of Angoulême last year: Julie Doucet and the author of The attack of the Titans, Hajime Isayama. An exhibition is also devoted to the work of colourists.
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