The Angoulême International Comics Festival unveiled on Friday its annual prize list behind closed doors, with the prize for the best album for “The hunting accident”, five months before a general public edition postponed to the summer and threatened with boycott by disgruntled authors.
The big winners were the Americans Landis Blair and David Carlson, who won the Golden Fauve for best album with this long graphic novel on Chicago of the last century.
The special jury prize was awarded to Briton Steven Appleby for “Dragman”, a superheroine behind which hides a father. That of the high school students devoted “Peau d’homme”, Hubert and Zanzim, already crowned with many other awards in the comic strip, while the revelation prize went to Maurane Mazars for “Tanz!”.
The latter was among the few winners present. “It’s pretty scary to know that we are embarking on a precarious profession (…) It’s hard for us, authors, in this flourishing market, but where the authors are increasingly impoverished”, a- she said.
We will have to wait for the general public edition of the Festival, scheduled for the end of June, for the most prestigious award of the Festival, the Grand Prix, given to a comic book author for his entire career.
Only journalists, representatives of the winners, members of the organization and the mayor of Angoulême were allowed to attend the event in the city theater, organized after the 6:00 p.m. curfew.
The 48th Festival had to upset its format and postpone its general public component to the end of June, to “adapt to the context of the pandemic”. It could be held entirely outdoors if the health crisis still prevents indoor gatherings, which seems likely.
The initiative to exhibit comic books in SNCF stations has annoyed the Auteurs et autrices en action (AAA) collective, which is claiming a larger share of comic book sales for authors. He deplored that the Festival and the SNCF “refuse again this year even to remunerate the authors and authors whose work they exhibit”.
– “Boycott total” –
A column was signed by nearly 700 authors, some of whom were in the official selection or even received awards, such as Zanzim and Maurane Mazars. They threaten a “total boycott of the public side of the Angoulême Festival, next June, if no real and concrete act is taken by then, in the area of our professional status, our representation and ‘a fair rebalancing of the book chain “.
“If things don’t change I won’t be here in June. I will stand with the other writers, because they’re really fed up,” Zanzim said upon receiving his award.
Among comic book authors, “50% of us live below the poverty line. I am one of those authors. We try to hold on, but at one point we let go”, launched Gabrielle Piquet, prize of daring with “La Mécanique du sage”.
The management replied, in an open letter, that in order to allow these exhibitions, the Festival had been forced “to invest, to commit (…) budgets that it does not have, in short. debt “for lack of revenue.
Comics are not suffering from the erosion of sales, since they experienced a new year of growth in 2020, according to the GfK institute, but from very low remuneration for authors, except for the best known.
And the gap with the lesser known is widening. According to GfK, the comic book saw “a significant refocusing of sales around the bestsellers in 2020. Their weight has been reinforced throughout the year”.
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