44th Angoulême International Comics Festival 26.-19.1.2017
Here is a long overdue report of my visit at Angoulême Comics Festival this year.
I attended Angoulême Comics Festival in France for the first time this year. Angoulême is the biggest comic festival in France and one of the largest ones in Europe with an international crowd of about 200,000 people each year gathering into this small town in southwest of France. I had heard a lot about this festival that had gone on for over forty years and was interested to see it for myself.
I was invited as a guest to the festival as part of Femicomix Finland (Feministinen sarjakuvatoiminta). Femicomix was representing at Angoulême in collaboration with three other organizations from around the world that bring awareness of gender inequality in the comic scene and bring out more female artists. These organizations were Chicago Ladies’ Night Anthology (USA), Laydeez Do Comics (UK) and Comic Book Slumber Party (UK). As a group we called ourselves “International Girl Gang”.
The Mission of International Girl Gang was to bring awareness of gender inequality in the French comic business. Last year there was a scandal at Angoulême Comics Festival because no women were nominated for the lifetime achievement award. The scandal raised a discussion internationally about the position of women in comics. Female creators do not get as much praise as the male comic creators and are often left without publishing deals. There are many great female comic artists so why did the awards not reflect it?
To bring more women in to the eyes of the public visiting Angoulême we had an exhibition at Conservatoire as part of the Angoulême Comics Festival. Many locals and people visiting the festival came to the opening party and saw the exhibition later as well. I had few pages from my graphic novel MOSS DASH exhibited there. We had a table in Espace BD Alternative where all the international artists in the Girl Gang could sell their work and meet people visiting the festival. We also publsihed a zine International Girl Gang Encyclopedia that we sold at our stall. The zine had works from all the four organizations by different artists in the groups. There was also a two page comic about impostor syndrome by me published in the zine.
We held a very popular panel discussion on how to fight sexism in comics that had a huge line before it started. We decided to have the panel two times since there were so many people wishing to hear about this topic. Speaking we representatives from each of the four groups. Johanna Rojola was representing Femicomix Finland in the panel.
We also had a seminar day at EESI with workshops and presentations from the different groups taking part in international girl Gang. I was unfortunately unable to attend this seminar. I was supposed to talk about trans and non-binary representation in comics at the seminar but on the day I got really bad food poisoning and had to spend the rest of the day puking in the toilet. My last few days were a bit of a haze of throwing up and trying to survive. Luckily I got some strong french medicine to help with my sickness and I was able to make it back to Finland without puking on the plane, bus or train.
Our table was in the alternative area comics are of the festival and I really found some interesting artists there and wonderful new styles in comics. Alternative artists as graduates from renowned ÉESI (École Européenne Supérieure de l'Image) in Angoulême were pushed aside to a Spin off Festival near by. The works at Spin Off were very artistic and inspiring. Reminded me most of the finnish comic scene that is ruled by great artists from KutiKuti for example. The comic market in Finland is very much a small niche thing and no matter what you do you will be considered a niche thing. The french comic market is very big and many international publishers head to Angoulême in hopes of cashing in on the large french speaking market.
As a non-binary transperson I am always trying to search representation of queer themes and artists in comics. At the festival I didn’t see many queer artists. I met one trans artist stco-19 that had many great zines about trans and queer themes which I was very happy about. The publisher LGBT BD also had many comics about queer themes. I was really happy to find them as well. But that was about it. Maybe if I understood more french I could understand the comics more, now I was mostly limited to understanding the comics that were in english. The french culture is still very conservative when it comes to LGBTQIA+ issues. So for these themes to hit the mainstream and be in comics more widely might still take some time.
I saw some women creators and artists at the stalls. Still the mayority was men in the creators, publishers and sellers. The french comic scene is still very much ruled by old men making adventure comics for other men. While women make up a large portion of the comic consumers, not many comics are made by women or for women.
Overall I had a great experience. I want to give a big thank you to all of the wonderful people of International Girl Gang and to Kone Foundation for giving us funding for the trip. Hope to go to Angoulême again but not next year since I got a little bit traumatized by my food poisoning there. And it was so hard to find vegan food there. Maybe I can go back in a few years and see if things have at all improved in Angoulême in regards to gender inequality and vegan food.
