Angoulême
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Angoulême
So, I realised I didn’t do any sketchbook drawings the whole time I was at the Angoulême Festival last week. I did draw but on serviettes and napkins and stuff that I left behind. Indeed the coolest and strangest situation I found myself in was sitting around a table at lunch with various First Second/ Dargaud cartoonists including Joann Sfar, Christophe Blain, Paul Pope, publisher/artist Mark Siegel and Lora Fountain. Mark took out a pad and instituted a comics jam, sketches for the staff back in the FS offices. Suddenly I’m drawing stuff and Joann’s adding bits to it, Paul’s adding bits, we’re all chucking stuff down at a rate of knots. Most of what I drew was the usual nonsense one does, the flotsam and jetsam that travels out of one’s dream-head and somehow arrives at the end of the pen. Hilarious to see how my giant eyeball balloon was fallen in love with by Joann’s giant eyeball monster. I wish I had a copy of that.
Other highlights included sitting around with Charlie Orr, Patrice and John Aggs (the only mother/son team I know of working in comics today), Thomas Ragon, Gene Yang, Edmund Bagwell, Will Fickling, Matt Broersma, Yoann Chivard, Joelle Bernard, Metaphrog and many other amazing cartoonists, comics folk and respective spouses and other halves in various cafes and bars, talking, drinking, eating. I even got to meet one of my BD heroes, Max Cabanes (thanks, Joelle).
I had one particularly enjoyable meal with Stephen Betts, Charlie Orr, Bart Beaty, Alfred of Nederland and various other friends and acquaintances. Patrice and John Aggs somehow wangled some tickets to the Festival’s awards ceremony but ended up giving them to Bart and Stephen because they thought they’d get more out of it. They did – Bart used Charlie’s iPhone to send the results of the awards off to Tom Spurgeon while we were eating oysters. And what oysters. Yum. And what a cheese plate. This is how you end up thinking of Angoulême if the conditions are right – great exhibitions, a great president (this year it was José Muñoz), great comics, fine food. It’s all sensory pleasure mingled with superb company and the finest artistic and communications medium humankind ever invented. Perhaps that sounds like I’m heaping on the superlatives, but boy, did we have a good time. Even the weather was perfect this year. Well, one niggling complaint was finding Alvin Buenaventura’s table off the beaten track in a tiny, cramped tent behind the Champ de Mar: the zine ghetto. Publishers as good as this who make the effort to cross the Atlantic to be at Angoulême deserve better hosting. But then, so do the locals.
Next year’s Festival presidents are Dupuy & Berberian, which promises another not-to-be-missed Angoulême in 2009.
While I’m mentioning Stephen Betts, I must draw attention to his rather fine new project. It’s a collaborative comics translation website called Comix Influx (link also at left). He’s also posted some extraordinary footage he took of José Muñoz drawing at the awards ceremony.
After the Festival, Charlie Orr and I travelled on to Paris, where we continued drinking. Well, I don’t get to see him that often.
I think this is the longest post I’ve ever written here. So, anyway, today’s sketches are a couple of blokes I sketched on the Eurostar out of Paris. They looked as knackered as I felt. Knackered maybe, but satisfied.
Posted by: Nick Abadzis | permalink
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Galleries: Black and White, People, Places
Tags: angoulême
I like your written entries! Thanks very much for mentioning Comix Influx - let's see how it all works out!
Angoulême certainly was great this year - and a huge amount of fun! Still debating whether I should have had the oysters instead of the scallops and trompettes de la mort feuillete...
Stephen.