Être un Journal de l’année de la Peste
On this last day before we break for pie, Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin brings us news of how the pandemic is affecting next year’s festivals.
The Festival International de Bande Dessinée d’Angoulême has finally acknowledged there would appear to be a pandemic going on, and has announced their plans for the 48th edition (warning: inaccessible, untranslated video). Unsurprisingly, the main event in January is canceled, to be replaced by just the awards ceremony with limited if any attendance, similarly to how Lyon BD and Quai des Bulles awarded their prizes in 2020.
But contrary to these festivals, the Angoulême organizers won’t want for a year to pass without any proper festival, and have thus scheduled a new 48th edition to take place from June 24th to 27th. We know for instance the Grand Prix will be awarded at that time and not be part of the January aways ceremony, but other than that details were light on what this edition will entail, which is fine: we can always learn that as the date for that event approaches.
So what did they announce besides the new schedule? Mostly, the selections for the various awards (Fauve d’Or, 8-12, 12-16, high schoolers, noir, and reissues); of note are G. Willow Wilson for Invisible Kingdom*, Derf Backderf for Kent State, Chris Ware for Rusty Brown, Boulet for Bolchoi Arena, and Lisa Mandel for Une Année Exemplaire) (which interestingly enough is self-published), all for the Fauve d’Or (Kent State being also in the running for the high schoolers award).
Now, had they made their announcement two weeks earlier, I would have asked what made them hope June would turn out to be better than January; after all, Lyon BD was set to take place in June 2020 and had to cancel. But the announcement at their intermediate milestones that the most advanced vaccine candidates turn out to be remarkably effective (you may remember Derek Lowe from Randall Munroe’s What If) is a game changer, because having at least one efficient vaccine is probably the only thing that could possibly allow an event remotely the scale of Angoulême to take place in a way remotely resembling normalcy in the era of COVID-19.
So, yes, vaccine distribution willing, I am going to try and check out what Angoulême is like at the beginning of Summer.
Many thanks, as always, to FSFCPL. I know that it isn’t Thanksgiving in France, but all of us here at Fleen are thankful for his myriad contributions and the bragging rights for being the only comics press with a European desk. In your face, every other comics press that’s won an Eisner!
Stay safe, friends. Keep isolated, wear the mask, and hopefully we’ll be doing better soon¹.
Spam of the day:
Top-1 job in SWorker world rankings
You’re trying to recruit me as a sex worker?
Okay, but you gotta buy me dinner first.
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¹ If we’re back here in three weeks with a widespread acceleration in diagnoses because people just had to travel and gather in large groups, I am going to go into a Dutch fugue on those assholes.
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