Just kidding, I can’t say nous vivons because it’s not really nous that live — this is all down to Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeupin, who is featured here today. It’s been too long, so let’s all be glad that the drought is over.

For the first time since 2020, in Angoulême the FIBD is taking place at the expected time of the year; this marks the end of COVID-related Angoulême controversies¹, which means we can focus again on the non-COVID-related controversies.

Now, many of these happen at or around Angoulême because it is so big that it can hardly avoid being involved in controversies spanning comics of the French-Belgian tradition in general; furthermore, Angoulême tends to get all the mainstream media attention, so people attempting to get media attention will attempt to do so in Angoulême, without this necessarily being the Angoulême organizers’ fault.

But sometimes they bring this on themselves. Case in point: in Fall it was announced everyone’s least favorite pedophilia enabler would be honored with an expo featuring his works as part of the festival. To say the announcement did not go over well would be an understatement, and after a few days of activist pushback the festival announced the cancellation of the expo, ostensibly for security reasons after they received threats. However, the timing of the announcement makes it look more like an out of the situation without angering either party, as a few days seems an awfully short amount of time to actually evaluate their options in terms of heightened security needs in light of these threats. As a reminder to Fleen readers, in 2015 not only did the festival take place not even a month after the Charlie Hebdo murders, but Angoulême that year even had a hastily set up expo around Charlie Hebdo and the murdered cartoonists.

Still, that does not mean it was the wrong decision to cancel the Vivès expo; yet that has not ended the controversy: a number of creators have since then come out in favor of Vivès (no link: I still need some time to mourn my respect for these folks), with something of a generational divide as no young creator appears to have done so. Though it does not appear to fit a naive you can’t joke about anything anymore these days framework either: I do not know of a time when anything comparable to what Vivès did in Petit Paul would have been remotely mainstream (there have been some superficially similar instances, but on closer look these did not compare, e.g.:a background gag as opposed to the main plot).

Another lasting consequence may play out in courts: the exposure appears to have led a state attorney to pay more attention to Vivès’ body of work, as an investigation was formally launched against him since the news of the cancellation, targeting his work on Petit Paul (published by Glénat) as well as two other books, this time published by Les Requins Marteaux: Les Melons de la Colère (roughly, The Canteloupes of Wrath) and La Décharge Mentale (roughly, The Mental Unload, a reference to Emma’s Mental Load).

In more positive news, on the occasion of this being the 50th anniversary of the FIBD, The Beat solicited FIBD memories from a number of professionals, and I was included, though I do not know whether I deserve to be listed along Charlie Adlard, Derf Backderf, Simon Hanselmann, Elyon’s (listed as Joëlle Epée Mandengue), Paul Gravett, or Serge Ewenczyk …

Finally, congratulations are in order to Riad Sattouf for having been awarded the Grand Prix this year. His presidency next year will be coming at an interesting time, as he will have wrapped up his current series (Esther’s Diaries and The Arab of the Future) and surely will try new formats, new narrative techniques, new publishing models, as he has always done in his career.

Many thanks to FSFCPL for his insights, and everybody drop him a line and remind him: he absolutely deserved to be included in The Beat’s roundup. Not to brag or anything, but Beat generalissimo Heidi MacDonald told me once that she wished she had an on-the-ground French contributor like FSFCPL.

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¹Don’t get me wrong, COVID hasn’t gone away; in fact, it is still one of the factors in my decision not to attend this year.