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Get the latest newsEvery year, the sleepy little town of Angoulême, in the Poiteau-Charentes region of France, is beset by over 200,000 comics enthusiasts for a four days of events and programming in celebration of the art of bande dessinée: The Angoulême International Comics Festival (In French: Festival international de la bande dessinée d’Angoulême.). It’s the second-largest comics festival in the world (topped only by Tokyo, Japan’s Comiket).
This year, though, a cadre of cartoonists from The Center for Cartoon Studies–former fellows Julie Delporte, Alec Longstreth and Max de Radigues and alumni Charles Forsman, Joseph Lambert, and Jen Vaughn–will be in attendance.
Forsman, Lambert, and Longstreth will be tabling with de Radigues in support of their books released through de Radigues’ publishing house L’Employe du Moi. Angoulême is just the kickoff of their whirlwind tour of francophone Europe, however–the boys will also be stopping in Brussells and Paris for book signings.
Longstreth, who had attended the festival in 2009, is pretty excited about the trip: “It’s like if you had San Diego Comic Con AND the Small Press Expo AND the Portland Zine
Symposium happening all at the same time, and also you set up exhibits from the Cartoon Art Museum and the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library, and did some retrospectives on Bill Waterson and Carl Barks and NBC news came in to cover the whole thing.”
“It’s hard to imagine it happening in America,” Longstreth said, “But it happens every year in France!”
Longstreth documented his previous Angoulême visit in his minicomic Phase 7 No. 14, which you can read online here. If any of our readers overseas have the time and the inclination to go to Angoulême, we highly recommend it!
