On the occasion of the 49thnd edition of the Festival of Angoulême, MAG made a little snag on the side of the comic strip. This new edition has once again highlighted the tremendous diversity and vitality of the 9e art, from the Franco-Belgian comics to the manga, to American comics and many others. As an illustration, this year the Grand Prix came to crown the work of Julie Doucet (only the 3nd woman rewarded!), alternative Quebec author, trash (wrong might be said) and feminist. Known for Dirty Plotte, She left the comics almost 20 years ago to flee this world deemed too masculine. The Golden Fauve, which rewards the best album of the year, has set its sights on Look, pretty Marcia., portrait of a mother and nurse at the heart of the violence of a favela, a book by the Brazilian author Marcello Quintanilha.
MAG offers you a non-exhaustive review of some highlights of the festival, around 3 authors who have been the subject of retrospectives: Shigeru Mizuki, Edmond Baudoin and Chris Ware, works of remarkable richness and depth. Although very different, they have as their common feature the use of autobiography (or self-fiction) and bear witness to a great sensitivity and humanity, qualities that can only be too greeted in these dark hours of Putinian brutality, the tragic return of war in Europe and other sad passions.
Shigeru Mizuki, from war to cute little monsters
Shigeru Mizuki, one of the pioneers of manga and gekiga (for adults), would have been 100 years old this year. To celebrate its centenary, the Festival d'Angoulême has devoted a beautiful retrospective to its polymorphic work of multiple talents and artifices, between horrors of war and fantasy, characters with falsely simplistic and childish drawings, and hyper realistic sets, overflowing with details, autobiography and romantic adventures. This ability to juggle with themes, styles and modes of narrative draws a third, singular and median path between the works of his contemporaries, the flamboyant Osamu Tezuka, father ofAstro Boyand the tortured Yoshiharu Tsuge (who was his assistant).
Let us thus salute two structural elements of his work, which at first glance have nothing to do with it. First of all, Shigeru Mizuki marked the minds with his stories of yõkai, these strange creatures from the fantastic local folklore, as in his series Kintaro or his account NoNoBâ narrate the life of a superstitious old woman obsessed with these little monsters. He wanted to be a smuggler rather than a creator, helping to make these illustrious characters of Japanese tales known. Through his stories, Mizuki also intimately witnessed the horrors of the war, which he lived in the ranks of the Japanese army during the Second World War.nde World War in Papua New Guinea.
He lost his left arm there, contracted malaria and was taken prisoner. Great optimism and defender of life (as his daughter Naoko Haruguchi, invited to the festival, testified), he subtly denounces in Operation Death The absurdity of the war and the Japanese military mentality of the time, which preferred suicide operations in honour to reasonable strategies. Through these various narratives and drawings all in contrast, sometimes in plain darkness, appear a playful spirit, a desire for poetry, a spirit of life and an effort of reconciliation. And to say that only a small part of his work is translated into French!
Edmond Baudoin, the black line that magnifies life
Angoulême, it's mostly encounters. With authors, works and new worlds. So what a pleasure it was to discover Edmond Baudoin, a self-taught cartoonist from the Niçois hinterland who left his accounting post in order to devote himself to his art and publish his first album at the age of 40. Four years later, his work, first of all autobiographical, with a black brush, takes us on a thousand paths, both clean and figurative. Trails full of lives, encounters, beautiful and delicate landscapes.
To our greatest happiness, he has just left most of it to the Comic Strip City of Angoulême. He reminds us of another southern author, Jean Giono, who magnified through his novels the simple and rustic lives of the inhabitants of his Provence, pastoral and peasant. Its black trait is full of sun, sensitivity, humanism, desire, but also anger when it comes to denouncing the fate of migrants. From this intimacy and this personal gaze emerge a universal message: that life takes all its measure and magic only in harmony with nature and men.
Chris Ware, the new comic strip border
How can a man at the same time demonstrate a pure genius, capable of defining new boundaries, and humility nearing self-denigration? This is all the puzzle Chris Ware and the thread of his work, of Jimmy Corrigan to Rusty Brown, where the ill-being, doubts, flaws, complexes of his characters are so cleverly and finely explored. From American lives of quite banal or even boring appearance, Chris Ware weaves proustian narratives where the profusion of details keeps questioning us on universal themes such as passing time, family or middle class life. He builds absolutely unique objects, which limit to almost malady perfectionism.
Let us salute the wonderful Building Stories, extraordinary bookwork invention of a comic book architect. With Chris Ware, we learn again that this art is above all material, an object in three dimensions capable of carrying us in all directions to finally detect the essence of each existence, as simple as it seems.
Aude Picault, another reading of the status of women
Another superb exhibition dedicated to the author Aude Picault has made the part of everyday life and the dread of women's lives beautiful « Regular », to this famous mental charge and other injunctions that kill (to be a perfect mother, to combine family life, career and sexual development, etc.). Strips with devastating humor to highlight contradictions and ills that affect women especially in our modern societies... Gentlemen, to read absolutely, there is still work on the way to equality!
Trailer of the edition 2022
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