After the controversy on the exhibition devoted to Bastien Vivès, deprogrammed since, the festival will designate its winner on January 25.
by Frédéric Potet
Embranly by the deprogramming of the exhibition dedicated to Bastien Vivès, the Angoulême International Comic Strip Festival (January 26-29) resumes the normal course of its news with the announcement, this Wednesday, January 11, of The list of the three contenders for the Grand Prix. Alison Bechdel, Catherine Meurisse and Riad Sattouf – Here named in alphabetical order – came to the top of the voting organized numerically with professionals of 9 e art (authors, colorists, etc.). A second ballot will designate, Wednesday, January 25, the identity of the one who will succeed the Canadian Julie Doucet in the list of this distinction rewarding a comic book artist for the whole of his work.
Figure of the BD Queer, the American Alison Bechdel (62) is the author, among other titles, Fun Home (2006), an autobiographical and labyrinthine story with multiple awards, in which she approaches the Theme of sexual identity through the suicide of his father. The designer is also known in the United States, for having given her name to the “Bechdel test”, an indicator used for thirty years by feminists to account for the under-representation of women on the screen. Released in 2022, the third and last volume of his autobiography, the secret of the superhuman force (Denoël Graphic), is in the running, in Angoulême, for the title of the best album of the past year. The book was part of the selection of the foreigner Medici price – a first for a comic strip.
Catherine Meurisse already finalist
Twenty years younger, Catherine Meurisse has established himself as an important voice of 9 e art, only eight years after having decided to devote herself exclusively to comics. The former designer of Charlie Hebdo (who escaped the attack on January 7, 2015) likes nothing but throwing bridges between artistic disciplines, in particular visual arts and literature. His neat writing and his spontaneous line seduced to the members of the Academy of Fine Arts who elected her within their Cenacle, in January 2020, in the “Engraving and Drawing” section. Catherine Meurisse was already one of the finalists of the “Grand Prix” during the last two editions of the Angoulême Festival. In 2021, an exhibition had been devoted to him on the banks of the Charente.
For Riad Sattouf (44), this appointment is, on the contrary, unprecedented. Whoever is also a director (the beautiful kids) knows Angoulême well to be one of the rare authors to have obtained the golden beast of the best album twice: in 2010 for volume III of his series Pascal Brutal and in 2015 for The first volume of the Arabic of the future, works at the undeniable critical and public success, translated in more than twenty languages, whose sixth and last chapter has just been released. Riad Sattouf recently added a string to his bow by creating his own publishing house, the books of the future.