Angoulème 2010

Angoulème is the city for comic books in Europe. It's in the south-west-ish of France, not over 3h from Paris, and is home to the comic book school of France as well as the second biggest comic book festival in the world (the first being the San Diego Comic Con). Each year at Angoulème there's the Festival de la BD d'Angoulème which is a 4 day event this year from the 28th of January to the 31st. There is also what is known as the biggest intellectual comic book award. The way the press and the comic book publishing world see things is that Europe is home to the intellectual comic books of the world, such as the Persepolis (the film adaptation was nominated for the Oscars) and last year's winner of the Angoulème festival Pinocchio by Winshluss.

Here you can find the list of the 48 nominees for this year's Angoulème comic book competition.

In the list, I'm quite a partisan of Daniel Clowes' Eight Ball, and unfortunately, not having been in France since the last festival, I don't know many of the comic books listed, and with my newly acquired title as "art student" I have to take in the financial burden of having pecuniary problems stopping me from getting some of these great titles imported from France.

Keeping in touch is quite important, especially with the European comic books as they are suppose to be the "artistic" comic books. That doesn't mean that the UK or the USA don't have artistic comic books, it's just the reputation European comic books have. Daniel Clowes is an American in this year's selection. When Chris Ware's Rusty Brown will be translated in French, I'm sure it'll be in the selection, he won the competition with Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth.