Angouleme

After a horrible long travel Im back from the international Comicfestival in Angouleme. After it took me 18 hours to travel back from Anouleme to Graz with the train. Never again. There where so many difficulties and decays – next time I take the plane, pay a bit more but spare myself the trouble and the exhaustion of a long train travel. I dont want to know how I smelled torwards the ending......

Anyway, the Comicfestival: or lets say the “B.D. Angouleme”. B.D. stands for « bande désignée », which means «gezeichnetes Band ». That shows imidiately how differnt the French look at the medium comic – France and Belgium accepts the Comic as an art and literary form.

Here you see the masses moving trough the halls of the festival. People from every age where to be met at the festival, since the comic for adults is very big in France.

Angouleme is a bautiful little french town in the south west od France, 3 hours by fast train from Paris. Its situated around a hill and contains a lot of beautiful old buildings.

The walls in Angouleme are paintings with comics from the french comicscene.


The festival had a couple of locations: The Hall of Editors, which was a gigantic space where all the french publishers presented their newest publications and where famous artists signed and drew artwork for fans for hous and hous. Some people just go to the festival to stand in queues the whole day, to collect original art from the comicartists.

Another location was the Center of « bande désignée “, which contained a couple of nice exhibition, a big comic libary and shop and a cafe with a gay waiter.

There was the “Franquin” center (where discussions, mostly in french, took place and a small exhibition. The famous “Tintin” (Tim und Struppi) inventor Herge had his own exhibition which wasnt that good.

Characters from comics and from the Jim Wooldring exhibition at the bottom.


In gerneral im a bit dissapointed. I don’t know what I expected. But something else. First of all, everything was in french, there wasnt even an English program, even tough this festival is supposed to be international and has a lot of international guests.

Then, the hall of editors was constantly filled up with gigantic queues of people who wanted original drawings. All the time, the way was blocked by them. Also, the ticket for the festival costs 13 Euros, and I dont udnerstand why to pay that money if you go inside the halls and spend money for comics again. You pay money to spend money...thats kind of sick, especially for the comic industry.

This are Flo and Piwi, who draw comics too and with whom I visited the festival with.


The city of Angouleme, filled with comic-maniacs.


On my way back home I spend a couple of hours in Paris and visited the Louvre. This bird flew directly into my camera.