Rima Abdul Malak, who visited this great comic book gathering on Thursday, did not evade the question in front of the press.
"There was a legitimate reaction against an attitude that was unacceptable"
and
"insulting remarks"
from this author, explained the minister.
“Things took place at such a rapid pace that this debate, ultimately, could not be held
, she lamented.
I would have liked it to take place more here, at the Festival”.
It was with great bitterness that the organization of the Festival had canceled, in mid-December, "In the eyes of Bastien Vivès".
Much of the world of comics did not swallow the tribute to a young man who was once very virulent against one of his peers, Emma, and author of disputed books, which mix minors and pornography.
Since then, justice has looked into his case, reopening a preliminary investigation in early January for the dissemination of child pornography images, while in 2019 a first complaint for these same facts had been dismissed.
Read alsoAngoulême Comics Festival: cries, tears and candles to launch the 50th edition
This bitterness could still be read, among other reasons, in the emotion of its director Franck Bondoux, in tears at the desk during the opening ceremony on Wednesday evening.
He did not address the subject directly, but said:
"A lot is expected of major cultural events."
Asked after the ceremony about this controversy, the winner of the Grand Prix, the cartoonist Riad Sattouf, underlined that “
the Angoulême Festival is the beating heart of comics”.
He himself does not get involved in the debate.
“All the discussions around the Festival, its missions, how it should evolve, are really legitimate.
Me, it's true that I make comics and I write books.
I try to focus on that,”
he said.
While walking in Angoulême, he and the other festival-goers could not miss the wild displays which said, for example:
"Child pornography: complicit publishers, guilty broadcasters #metoobd"
or even
"Children do not provoke desire: adults are the guilty".
The great evasion
As soon as it is a question not of writing slogans, but of exchanging contradictory points of view, everything is more difficult.
During a “meeting” Thursday in front of the public, an author, Aurélia Aurita, 42, confessed:
“I had chosen not to speak publicly about this controversy.”
“In any case, I am happy that there are debates.
As long as there is debate it is very healthy (...) even if we argue.
That's all I'm going to say
," she said.
At her side, an author who co-signed a comic strip with her in 2018 (
Comme un chef
), and who is a professor of
“poetics of comics”
at the Collège de France, Benoît Peeters.
He announced his participation in a debate scheduled for Saturday afternoon on "Sexuality and comics: can we draw everything?".
But, he lamented,
"many people shied away, including among the declared enemies of a certain author"
.
“I hope that we will be able to debate, because there are real questions, which are not limited to the problems of an individual”
, explained this recognized theoretician of comics.
The round table does not appear in the program of the Festival distributed to visitors, because it is the initiative not of the direction of the Festival, but of a partner,
Le Point
.
This weekly which published Thursday the analysis of the journalist Peggy Sastre.
His title ?
“Vivès affair: the mechanics of a lynching”.
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