Published
'Angouleme - murs peints' (issue 24, January 2009)
First published in hidden europe, issue 24, January 2009
Angoulême is one of those French cities by-passed by the modern autoroutes. So a place missed by most road travellers. And it is a community where the TGV to Bordeaux pauses for just two minutes, before the doors slide shut and the train heads on to the south, speeding past the homely stone villages which are a feature of this part of western France. Yet for aficionados of the comic strip, Angoulême is much more than just a brief stop on the train.
The comic strip, or bande dessinée, is a peculiarly polarising art form, derided by its detractors but celebrated by its devotees for its cultural vitality. And for those devotees, Angoulême is the undisputed capital of the art. The city hosts its enormous comic strip festival, called the Festival International de la Bande Dessinée, in late January each year. It is an event which regularly pulls close to a quarter of a million visitors to the city on the Charente river. Large marquees swarm with avid fans; there are performances, interviews and exhibitions; and artists sign and dedicate endless copies of their books.
Angoulême has been holding its annual bande dessinée festival for thirty-five years and, quite simply, it is the event in the calendar of comic strip artists in Europe. There are other comic-strip festivals - in Saint Malo, Blois and other cities in France and Belgium - but Angoulême reigns supreme. Marquees, called bulles (literally meaning ‘bubbles’, but also recalling in their name the familiar ‘speech bubbles’ of comic strip art), are erected for the event along Angoulême's Champ de Mars, which was renovated in 2007 to better accommodate them. Aller sous les bulles is the expression used by artists before diving into the marquees to meet their fans and dedicate their books. Such dedications are often fairly elaborate affairs, usually being executed in the form of a drawing or painting, rather than just a signature.
Reminders of Angoulême’s association with bande dessinée (or BD, as it is often colloquially called) are dotted throughout the town. There is a statue of Hergé, the Belgian creator of Tintin, in the town centre – in a street renamed Rue Hergé in 2003. Street numbers on many house fronts are written in bulles; and paintings by celebrated BD artists adorn the sides of various buildings. Then there’s the famous Centre National de la Bande Dessinée et de l' Image (recently renamed the CIBDI (Cité Internationale de la Bande Dessinée et de l'Image), down by the river Charente. A large, partly glass- and aluminium-fronted building, it sits wedged below the ramparts of the old city, reflecting the surroundings in its façade. The building is actually a renovated brewery, which operated between 1917 and 1973 – initially as Boeckel et Morzt, subsequently the rather illustriously titled Grandes Brasseries et Malteries Alsaciennes - and the site is also significant in that it covers part of the remains of the old abbey of d’Angoulême.
Centre National de la Bande Dessinee, the comic strip museum in Angouleme (Nikon D200, Nikkor AF-S 12-24mm f/4 G ED-IF DX)
Angoulême’s art school (L’École Régionale des Beaux Arts d’Angoulême, or ERBA for short), also located in a renovated building by the Charente, opened its bande dessinée department in the early eighties. Artists work in various studios (ateliers) across the town, and art students are sent off along the river to sketch. It's an atmospheric area, overhung with dark trees, scattered factory chimneys and other reminders of d’Angoulême's industrial past.
The fortunes of the city have been linked with the paper industry for centuries. The Charente is blessed with a very even flow rate which makes it eminently suitable for this industry. The well-known Rizla+ brand of cigarette papers were once produced here, as were the less well-known (at least, outside France) brand, Le Nil – the latter forming the subject of one of the city’s numerous murals. Le Nil are named, not after the river in Africa (as might be suggested by the elephant in many of the brand’s advertisements), but after a small tributary of the Charente. The company was in production from 1918 to 1972; the factory, opposite the CIBDI and renovated in about twenty years ago, now houses ERBA and the city’s Musée du Papier.
The term ‘comic strip’ is misleading when applied to BD – there is not necessarily anything particularly humorous or ‘comic’ in the subject matter. On the contrary, the themes espoused by BD artists are often rather dark. And modern BD is much more than the classic three image ‘strip’ on the back of a newspaper. BD stories typically fill large format books that run to forty or more pages, and a single story line may run over several volumes.
The art is not uniquely French. Italy has its own term for ‘comics’ – fumetto, meaning a puff of smoke, or that familiar ‘speech bubble’ – again, there is no connotation of anything funny in the subject matter. The US term ‘graphic novel’ is perhaps somewhat closer to the mark, yet the style of Franco-Belgian (as it is often described) bande desinée is far removed from that of their counterparts in the UK and US such as Marvel Comics. Literally, the term means ‘drawn strip’. BD albums (as they are known) sell in their thousands in France alone. Print runs average some three to six thousand for a first edition, but sales far in excess of this figure are not uncommon for a particularly popular title. For example, sales of albums by artists such as Isabelle Dethan have reached 27,000, those of Tiburce more than 30,000, while those of the enormously popular Masbou are in excess of 100,000. It generally takes a BD artist, or more accurately dessinateur / dessinatrice, a good year or more to complete an album. The pages (planches) are typically drawn at A3 size, and reduced to roughly A4 for publishing. Lines are traditionally drawn with a brush, rather than a pen - although some artists now work on computer. The storyline may be by the artist him- or herself, or an album may be a collaborative effort between two or more artists, one writing the story, another completing the artwork. For example, Donjon Monsters is a collaboration between Mazan (artwork), Walter (colours), and Joann Sfar and Lewis Trondheim (story). It is a testament to the prominence of bande dessinée that it is often referred to as the Ninth Art in France, according it a status on a par with architecture, painting, music and poetry.
Yet surprisingly, with the omnipresent exception of Hergé’s Tintin books, together with Asterix, Lucky Luke and a few others, although BD albums are translated into numerous other languages, they are only rarely translated into English. And, with the exception of only a small number of titles, most of these are notably from the earlier period of BD (Tintin for example was drawn from 1929-86, Lucky Luke from 1946-81) - comparatively few contemporary titles are known in Britain. One such exception is Mazan’s Le Vaillant Petit Tailleur, translated into English – as well as Swedish, Danish, Portuguese, German, Turkish and Chinese – and published under the title Tales from the Brothers Grimm.)
Angoulême’s dessinateurs are also closely involved with the world of animation. The creator of the acclaimed animated film Belleville Rendezvous, more commonly known within French under its original title Les Triplettes de Belleville studied at ERBA, and French BD artists have worked on a variety of animated projects from the late nineteen-eighties onwards, mainly in character design - from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to Alien, as well as various computer games. At the same time, Hayao Miyasaki, the director of Japanese animated features such as Spirited Away, has said he is an admirer of Franco-Belgian bandes desinées, including the work of the French dessinateur Moebius (co-creator of Métal Hurlant, perhaps better known in its translated form as the US publication Heavy Metal).
With the exception of its annual festival, it is the murals or murs peints, punctuating the various street corners and facades of Angoulême, which are the greatest outward expression of the city’s relationship with the art of BD. On the side of a building just off a narrow side-street, a couple from the Belgian artist Yslaire’s Sambre embrace, the cobbled street and grand architecture against which they stand appearing to recede into the side of the building on which they are painted. Close by, and around the corner from an old stone pigeon house, a winged figure in something like a spacesuit flits deliriously across a wall, trailing an umbilical-like chord. The red-faced, enraged figure of Léon Prunelle leans out of a blank window just off Rue Hergé, screaming and gesticulating at a loafing Gaston Lagaffe, who is giving a rowdy musical performance in the window above (both are characters from André Franquin’s hugely popular series Spirou).
Mural with characters from Yslaire’s Sambre, Angoulême (Nikon D200, Nikkor AF-S 12-24mm f/4 G ED-IF DX)
Elsewhere, an (imaginary) cat sits on a (real) moulding, below yet another figure leaning out of a blank window, and watches the pedestrians below. A trumpeting elephant stands above a mass of industrial wheels and cogs, commemorating the town’s association with Le Nil cigarette papers, along with the motto, in peeling paintwork, 'Je ne fume que Le Nil'. And most impressively of all, an enormous mural by Max Cabanes (formerly one of the Presidents of the festival), in various shades of blue, adorns the side of a building overlooking the Charente from the northeast edge of the town centre. The line of an adjacent wall continues into the painting, where imaginary architecture is blended with the real, and a woman leans on the wall, apparently lost in thought and surveying the view. It is known, very appropriately, as ‘La Fille des Remparts’ – the Remparts being the name given to the upper perimeter of the Old Town, and the roads which encircle it.
A steep flight of steps leads down from the Remparts, towards Avenue de Cognac, the road which continues down behind the CIBDI – rather lopsided and slippery, and referred to jokingly by artists who use them on a regular basis to reach their atelier as the Stairs of Death. The nearby atelier in this case is the rather wonderfully named ‘Atelier du Marquis de Crocogoule’.
Over the past fifteen years, a number of young artists in the area have begun moving to the surrounding countryside, buying old farmhouses and renovating them. The villages downstraem from Angoulême, heading along the Charente towards Cognac, are especially favoured. Isabelle and Pierre Lavaud (better known in the world of BD as Isabelle Dethan and Mazan respectively) were among the first to do this, and now live with their two children in the small community of Champmillon, some fifteen kilometres from Angoulême, surrounded by vineyards. The area is famous for a wickedly seductive fortified wine, Pineau des Charentes. Also among this extra muros group of dessinateurs are Turf (creator of La nef des fous), and Tiburce (creator of Gorn), who lives with his family in an enormous, rambling farmhouse, complete with a collection of antique firearms.
And yet in some ways the material presence of bande dessinée in the city is not as immediate as one might expect. Local artists point out that, with the exception of the bookshop at the CIBDI, there is no dedicated BD bookshop in Angoulême – something found in plenty of other cities, such as Bordeaux and Paris, which cannot claim any specific association with BD. And perhaps even more remarkably, as artists have commented with more than a touch of irony, there is only one small art supplier in the whole of Angoulême.
Houses in the village of Champmillon, one of the many around Angoulême where local artists have renovated old buildings and made their homes (Nikon D200, Nikkor AF-S 12-24mm f/4 G ED-IF DX)
Text and photographs copyright Rudolf Abraham 2009
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