Manga Titles Nominated for Prestigious French Comics Awards

Thursday in Paris, a press conference was held announcing award candidates for next year’s Angoulême Comics Festival. ActuaBD (Google translation) has the report. The Angoulême Comics Festival, which takes place each year in the town of Angoulême, France, is Europe's biggest comics event, and its prizes are the most prestigious awards on offer in the continent.

Fifty books were chosen as this year’s “official selections” by Lewis Trondheim (this year’s festival president) and a small group of critics, journalists and graphic designers; the selections were made without regard to national origin, and in the case of foreign-language books, without regard to when the work was created prior to French translation. 44 of the works are eligible for all the main prize categories save the Heritage prize, with the other six competing for that one. The eight prizes will be composed of one for “Best Comic Book,” six equal prizes designated “Angoulême Essentials” with one of them receiving an additional designation as “Best Newcomer,” and the Heritage Prize. (Gone are separate awards for writers and artists, as this distinction “evidences the Festival’s reluctance to separate drawing and scriptwriting and the necessity to envisage a comic book as a whole, that is, the indissociable combination of words, narrative and graphic style.”)

The selections themselves are a strong and eclectic bunch, with a variety of genres and formats all receiving representation -- and a number of manga titles made the list this year. They are:

• Avant la Prison, Kazuichi Hanawa
• Gyo, Junji Ito
• In the Clothes Named Fat, Moyoco Anno
• Jacaranda, Kotobuki Shiriagari
• Ki-Itchi!!, Hideki Arai
• Non Non Bâ, Shigeru Mizuki
• Sorcières, Daisuke Igarashi
• Zipang, Kaiji Kawaguchi

Half of the titles eligible for this year's Heritage Prize are from Japan. They are:

• Golgo 13, Takao Saito
• Hato, Osamu Tezuka
• Les Vents de la Colère, Tatsuhiko Yamagami

The complete list of nominees is available in Adobe PDF format at the above link.

(This is a mildly abbreviated version of a report filed at The Comics Journal's ¡Journalista! weblog, and was submitted by its editor, Dirk Deppey.)