PART 1 Angouleme - THE INTERNATIONAL BD (COMICS) FESTIVAL

On Wednesday, January 27th the Sequential Students at SCAD-Lacoste rose early in the morning and enthusiastically gathered at our bus for departure to the town of Angouleme - home of the International Festival of BD, a yearly event. As you can see, everyone was happy (ha!) to be up at 7:00 a.m.

It was icy and there was snow on the ground from the previous evening. Very eerie looking.

Not one of these students had ever been to this festival, so it was a great opportunity for all of them to wet their feet at one of the biggest festivals centered on comic books in the world.




It was still raining when we arrived in Angouleme and everyone still looked really happy. This photo is actually from Thursday, the 28th of January when we were going for our first day of the actual festival. Madame Geraldine Zannier of ECMA met us at the parking area and took us to the museum of BD - Comic Art. It was a very cool experience.


We went to see the French artist FRED in the afternoon of day one. There was no translator and I had hoped that they would show graphics of his art as a way to help the students with their attention. But there were no graphics and we had about an hour and a half of French that no one understood.

My fault.

I appreciate that the Event Organizer for the festival, Marie-Noelle Bas set up the seats for us at this event. I was mistaken about how much we might be able to get from the "encounter" as they call it. He was a very pleasant man. His work (when we could see the books held up) is interesting. I wish that we could have understood more.



We also had an encounter with the animation school of ECMA and were given a copy of their WHITE ALBUM that shows a selection of their best animated shorts. An animator named TIM had two shorts on the album and they were fantastic. The school was very nice to us and very gracious with their time.

All of the events on Wednesday took up most of the day so that we had very little time to go to the actual festival on the first day. We were able to go to a vernissage/opening of an art show for the Maison Auteurs - a building set up for the availability of economical art studio space so that artists can work on their projects in a comfortable environment.

It was a very neat set up and we met an artist who was an animator. She was quite good.



Finally, as a tribute to SCAD-Savannah Faculty member Dove McHargue I took this photo of Corto Maltese, the statue. The moon was so neat right over his head.

Be jealous, DOVE!!!

Love from France-

Tom