The success of the manga, materialized by hundreds of meters of queue at the Angoulême Comic Book Festival (south-western France) over the weekend, is a safe bet for this cultural event with a fragile economy.
After a canceled 2021 edition and a 2022 edition where attendance was hit by being postponed to an unusual date, the Charente town may have reconnected with its almost 200,000 visitors in its best years… thanks in part to Japan .
On Saturday you had to be patient to enter the Manga City marquee, a large marquee of more than 3,000 m² erected on the edge of the train tracks. The queue stretched in the morning to a street in the popular L’Houmeau neighborhood.
Manga stars present
The same near the city center, with a queue that wrapped around the Espace Franquin, for the exhibition of the mangaka Junji Ito, known for his horror drawings.
Regarding the exhibition dedicated to The attack of the Titans, in the media library near the TGV station, has been sold out since mid-January. Bringing in the cartoonist behind this bestseller, Hajime Isayama, was a smash hit at the International Comics Festival.
“He travels very little outside of Japan. He did two exhibitions in Tokyo, including one that went to Singapore. She was at the New York Comic Con in the fall. And there in Angoulême”, explained to the press the artistic director in charge of Asian programming, Fausto Fausulo.
“Creative Industry”
The exhibition showed 170 original prints by this artist who works in the old fashioned way, on paper, entirely in black and white.
“I’m not a rock star,” he told France Inter on Thursday. But the reception that the fans reserved for him on the occasion of his conference on Saturday morning at the Théâtre d’Angoulême, before 400 privileged people, said the opposite.
In a comic book market that is doing relatively well, manga is a breakneck growth engine. In ten years, the volume of the French manga market, second in the world behind Japan, has quadrupled. It reached 381 million euros in value in 2022.
The city of Angoulême (42,000 inhabitants) is strongly committed to this enthusiasm. Because the Festival is the showcase for its “cultural and creative industry”, which represents 4,300 jobs and nearly 1,800 students in the image, according to the Charente Chamber of Commerce and Industry.
Room for improvement to explore
Attached to the ephemeral structure that is Manga City, the Alligator 57 room opened its doors for this 50th edition of the Festival, in a renovated old SNCF hangar. There the atmosphere of a big Asian city has been recreated.
Culture Minister Rima Abdul Malak, during her visit to Angoulême on Thursday, hailed this “extension” as a “structuring development for the future of the Festival”, in which state and local authorities have invested.
The interior of Manga City is dotted with publishers’ stalls selling good amounts of manga. There were also meetings and workshops, which drew an audience of families and young people.
A table round the same media matin portait sur l’avenir en France du shojo, the manga destined for aux filles, which is not reunited with the successes fulgurant of son pendant pour les garçons, le shonen (43% of BD sales in France in 2022 à lui Only).
The untapped potential for teen readers shows that the manga still has room to grow. “A big frustration is that male readers don’t go to shojo. Female readers easily buy shonen, female readers don’t do the opposite,” explained Timothée Guédon, editor of Kana.
Source: BFM TV
