The Grand Prix de la ville d’Angoulême is an international lifetime achievement award given annually during the Angoulême International Comics Festival in France. Though the festival awards a number of prestigious prizes to comics creators, the Grand Prix arguably carries far more weight than any of the others, since winners are recognized for their impact on the history of comics at large. This year, all 30 of the nominees were cis men, which, given the international scope of the awards, suggests that 9eART + (the company responsible for organizing the festival) could not think of one woman, trans, or nonbinary comics creator in the world who deserved to be recognized for a decade’s worth of their work.
The Collectif des créatrices de bande dessinée contre le sexisme (a collective of cartoon creators against sexism), which had confronted the Festival a month before about their consistent lack of parity over the years, promptly called for comics creators to boycott the Festival. Media outlets did not begin to take note, however, until a number of celebrated cis male cartoonists expressed solidarity with the collective’s outrage by asking to be removed from the list of nominees. The resulting controversy has compelled Executive Director Franck Bondoux to demonstrate the full extent of the Festival’s misogynistic mentality, first through a defense in which he claimed that female artists simply have not existed in great enough numbers to even be recognized, then through a so-called mea culpa, in which he tried to pass the Festival off as a feminist endeavor whose “error” was only symbolic of a larger problem that is not the Festival’s fault.
Rather than simply calling out Bondoux’s reprehensible invalidations, Julie Maroh, a prominent member of the aforementioned collective, responded with a pointed editorial focusing on a larger, more insidious facet of the problem: the fact that both the media and the public will only take an issue seriously if it is claimed by men, while anyone else’s grievances over the same issues are scoffed at and condescended to. This inveterate phenomenon, which Maroh calls social cryptomnesia, perpetuates the marginalization of the oppressed and reduces social progress to a mere “campaign slogan.” As such, the buzz will inevitably fade, and, as Maroh says, “our fighting will continue.”
In the spirit of Maroh’s argument, Nat. Brut continues the conversation by asking some prominent and emerging women and nonbinary comics creators to share their feelings about the Angoulême Grand Prix. Below, Carol Tyler, Kayla E., Annie Mok, Cathi Chavers, Lauren Weinstein, mickey z, The Ladydrawers Comics Collective, Esther Pearl Watson, Edie Fake, and Izzy Star open up and speak out about sexism, representation, elitism, and invisibility within the field of comics, and pay respect to the long line of women and gender non-conforming creators that came before them.
-Ed.
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Kayla E.
1. Like so many artists and comics creators, my introduction to comics came through being exposed to the work of a handful of white cis male cartoonists. Let me be clear: this is not a relatable anecdote. This is an injustice.
2. As a queer latina artist from an impoverished background, continuing to create comics despite constant invalidation and invisibility is, for me, a radical act.
3. The most important thing we can do is amplify each other. MariNoami, Chitra Ganesh, Amanda Baeza, Erika Lopez, Yumi Sakugawa, and Marjane Satrapi are just a few of the queer and/or women of color comics creators who are influencing my current practice, and there are so many more making important work that deserve to be recognized.
4. I will continue to do everything within my (somewhat limited) means to dismantle the white supremacist heteropatriarchal stronghold that has its white-knuckled hands around this industry’s throat by continuing to primarily publish women and non-binary cartoonists in each new installment of Early Edition, Nat. Brut’s comics section.
Kayla E. is a queer Latina artist, editor, and designer from Texas. She’s the Editor-in-Chief and Art Director of Nat. Brut. Her comics confront issues of abuse, erosion of personal space, the destructive undercurrents of gender roles, and the heightened trauma of childhood misogyny. Her work has been featured or is forthcoming in The Comics Journal, Rough House, The New Delta Review, Black Eye, and The Spectacle.
Izzy Star
When I think about the Angoulême Grand Prix, I mostly feel pity. When I close my eyes and try to imagine what my education in comics would have looked like without women, without people of color, without queer folks, my world shrinks ten-thousand-fold. What a small sliver of human experience that would be. What a dull and stunted vision of the “state of comics,” if you could even call it that.
A friend of mine recently introduced me as “Cartoonist Izzy Star” to a group of people I did not know. My body stiffened. “Oh no, I’m not a cartoonist,” I heard myself start to say. I swallowed the rest of that sentence, squeezed out a hello, and spent a good part of the evening trying to disappear into my chair.
While I’ve drawn comics for as long as I can remember, I’ve never called myself a cartoonist. Not once. There are many reasons I’ve never granted myself membership to this club. Most notably, no one has ever given me permission to be a cartoonist. After a lifetime of seeing whose work counted as “canon,” seeing anthologies absent of women’s voices, of queer voices, how could I possibly have felt like I deserved to be a cartoonist?
As far as representation goes, being a white cis queer woman gives me a gentle hill to climb (and, as a queer girl with short hair and round glasses, I quite literally see myself in comics all the time). But even a blockade as small as this has proven vast enough to give me serious pause. I owe everything to the wonderful cartoonists that came before me who were not paralyzed by fear. Those women who were not so easily derailed, who did not wait around for someone to give them permission. Those cartoonists taught me so much of what I know about being human. They guided me through depression, through heartbreak, through triumphs.
The Grand Prix’s unfathomably tone deaf response — which amounted to something along the lines of, “Women?! We love women! Here is an example of three whole women we have heard of. You are welcome women.” — has pretty much solidified their place as an irrelevant relic. A prize is only as valuable as its prestige among its readers, and I can’t imagine the Grand Prix has much of that left. But enough pity for the lazy. We’ve wasted enough time on them already.
Izzy Star lives in Austin, Texas where she works in social services by day and draws cartoons also by day.
