Comic book author Bastien Vivès, whose exhibition at the Angoulême Festival was canceled after he was accused of promoting child pornography in certain works and public statements, apologized on Thursday for his most virulent remarks . “I sincerely regret some of my comments,” he wrote on Instagram on Thursday. At “no time did I want to hurt victims of crimes and sexual abuse. And I obviously want, if my words may have offended these people, to offer them my most sincere apologies.
The International Comics Festival, the most important event of the 9th art, announced on Wednesday the cancellation of the exhibition which was to be devoted from the end of January to this 38-year-old designer. He invoked “threats” which targeted the author and the organizers. Critics of Bastien Vivès accuse him, among other things, of having launched calls for violence on Facebook, under a pseudonym, against the feminist cartoonist Emma in 2017.
“A humorous burlesque genre” with a “provocative” tone
“Today I realize that beyond my works, it was above all my words that shocked,” he wrote Thursday on Instagram. “I sincerely regret some of my remarks, and more particularly those against the designer Emma posted on my Facebook wall to which I would like to apologize. It was gratuitously violent, disrespectful and above all outrageous,” he added.
The controversy also relates to the books of this author, which mix pornography and minors. “They are part of a humorous burlesque genre. This provocative tone, it happened to me to take it up sometimes, in an awkward way, in my interviews, “explained the author of Little Paul.
This comic, which presents a child with an oversized penis arousing the lust of women, and other titles like Melons of Wrathwhere a teenage girl is raped, and The Mental Dumpwhich depicts sexual relations between minors and an adult man, are the subject of a debate on their conformity with the law.