“Oh you are French? Where are you from ? – Paris. Finally, Versailles. – Ha… Many Japanese people dream of going there… – Don’t you? – No, if I go to France, I dream of going to Angoulême…”
We didn’t see that one coming. This is an informal chat with Haru Saito, the all-powerful illustration director at Creatures Inc, the studio that creates Pokémon cards. The young woman works daily with the best of Japan’s graphic designers. What would she like do in Angoulême ? A cruise on the Charente? Discovering the Cognac vineyards? No, participate in the comics festival of course.
Stars and a myriad of authors
While the festival, which holds its 51st edition until Sundaycelebrates 20 years of creation from its Manga Space, he can today boast of having managed to attract very big names from the manga scene. This year, for example, Moto Hagio, Hiroaki Samura and Rintarō are making the trip. These names may not mean anything to you but we have here an impressive panel of the manga scene: a mangaka who in fifty years of creation has revolutionized the romantic genre, the legend of sword manga and the director of the cult series Albator. Last year, it was Hajime Isayama, author of The attack of the Titans. In previous years, Leiji Matsumoto, Jirô Taniguchi, Katsuhiro Otomo, Junji Itô, Rumiko Takahashi…
A litany of names which does not give the full measure of the growth of the Japanese colony which now comes every year to the banks of the Charente for the last weekend in January. After many years of wanderings where, despite wishful thinking, manga was almost absent, Japan finally has a permanent seat at the festival.
Discovery tour
Return to Tokyo where Makoto Wada, artistic director of the magazine Monthly CoroCoro Comic, confirms: “Angoulême has become known to Japanese authors in recent years. It started just before Covid and now it’s very strong. Many authors dream of going there to discover other ways of working. Manga authors don’t work at all like European authors. The industry is not the same. And there is a strong curiosity to discover all this. »
“Japanese authors have an astonishing pace,” confirms Tony Valente, French author of the successful manga Radiant. They do not work on an assembly line but with real industrial logic. For them, the author who works alone for a year on a single comic book is science fiction. ” There French Touch (or rather, the Frenchy-Belgian Touch) thus acts like a magnet.
Recognition and pride
Hajime Isayama, star guest of the festival last year, confided, during a master class, his joy in discovering the formal and narrative richness of European comics. According to a member of the team responsible for welcoming him, he left with around a hundred comics and a lot of authors’ business cards. The mangaka also mentioned the immense honor that being invited to Angoulême represented, in his eyes. From the point of view of his fans, the honor was rather that he deigned to accept the invitation…
“It took a while but in recent years, the festival has found the recipe to attract and receive Japanese authors and their delegations,” a close observer of the Angoulême festival tells us. There is a way of doing things, a protocol to follow. But once trust is established, the Japanese are very proud to come. » Accustomed to American commercial conventions, which have been exported to France for around ten years, the Japanese delegations did not know for a long time how to handle the invitations emanating from the Angoulême festival. “It’s not a question of money or remuneration,” explains Sophie Tojiima, a Franco-Japanese translator who works with mangakas. It’s just that the Japanese didn’t understand these invitations. It’s very unusual, from their point of view, to invite a manga artist alone, just to chat with him and exhibit his work. »
Not there to trap the bubble
In addition to a cultural gap finally bridged, there is another essential element of the popularity of the capital of Charente in the land of the declining yen : the MID, international rights market. Every year, on the sidelines of the festival, a very important market is held where publishers and investors from the world of comics meet animation studios, TV channels, film producers, streaming platforms… In short, it’s about rights of authorship and exploitation, adaptations and big money.
Thus, the Japanese delegations do not come to Angoulême to block the bubble. In a competitive and booming market, face-to-face meetings always have a special value. Even the Charente winter setting is better than an email or a Zoom conference call. “It would be naive to think that the Japanese only come for soft power,” Mehdi Benrabah, editorial director at Pika Edition, explained to us when Hajime Isayama visited. Manga is a market that is evolving very, very quickly, and in Europe too. The Japanese know that they must be there today to still be there tomorrow. »