Tag: Angouleme

Quick Hits | ‘Demon Slayer,’ Dav Pilkey, Bill Watterson top 2023 graphic novel sales charts

Plus: ‘Monica’ wins in Angouleme, the Bram Stoker Awards ballot and more.

Pulling information from Circana BookScan, ICv2 has listed the top 20 graphic novels sold in 2023 in the superhero, manga and “author” categories. They’ve also posted lists of the top adult and kid’s graphic novels.

Looking through the lists (which don’t provide exact numbers, just rankings), it looks like the first volume of Demon Slayer: Kimetsu No Yaiba by Koyoharu Gotouge is the big winner, topping both the manga chart and the adult graphic novel chart. Or maybe I should say “a big winner,” because over on the kid’s graphic novel chart, Dav Pilkey rules supreme, as Dog Man and its Cat Kid Comics Club spinoff took 13 of the 20 positions, including the top 3.

Also, I’m not exactly sure how the superhero and author categories are defined. For instance, the Invincible Compendium shows up on the author list — which makes sense, given how popular the Amazon show is — with Robert Kirkman listed as the author. But I would have expected it to be on the superhero list, given it’s about superheroes and Kirkman isn’t the sole author.

Then for superhero graphic novels, IDW’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Last Ronin hardcover topped the list, followed by Tokyopop’s Nightmare Before Christmas: Battle for the Pumpkin King manga. I think you could make the argument that the Last Ronin is a superhero title, but the Nightmare Before Christmas manga seems like it’s in the wrong place. But maybe I’m misunderstanding the catgeories.

All that aside, sales numbers for comics disappeared during the pandemic when the industry went from a single distributor to multiple distributors, so seeing any kind of data like this is appreciated and interesting.

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Quick Hits | Posy Simmonds wins the 2024 Grand Prix at Angoulême

Plus: News on the Eisners, Brett Lewis, Bill Griffith and more.

British cartoonist and illustrator Posy Simmonds has been awarded the Grand Prix at France’s annual Angoulême International Comics Festival. Simmonds beat out Daniel Clowes and Catherine Meurisse to capture the prize, and is only the fourth woman to be awarded the Grand Prix in its 50-year history.

Simmonds, 78, has done it all in her career, including comic illustration, daily press cartoons, weekly comic strips, best-selling albums, children’s books and screen adaptations. Her debut graphic novel, True Love, is one of the first British graphic novels, and she went on to create the well-regarded Gemma Bovery, Tamara Drewe and Cassandra Darke. She began her career doing comic strips for the Sun, the Times and the Guardian, where she spent the majority of her career. Later in life, she would start creating children’s books, and her most famous, Fred, went onto become an Academy Award-nominated short film, Famous Fred.

“I always think in a perfect world, the gender of a prize winner shouldn’t be remarkable,” Simmonds told the Guardian. “But it’s an imperfect world and the comics and bande déssinée world has always been a masculine milieu, a bit of a boys’ club. But, bit by bit, especially over the last decade, women have infiltrated it, so I’m pleased to be one of them, of course.”

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Riad Sattouf named Grand Prix winner at 50th annual Angoulême

The creator of ‘The Arab of the Future’ wins the French festival’s biggest prize.

Riad Sattouf, the creator of The Arab of the Future and Esther’s Notebook, has won this year’s Grand Prix at the Angoulême International Comics Festival.

The 44-year-old French cartoonist, who has also directed feature films, was quoted as saying “I am deeply honored and moved. It’s the centerpiece that was missing at the top of my ego pyramid” upon accepting the award.

Sattouf is best known for The Arab of the Future, or L’Arabe du Futur, his six-book collection about growing up in Libya and Syria in the 1970s and 1980s. Four of them have been released in the United States. He’s also a former contributor to France’s satirical publication Charlie Hebdo and is the creator of the Esther’s Notebooks comic strip, a collection of which was released this month in the United States.

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Quick Hits | Rest in peace, Tim Kennedy, Aline Kominsky–Crumb

Plus news on Hunter Gorinson, Steve Ditko, Anders Nilsen, Angoulême and more.

Archie Comics artist Tim Kennedy, who collaborated artistically with his twin brother Pat, has passed away. No cause of death has been reported.

The Kennedy brothers began working for Archie in the late 1980s, after graduating from the Joe Kubert School of Cartooning and Graphic Design. They’ve been regular contributors ever since, drawing classic Archie stories as well as projects like the popular Life With Archie, which showed two alternate takes on Archie marrying Betty and Veronica.

“For decades, the Fabulous K Bros have dazzled fans around the world, bringing some of the funniest and most difficult stories from idea to the page,” said Archie Comics President and Editor-in-Chief Mike Pellerito. “No matter the challenge of illustrating a difficult scene with a giant Ferris wheel, intricate architecture, spaceships, car chases or any other wild story idea, they handled it seemingly with ease. Over the past decade or so I think their work has become some of the best and most versatile at Archie.”

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Comics Lowdown | Marvel editors participate in #DisneyWalkout

Plus: ‘Persepolis’ under fire in Pennsylvania school district! David Gallaher, real-life superhero! News on Behemoth, Zestworld, Julie Doucet and more!

Marvel employees joined their colleagues from Pixar, Lucasfilm and other Disney-owned divisions in a walk-out on Tuesday to protest the company’s response to Florida’s Parental Rights in Education act, which has become to be known as the “Don’t Say Gay bill.”

The bill bans lessons about sexual orientation in kindergarten through third grade and prohibits lessons in other grades unless they are “age-appropriate and developmentally appropriate.” Critics say the law could stigmatize LGBTQ+ students, and lead to bullying and attacks. The bill has yet to be signed by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, but it’s just a matter of time, as the governor has expressed his support for it.

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Three women nominated for Grand Prix d’Angouleme

Penelope Bagieu, Julie Doucet, and Catherine Meurisse are on the shortlist for the prestigious lifetime award.

For the first time ever, the final nominees for the Grand Prix d’Angouleme are all women. Pénélope Bagieu, Julie Doucet, and Catherine Meurisse were chosen by a jury of their peers—literally: All comics creators whose work is published in France are eligible to vote for the nominees.

The winner will be announced on March 16.

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Chris Ware Wins Grand Prix d’Angouleme

Ware was chosen after a number of protest votes were disqualified.

The electors of the Angoulême International Comics Festival have chosen Chris Ware as the recipient of the Grand Prix d’Angoulême, an annual award that recognizes a cartoonist for his or her life’s work. Previous recipients in the past few years have been Richard Corben, Rumiko Takahashi, and Emmanuel Guibert.

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Comics Lowdown | Cartoonist Chronicles Attack

A photo shoot to promote Karl Krumpholz’s new book was punctuated by a surprise attack.

A planned photo shoot went sideways fast for Denver cartoonist Karl Krumpholz.

Krumpholz’s graphic novel Queen City, a chronicle of changing streets and neighborhoods of Denver, is out this month from Tinto Press. The Denver Post did a feature article on Krumpholz, and the photo shoot for the piece was set for mid-afternoon on East Colfax Avenue, one of the venues he depicts for the book. Before he and photographer AAron Ontiveroz could start the shoot, though, a passerby attacked them both with a homemade weapon.

Krumpholz and the photographer escaped unscathed, but since everything is material to a creator, he made a comic about it:

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Comics Lowdown | TCAF is back

Plus: Angoulême comics awards, Adam Ellis accuses filmmakers of plagiarism, and a look at the world of back-issue collectors and dealers

The Toronto Comic Arts Festival, which was canceled last year due to the pandemic, will return in May as a virtual event. The past year has been a difficult one; in June, TCAF co-founder and artistic director Christopher Butcher stepped down for both professional and personal reasons. This year’s festival will be online only, and it’s being run in partnership with the zine festival Canzine and the Toronto Hand Eye Society.

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Comics Lowdown is back!

Your roundup of essential comics news is back, with an Angoulême update, cussin’ Stan Lee and more!

Big publishing news: Bertelsmann, the parent company of Penguin Random House, announced the day before Thanksgiving that it will buy Simon & Schuster. This will affect graphic novels and manga in a big way, because PRH and S&S distribute a LOT of graphic novels and manga.

In a series of Tweets, Ed Chavez sketches out what the manga landscape will look like, and why it matters. ICv2 lists all their comics/distribution clients; keep in mind that this is in addition to the graphic novels the companies themselves publish under a variety of imprints: Random House has RH Graphics and Pantheon (which publishes the works of Chris Ware and other literary graphic novels), and S&S has Gallery 13 and, just announced, two new lines of graphic novels for young readers.

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Guibert named Grand Prix winner as Angouleme Festival opens

Robert Kirkman, Catherine Meurisse and Chris Ware also recognized as the festival kicks off.

The Angoulême international comics festival (a.k.a. FIBD Angoulême) opened yesterday with the announcement that French writer Emmanuel Guibert had been awarded this year’s Grand Prix. Guibert is a frequent collaborator of Joann Sfar; the two worked together on The Professor’s Daughter and the Sardine in Space series, and he is also the writer of The Photographer, Alan’s War, and the children’s series Ariol (this last is published in English by Papercutz, while all the others are published here by First Second).

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Comics Lowdown: Abrams pulls ‘A Suicide Bomber Sits in the Library’ from its schedule

Plus: “Olivia Jaimes” speaks, Bill Maher doubles down on his comic book comments, a comic convention apologizes for giving ‘Saga’ to kids, and much more!

Abrams has abandoned plans to publish A Suicide Bomber Sits in the Library by Jack Gantos and Dave McKean following online criticism and controversy. The book is about a young boy who plans to blow up a library, but he changes his mind when he sees how captivated the people inside are with their reading.

An open letter to Abrams from the Asian Author Alliance, signed by more than 1,000 writers, teachers and readers, reads: “The simple fact is that today, the biggest terrorist threat in the United States is white supremacy. In publishing A Suicide Bomber Sits in the Library, Abrams is willfully fear-mongering and spreading harmful stereotypes in a failed attempt to show the power of story.”

McKean responded to some of the controversy on Twitter: “The premise of the book is that a boy uses his mind and faith to decide for himself that violence is not the right course or action.” The book was due to be published next May.

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