This story is a true one, taken from my time in Iraqi Kurdistan with the Common Language Project in November of 2010 (which I am working on creating a full-length book on right now). This isn’t really an excerpt, but a stand alone story that I had been tossing around in the back of my head for a while.

(Please note that the bulk of this was done under extreme stress during the actual 24hBD so excuse any sloppiness in writing or drawing. Also please note that although this is based on a true story but should not be considered journalism. The last scene has been fiddled with in order to fit the constraints of the 24 hour comics theme and the dialogue has been reconstructed/invented. Thank you.)

UPDATE: The Common Language Project is making a feature length documentary about Sam Malkandi, the Iraqi deportee mentioned in this comic. Please go watch the trailer and consider pitching in to help them raise the funds to make the film happen:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cassidyd/barzan-the-movie

[Show as slideshow]

Bear with me; I’ve never done a “con report” or a “festival recap” before. I think they often involve the blogger talking about the convention day by day, being very thorough about covering everything important that happened, the most buzzed about books and news and who’s who. I’m sure there’s tons of that already out there for people who care about what happened during the Festival Internationale de la Bande Dessinée 2012 which means I don’t have to do it here. Thank goodness.

To tell the truth, there was a lot that I missed. You would think that four days would be plenty of time to see everything that this festival has to offer, but it could have been a week long and I still might not have seen it all. Of course, the fact that I live here now relieved a lot of the “must see it all right now” burden.

Take, for example, the Art Speigelman exhibitions. There’s his retrospective at the Castro building (that building which my apartment complex is attached to) which is supposed to be fantastic as well as the show he curated at the comics museum across the river called “Le Musée Privé d’Art Speigelman.” This is sort of like Art’s personal history of comics, taken from both the museum’s collection and from various collections in the US. The opening was on Wednesday night and I stumbled over to check it out a few hours after my whole transcendent 24hBD experience.

It was kind of crowded, so I decided not to actually look at anything and to come back after the festival is over (we’re going tomorrow). But I have gotten confirmation from several sources that it’s a very good show.

They say that Angoulême is completely transformed when the festival starts, and this is definitely true. There’s the banners

and new signs directing people to this or that tent, but then there’s also little loudspeakers wired up throughout the city.

see there, up at the top?

The loudspeakers announce events as they are about to begin. And, when there are no events to announce, music:

Sounds of Silence

Hergé got a makeover, with new glasses for every day of the festival:

Thursday: Hergé as post-swirly nerd.

Sunday: Hergé as the guy who wears his 3D glasses outside of the theater

And then, of course, there were the crowds, which are absent from Angoulême for 361 days of the year.

on Rue Hergé

on the bridge to the museum

Inside the tents themselves, it was sometimes hard to move:

ay yay yay

But who am I to complain that too many people are into reading and buying comics?

the FNAC reading area, where copies of the books nominated for the festival prizes were available to read

And I guess this wasn’t even as crowded as usual. According to Bart Beatty, this years’ attendance was markedly down from previous years.

Being an artist has its perks. I heard that there was a special room for “professionals” in the Hôtel de Ville, the giant castle that is Angoulême’s city hall:

And lo, it was true. A flash of the “auteur” badge and you’re in a big fancy room with free coffee and cognac all day long.

This is where the press could comfortably work on and file all those professional con reports I was talking about. A lot of us ended up coming here whenever we wanted to take a break from the action outside.

George O'Conner and fellow Maison des Auteurs resident Nathan Schreiber

Some of my time each day was taken up by signings at the Steinkis/Atlantic booth.

I’m a small fry and my French publisher for Comment Comprendre Israël en 60 Jours ou Moins is a new one with only two graphic novels to its name so far (me and GB Tran’s great Vietnamerica) so we shared a booth with Atlantic, who do comics of a more alt bent. Both Atlantic and Steinkis are run by Moïse Kissous, who is the boss at Jungle, who publish super mainstreamy stuff like the Simpsons. This is the part of the blog post where I remember that no one really cares about my French publisher’s family tree. Excuse me. The point is, we were in the “comics and manga” tent and I don’t really think anyone who was there looking for comics (“comics” meaning superhero type stuff in France) or manga would really be looking for a book like mine, thus causing some confusion when people picked up my book. But it was nice all the same and the Atlantic guys were a fun group.

the Atlantic team strike a pose

There were tons of interesting looking panels but I didn’t really get to very many. Here’s Joe Sacco, Josh Neufeld and Mana Neyestani talking about comics journalism:

The talk was appropriately documented:

One of the highlights for me was the Concert de Dessins. A band played arrangements of traditional French music (and maybe their own music too?) while a suite of artists took turns drawing a story. I’ve seen this sort of live drawing before in France. Back in 2009, Blutch improvised drawings inspired by the work of Sun Ra as it progressed over his musical career:

Blutch draws from Sun Ra

The artists here at Angoulême were Bastien Vives, Craig Thompson and five others (whose names I can’t seem to find on the event page of the festival website), working on a script by Arnaud Le Gouëfflec

the show begins

Craig Thompson and ? draw panel 2

Bastien Vivès and ? draw the penultimate panel

I'm pretty embarrassed that I don't know who any of these artists are. Stupid American.

Here’s the finished story all the way through (although I missed the first two panels in which the thief creeps up on a Maltese Falcon type sculpture and then begins to run from the police):

concert de dessins

Comics festivals can be great and all, but watching other people draw is what makes me want to leave the fairgrounds immediately and get to the drawing table.

bravo.

The festival sponsors several official exhibitions, usually based on regional selection of cartoonists. There was a Swedish comics exhibition and a Spanish one that I didn’t see. I did manage to check out the Thaiwanese comics tent and an exhibition called Europe Se Dessine (Europe Draws Itself). The Thaiwanese comics exhibition might have been interesting if they had been displaying originals, but there were just copies of the books and then reproductions on the walls.

nah.

Call me crazy, but I think that if you can’t display originals, there’s no point to having an exhibition. Looking at reproductions is kind of a tease.

Some of the best exhibitions were part of the “Off” festival, which are, as far as I can tell, exhibits and events that don’t fall under the official FIBD jurisdiction.

Off all over

The highlight of this was “Dog”, an exhibition of original pages from Vincent Perriot‘s new book of the same name. This exhibition, like the Thaiwan one, was also in the Hôtel de Ville, but the wait for this one was long and took the visitor inside some room that seems not to get used very often.

a bit rawer of a space than the fancy cognac room

They only let in 18 people at a time. We wondered why this was until it was our turn. To get to the show, you climb up two stories worth of narrow stone spiral staircase…

vertigo inducing

…and then at the top, you reach a tower room with stone vaulted ceilings where where the exhibition is mounted:

et voila

I love Vincent’s work and these drawings are amazing to see in person. Well worth the wait:

a drawing from Vincent Perriot's "Dog"

a drawing from Vincent Perriot's "Dog"

The show also included these clay sketches:

Vincent Perriot sculpture

That’s the artist in the background, who seems to have spent all day every day drawing in books for people in his tower.

Seeing as how most of us whine about doing dedicaces for a few hours, that’s pretty impressive stamina for a show.

Vincent Perriot drawing

The “Off” exhibitions were all over town. Some I would just stumble upon, like this storefront leant to a group of local comics artists who were adding new work to the walls as the days wore on:

I followed some signs to an exhibition that was in the big cathedral:

I wonder what this could be...

An exhibition of artwork from illustrated bible stories! As part of the Festival of Christian comics?

That’s fitting, I suppose. But not anything that I care to stand in line for (this show had a wait to get in because the artist was doing signings inside):

not really my thing

dramatic bible things happening

this one seems...out of place, somehow.

In a different Church across town was an exhibition of comics from Africa called “Afrobulles” (Afrobubbles).

I liked the work of Jean de Dieu Rakotosolofo of Madagascar (although they were reproductions again)

JDD Rakotosolofo

Then there’s the off off stuff, like this portrait artist who will draw you as a manga character:

I saw most of these shows on Saturday, which means I was on day three of packed days, long nights, and little sleep. I tried to find a car that would match how I felt and found it near the small press tent:

ow my head

Of course, part of what makes Angoulême such a great festival is getting to spend so much time with such a great group of artists and publishers. I felt really lucky to see people I already know from the US and European comics scenes, and also to be able to meet and spend some quality time with some of my personal comics heros.  Maybe its the setting (Angoulême is spread out over more space than, say, the Bethesda Marriott but is less vast than New York City), or the fact that four days allows people to relax a bit, but people were generally in very good moods.

Here’s Dan Berry, a cartoonist from England who maybe had the best looking comic to come out of 24hBD and Eleanor Davis. I’m ooing and ahhing over Eleanor’s sketchbook:

Dan and Eleanor

Dinners are the best part of the day and usually involve parties of 10 or more. Here’s a photo from dinner with the Belgian based Employe du Moi‘s Max de Radigues and Pierre Maurel. Max’s book “Pendent Ces Temps à White River Junction” about his year as a CCS fellow was nominated as part of the Angoulême official selection.

At another dinner with my Dutch publisher Oog&Blik, Joost Swart drawing on napkins to pay for his meal:

Joost drawing

Joost’s wife picked up one of the coolest kid’s books I’ve ever seen: New York en Pyjamarama by Michael Leblond and Frédéric Bertrand. She demonstrated its magic:

New York en Pyjamarama

(its published by Le Rouerergue)

I didn’t take any pictures at Le Chat Noir, the Mercure, or any of the other places that people tended to congregate at the end of the nights. By that time, documenting the festival for a future blog post just didn’t seem like a priority somehow. Just imagine a kind of not very cool bar filled with very cool people (I think le Chat Noir is popular during the festival just because its centrally located and pretty large, its not exactly the most romantic of bars).

Le Chat Noir in daylight hours

On Sunday evening before dinner, le Chat Noir was closed so we went to the bar next door, la Souris Verte instead. Chat Noir, Souris Verte, get it?

("la Souris Verte" means "the Green Mouse")

At this point, the whole city seemed exhausted but still standing and not hating comics just yet. Everyone in the bar seemed to be either reading comics:

Or drawing them:

Brendan Leach, here with ça et la

fellow Maison des Auteurs resident Julien Zanesi

While we were discussing worst jobs ever held, it was discovered that Brendan Leach and Mike Dawson, who were signing next to each other at the Ça et La table both worked at the Great Adventure theme park in New Jersey during the same summer. Spooky! Mike used to draw caricatures. He demonstrated his technique with a portrait of me:

Now I don’t feel like I missed out by not getting a manga portrait done.

And then all of a sudden, the festival was over and everyone was gone. I walked to the supermarket this morning afternoon when I woke up and found the streets back to their normal empty states.

the plaza in front of le Chat Noir

Was any of this even real? I saw on Twitter that Josh Neufeld feels similarly:

Good times. But after all that I’m excited to get back to work. Full steam ahead in sleepy ole Angoulême.

Angoulême is sad because you are gone.

Published April 2011 on Cartoon Movement

20 pages

Syria is a temporary refuge to hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have fled their own country following the 2003 invasion by US coalition forces. While some have been resettled to third countries, many are waiting as refugees without access to work or higher education.

[Show as slideshow]

utter destruction

Well, its over! And I finished 19 pages so far, which you can see here:

http://www.24hdelabandedessinee.com/public/auteurs2012.php?id=11048

It may not be 24 pages but it doesnt feel like a failure. I have to admit that I didn’t really WANT to participate in 24 hour comics day. I thought “that’s not how I work and I probably wont finish so whats the point and I’ll just end up with some crappy, hastily done comic that I hate.” I agreed to do this because I thought it would be a fun experience with my new fellow residents at the MdA and also because I was peer pressured by Gilles (Boulet).

But whaddaya know, it was actually a pretty helpful exercise. I found myself actually drawing differently as the night–and then day–wore on.

I started out thinking that I would make an inkwash comic. I’ve been experimenting with inkwash lately, considering using it for my next book because its faster than watercolor (and cheaper to print). So I started out yesterday with pages that looked like this:

But when I realized there was no way in hell I would finish a 24 page comic at that rate, I decided to stop adding the inkwash and just stuck with the line art. I can add the wash in later.

Things got much faster. But still not fast enough. Then at one point I drank too much coffee and all my lines started getting all twitchy (like me):

Then I started to calm down but my nib started clogging so those things cancelled each other out. Still, though, I actually felt like I was improving towards the end despite the tiredness and the hurry. Maybe it was just a nice chance to work on something that doesn’t need to be perfect; you have the freedom to fuck it up any way you want. That was refreshing.

What I’m trying to say is maybe you should try this 24 hour comics day thing sometime. I’m glad I did it. And next time I’ll know better than to try and do a 24 page story about a massacre in Iraq. Pro tip: on 24 hour comics day, keep it light.

Now I need to finish my comic because I told Lewis Trondheim I would (he doesn’t actually care).

ciao.

10:56

Four more pages done and uploaded and now I have 9 more pages to go in 4 hours. Impossible! Oh well, I’ll just finish afterwards. The sleep deprivation plus caffeine is doing weird things to my style, like adding a wiggly line due to shaking hands. But I dont necessarily dislike the effect.

http://www.24hdelabandedessinee.com/public/auteurs2012.php?id=11048

9:06am

@_@

6:19am

I stopped adding inkwash, instead just inking line drawings with plans to go back in with a wash later on. It’s much faster this way, although I still dont know if I’ll finish in time. I have 13 more pages to go (if you don’t count the front and back covers).

http://www.24hdelabandedessinee.com/public/auteurs2012.php?id=11048

1:56am

I no longer care if I finish this within 24 hours and it suddenly got a lot more fun.

12:02 am

I’ve drawn, inked and lettered 3 pages…up they go!

http://www.24hdelabandedessinee.com/public/auteurs2012.php?id=11048

6:01 pm

I’m done with my script now and about to start drawing. I decided to make a short story out of the visit we paid to Halabja, Iraq, in 2010 when I was there with some journalists for my next book (which will be about those journalists).

3:11 pm 

Etienne has given us the constraint: he picked three phrases from a hat and they must appear as narration in a frame in the story. The first one, “suddenly emerging” must appear within the first 8 pages, then “and finally” must appear between pages 9 and 16. The last, “she suddenly interrupted herself” will be somewhere between pages 17 and 24.

So here we go! I’ll update from time to time here.

Tomorrow at 3 o clock  (or “15h” in French) 24 hour comics day (or “24 heures de la bande dessinée” in French) will commence. Some artists who have signed up will be working from their homes, and some of us will be working from the Maison des Auteurs here in Angoulême.

In the States, 24 hour comics day seems to be a bit loose; there’s no set theme. It is this way because we cherish our freedom, natch. Here, there is a theme or constraint. Last year it was Popeye and I’m glad I wasn’t participating then because I know zero about Popeye except that it was the basis of Robert Altman’s strangest film ever. The year before that it was Pirates. What is the theme this year? I wont know until exactly 3pm when we gather round the break room at the MdA and find out. For the past several years, it’s been Louis Trondheim who gives out the constraint, but this year it’s Étienne Lécroart, a member of the OuBaPo club/movement/association. That means we’ll probably have to draw a palindrome comic or a comic that can be read in four directions or something. Yikes. Please be kind to us, Étienne!

artists at work on Popeye comics, 2011

Participating artists’ pages will be scanned and posted as they’re completed. You can follow along throughout the day from here:

http://www.24hdelabandedessinee.com/public/list2012.php

Also there will be camerapeople floating around and posting videos online periodically but I dont think they’re very interesting to watch unless you like looking at people hunched over desks or eating snacks.

Ok see you tomorrow.

I’m sure I’ll survive. The point of coming here IS to get a lot of work done, after all, and although I miss being able to get anything I want at any hour of any day for cheap within three blocks of my apartment, so far I really like Angoulême. It’s also a good sign that all the other artists and animators who I’ve met here seem to be pretty happy with it (and did you know there are special tax breaks for animators and video game makers in Angoulême? Or something like that. I don’t understand 20% of what people say to me in French here but I’m pretty sure that’s what they said.)

It is pretty tranquil here, and its hard to imagine what this place will look like when the festival starts in a few days and about 200,000 people will descend on a town with a year-round population of 44,000. I’m told it will be unrecognizable and that I will get very depressed afterwards when everyone leaves again.

So here’s a little walking tour to show you Angoulême before it gets insane:

My apartment building is attached to this place:

wtf

This is the main building of the Cité International de la Bande Dessinée. I still don’t really understand what a “cité internationale” is, but according to Wikipedia, the CIBD is “a public establishment of cultural cooperation of an industrial and commercial character created by the Department of Charente, the Ministry of French Culture, the City of Angoulême and the Region of Poitou-Charentes, devoted to comics and images” (poetic translation my own).

So under that umbrella you have the Maison des Auteurs, which gives studio spaces (and, in some cases, apartments) to cartoonists and animators, you have the Musée de la Bande Dessinée (across the river), a giant comics library, a cinema with a killer lineup, and a sort of school thing. The library, cinema, and school are contained in this monstrosity of a building which scares the bejesus out of me.

home sweet home

I live in one of these futuristic pods.

picture taken on a sunnier day

I may die of boredom but at least I’ll have a nice view.

Also this place sits right on the edge of the Charente river, which has a path all alongside it. When I visited back in October I took a bike ride and almost died of pretty:

pretty

possible case of death by pretty

ack

I didn't know these changing cabanas existed outside of cartoons

The center of Angoulême sits on the top of a big hill which you walk up from the riverside.

just a little further

Then at the top of the hill is the Maison des Auteurs (more on that in another post, someday)

the Maison des Auteurs

Because its Sunday, I walked over to the market at place Victor Hugo, which is a little ways away from the center of Angoulême. There are a lot of interesting looking shops along the way. Some have been closed down:

former music store

former AUO store

???

Some are still going strong, like the House of Rubber

all your rubber needs met here

And the awesome looking driving school

Here are some pictures of places where people live:

little houses with back gardens

apartment buildings

prison

I don’t want to be one of those people who moves to Europe and then starts telling everyone how much BETTER everything is there, but there is one thing (besides the healthcare system) that I can say is definitely better: the outdoor markets.

spices and dried fruit guy

Sure, there’s the fancy farmers market with artisanal garlic just like back home, but most of the produce here is really pretty cheap and fresh.

And the lobsters run free. These guys are alive and crawling around:

photo blurry because I couldn't understand whether the guy was telling me I was welcome to take a photo or to please not take photos.

Then you walk home with your little basket of groceries and relax, probably:

Angoulême has been known for the festival for about 30 years now, so comics has become part of its identity. All the street signs are speech balloons:

I'm not sure who is supposed to be saying "Rue Jean Guichard." Me, maybe?

And then there are murals which pop up all over the place:

Marc Antoine Mathieu

And of course, Corto Maltese vending machines

:

Then there’s the unsanctioned graffiti. I like these stencils that instruct passers by how to break into this abandoned building:

use an axe for plywood

use a crowbar for these window grates

I don’t really want to break into that building though. I want to break into THIS building:

home sweet home

Can someone tell me the story of this mansion and why no one lives there and why its for sale? Is it haunted? It must be haunted and that’s why no one has bought it yet.

I had the Downton Abbey theme song in my head for the rest of my walk after this.

Anyway here’s some more pictures:

my dream car

musical offerings

Ramp being built for the closing ceremony of the festival when Art Speigelman will jump a motorcycle over the Charente river and land in his exhibition in the Musée de la Bande Dessinée to wild applause.

Ok I’ve spent enough time uploading photos for today. I should probably do some real work before the festival comes and destroys us all.

see ya

I’ve lived in Brooklyn for 9 years and now I am pretty sure I won’t be moving back here once the residency is over.  I’m gonna miss it.

I’ll update again from the MdA. Bye!

photo by Emily Anne Epstein

After two years of blissful workspace sharing, our studio, Pizza Island, has decided not to renew its lease. Of course, it was going to be over for me anyway because I’m leaving for Angoulême today and had already given up my desk months ago. With Kate also leaving the country shortly and other members looking to save some money by working at home, it was generally agreed upon that leaving our studio space in Northern Brooklyn was the right thing to do.

photo by Emily Anne Epstein

I was really lucky to have had such great studio mates. Sharing a smallish space with five other people has the potential to be a disaster, but somehow the combination of Julia Wertz, Lisa Hanawalt, Domitille Collardey, Kate Beaton, Meredith Gran and myself hit some near-perfect equilibrium. Everybody inspired everybody else, and there wasn’t an artist in the room who wasn’t deadly serious about what they were doing (even if their work is sometimes anything but serious).

photo by Emily Anne Epstein

We had a blog for a while, although we were all terrible about posting on it. We talked about doing a weekly livestream Q+A and ended up doing exactly one. We were busy making comics. We did some interviews. That part was kind of weird.

But it was a good run! Thanks, ladies, for making my last two years in Brooklyn great ones.

xo

s

Hopefully I’ll be posting here more often. But then again, I always say that when I start a new blog.

http://www.tcj.com/sarah-glidden/

This time around I wanted to stay away from talking about “How to Understand…”, having just come off of a two month tour promoting the thing, which has already been out for a year.

So instead we talked about my current project, which is on some journalists I followed to Iraq and Syria. I was just about to leave for that reporting trip back in 2010 when I was a guest on another one of Mike’s fine podcasts, the Ink Panthers Show, which he co-hosts with Alex Robinson. Here’s the link to that one:

http://www.mikedawsoncomics.com/the-ink-panthers-show-65-featuring-sarah-glidden/

 http://www.cartoonmovement.com/comic/22