ANIMA: The Brussels Animation Film Festival 2020

The annual Brussels Animation Film Festival, officially known as ANIMA, takes place this year over the last two weekends of February, timed perfectly with the Carnival school holidays. Offering a wide range of national and international all-ages programming, ANIMA will screen 300 films over 10 days at the Flagey Cultural Centre and the Palace movie theatre. The festival also devotes a bulk of its resources to engaging with young children through interactive installations, exhibitions and animation workshops. This appeal toward pre-school and elementary school kids is telegraphed by the poster for this year’s festival which features a cameo by Petit Poilu, the popular character of a BD series of pantomime comics drawn by Belgian cartoonist Pierre Bailly.

The poster for ANIMA 2020 by Pierre Bailly. Petit Poilu is the character in the left-center of audience with the black face and red nose.

The opening event for ANIMA 2020 was the screening of L’extraordinaire voyage de Marona, which had debuted at several animation festivals at the end of 2019 but was now making its Belgian premiere.

The most striking aspect of the film from a comics perspective is the aesthetic of the animation itself. Belgian comics artist Brecht Evens served as the graphic consultant for the film, responsible for establishing the visual style and character design. Both Brecht Evens and director Anca Damian were present at the opening event to present their film.  

Director Anca Damian (centre) and Brecht Evens (right) at the ANIMA kickoff event. 

Director Anca Damian (right) and Brecht Evens (centre) at the ANIMA kickoff event.

Brecht Evens spoke about how he was brought on board the project via the persistence of director Anca Damian, who sought him out immediately after reading his comics to insist that his vision was exactly what she was looking for to portray the world of the film as seen through the eyes of a puppy. With his usual charm and humour, Evens humbly clarified his role in merely establishing the visual library for the film, and gave full credit to the film’s animators for the the labour in making that vision come to life. The trailer for film (presented below with English subtitles) offers a glimpse into how these animators did justice to the Evens style.

 L’extraordinaire voyage de Marona marks Brecht Evens’ first foray into the world of animation, and he follows in the wake of other fellow Euro comics cartoonists making their inroads into feature-length animated films (Emile Bravo and Lorenzo Mattotti, among others, come to mind). Here’s hoping that films like Marona reach a wider audience so that more unique visions and styles from the comics world can be expressed as moving images,

Nick Nguyen

Exhibitions of the 47th Angoulème International Comics Festival: Gunnm L'ange mécanique

The exhibition space on the main floor of the Espace Franquin served as the home to another exhibition devoted to manga, though here the focus was on a singular creation rather than an entire range of work. Gunnm, l'ange mécanique [Gunnm, the mechanical angel] paid homage to Yukito Kishiro's popular cyberpunk series (known to North American readers as Battle Angel Alita) that was originally serialized in Japan from 1990 to 1995, and which was one of the first wave of manga to be translated into French in 1998. To support this exhibition, the Festival pulled out all stops: showcasing 150 pages of original artwork from the series for the first time outside of Japan, as well as bringing in Yukito Kishiro himself for a masterclass and an international encounter with Enki Bilal. 

Inside the darkened L-shaped exhibition room, the pages of original artwork were displayed on the walls as well as on flat and angular tables, and all are individually illuminated by ceiling spotlights. Near the entrance, visitors are drawn toward a video screen that features clips of individual interviews with Kishiro, directors James Cameron and Robert Rodriguez and producer Jon Landau talking about Gunnm the manga and its adaptation into the feature film ALITA: BATTLE ANGEL (2019).

The exhibition organized the collection of original artwork into five separate sections that guided visitors through Kishiro's major graphic and thematic preoccupations that distinguished the series and elevated it (and by extension, its author, to stratospheric popularity. 

1. Le corps (the body). As the heroine of the series is an android named Gally, Kishiro places significant visual and thematic emphasis on the body as a site of permanent construction and destruction. Pages in this section are arranged to incrementally spotlight scenes of dismemberment, disconnection and repair to underline Kishiro's indulgence with the organo-mechanic body.

2. L'icone Gally (Gally the icon)

Gally's identity as an android provided Kishiro with the freedom to explore other the ways that duality is literally inscribed upon her body: human/android; hard wiring/free will; warrior/pacifist; violent/tender; and bounty hunter/prey. These dialectics consistently highlight the tension within Gally between the mechanical and the human in her search for her own humanity, with a visual character design that helps elevate her beyond being a simple character toward iconic status.

3. Un monde d'absolu (A world of absolutes)

The action in GUNNM takes place in a universe perfectly in tune with a post-Blade Runner aesthetic, where class divisions are expressed by two worlds: Kuzutetso (the lower depths) and Zalem (the upper heights). Pages that represent each of these worlds provided stunning clarity to Kishiro's labour and his vision in mapping out the intricate details that give these environments a sense of place and scope.

 

4. La cinétique (kineticism)

GUNNM is conceived and presented as a grand action spectacle.  Its pages highlight Kishiro's use of speed and sport through Motorball, a violent game within the GUNNM universe. The selected pages allowed for closer viewing to demonstrate the graphic tools that Kishiro uses, such as blur lines, panel and page design to connote velocity and combat.   

5. Les mues de Yukito Kishiro (The reinventions of Yukito Kishiro). The concluding section presents an evolution of Yukito Kishiro's graphism due to his discoveries of new tools (from airbrusing to digital art) and of new international comics (especially American comics).

This is a solid exhibition with a distinct aesthetic for its presentation (black walls and frames with ceiling spotlights as light sources; thematic sections individuated with color coded captions). The text and captions are to-the-point and provide sufficient commentary for visitors to appreciate what makes this series connect with its readers. Fans of the series will devour the opportunity to see so many original pages that confirm Kishiro's mastery, while neophytes such as myself will leave with a greater appreciation of the series and its place within both Japanese and French comics history.

Nick Nguyen

All photos taken by Nick Nguyen   

Exhibitions of the 47th Angoulème International Comics Festival: La bande d'Antoine Marchalot dessinée

Upstairs on the top floor of Angoulème's l'Alpha Mediathèque is an officially designated exhibition room where visitors would logically expect to find, based on the Festival maps and orientation literature, the exhibit about the comics of French cartoonist Antoine Marchalot .

"Yeah, well this here is also a an exhibition room, eh"

This was not at all the case as the exhibition was actually installed outside of that room - which was closed to the public during the festival - along the four available walls that surrounded the staircase leading up to the top floor. 

 

It is unclear whether this choice was a result of political, logistic, scheduling, administrative or financial constraints (last year's exhibition on Jeremie Moreau was held in this same space), or a deliberate attempt to evoke a sense of absurdity that is characteristic of the work of Antoine Marchalot. It is totally feasible and appropriate if the answer is the latter since Marcholat himself is the author of this exhibition and he grasped the opportunity to make a meta-joke about the situation. In other words, he doesn't take things too seriously, and that also applies to himself and the presentation of his own work.

Even the title of the exhibition is compromised by Marchalot's sense of absurdity, functioning as both a visual and literary pun in French that subtly shifts meaning of the sentence due to the placement of his name in the sentence. One expects it to be say "Bienvenue dans la bande dessinée d'Antoine Marchalot" [Welcome to the comics of Antoine Marchalot] but what it actually says is "Bienvenue dans la bande d'Antoine Marchalot dessinée!" (loosely translated here as the slang is so French-specific to be [Welcome into the drawn version of Antoine Marchalot's hood!]).  

The introductory panel to the exhibition also provides all of the necessary clues to coach visitors to prepare themselves for what they are about to experience. This is a tongue-in-cheek parody of a comics exhibition whose comedy is amplified because it takes the piss out of a typical comics exhibition by presenting itself as one. This sense of absurdity even informs the encouragement to go downstairs to the Walking Dead exhibition first to get an understanding of how comics (and comics exhibitions) work before returning upstairs! 

For example, the presentation of Marchalot's work is not meant to fetishize his original artwork, but to showcase in very broad terms the comedic register that grounds it. The text boxes only provide the title information of each piece and its date of creation. There is no other metadata about the work other than Marchalot's running commentary, which he uses in a self-deprecating, exaggerated and parodic tone to both inflate and take the piss out of his own work.

The framed pages could be read on the wall as well as in their respective published versions from Les Requins Marteaux, which were chained in a deliberately ridiculous manner to their display tables. Whether it was a public action of reading on the wall with other people at the same time or an individual reading of the chained books, many of the visitors that were present while I was there were outright laughing out loud - first at the gag, then at the commentary. 

There are certain points in the exhibition where visitors must certainly begin to pick up on what Marchalot is up to. The photos below offer some of the exhibition highlights where the absurdity is self-evident. No cow is too sacred for Marchalot, especially when it comes to the discourse of comics exhibitions. The absurdity that he associates with the way that comics aesthetics, form and content are currently valorized and discussed presents readymade targets to take down.

Newspaper and magazine covers. Appeared between 1975 and 2019.

Planche de bédé sauvage. Captured on the outskirts of Bretagnolle, Corrèze, 2019

Actual Caption: "The author desperately seeking to leave the underground". 2019.

It's a pity that the exhibition was only installed for the duration of the Festival weekend as this is the kind of exhibit that demands patience for an audience to appreciate. It took me a while to recognize what Marchalot was doing with his work and this exhibition, but once I understood the method to his madness, things all became clearer and hence, much funnier for me.

Nick Nguyen

All photos taken by Nick Nguyen

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF COMIC ART 21-1 table of contents

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF COMIC ART

Vol. 21 , No. 1 Spring/Summer 2019

This issue has been out for months, but my copies got lost in the mail. It even happens to editors when you produce an 800+ page journal.

Table of Contents

Ito Hirobumi's Nose: Syphilis in Early 20th Century Japanese Cartoons

Ronald Stewart

1

"You Are Leaving the French Sector": Flix's Spirou in Berlin and the Internationalization of German Comics

Paul M. Malone

28

As I Please: A Personal Reflection on Censorship

Anton Kannemeyer

52

The "Bobo" (bourgeois-boheme) as Post-Modern Figure? Gentrification and Globalization in Dupuy and Berberian's Monsieur Jean and Boboland

Annabelle Cone

62

Graphic Testimonies of the Balsero Crisis of 1994: Narratives of Cuban Detainees at the Guantanamo Naval Base

Tania Perez-Cano

79

Comics Reinventing Creativity in the Museum: Some Thoughts about the Show "Viii.etas Desbordadas/Overflowing Panels"

Ana Merino

105

Ishii Takashi, Beyond 1979: Ero Gekiga Godfather, GARO Inheritor, or Shiijo Manga Artist?

Jon Holt

118

Of Bears, Birds, and Barks: Animetaphoric Antagonism and Animalsceant Anxieties within Dell Funny Animal Franchise Comics

Daniel F. Yezbick

143

Wang Ning, Beijing Total Vision Culture Spreads Co. Ltd., and the Transnationalization of Chinese Comic Books

John A. Lent

171

Pointed Language: Reading Paola Gaviria's Virus Tropical (2009) from the Perspective of the Visual Protocols of the Graphic Novel

Alvaro Aleman and Eduardo Villacis

184

On Butterflies, Viruses, and Visas: Comics and the Perils of Diasporic Imagined Communities

Hector Fernandez L'Hoeste

192

The City and the Medium of Comics: Depiction of Urban Space in Sarnath Banerjee's Corridor and The Barn Owl's Wondrous Capers

Anu Sugathan

216

Crossing Borders: Graphic Novels Quoting Art

Dietrich Griinewald

Translated by Christina Little

242

That Chameleon Quality: An Interview with R. Sikoryak

Kent Worcester

275

Popular Format and Auteur Format in Italian Comics. The Case of Magnus

Sara Dallavalle

300

Chile's Military Dictatorship and Comics as Alternative Methods of Memorialization: Critical Approaches from Contemporary Chilean Graphic Novels

Sam Cannon and Hugo Hinojosa Lobos

329

Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis and Embroideries:A Graphic Novelization of Sexual Revolution across Three Generations of Iranian Women

Leila Sadegh Beigi

350

A Sublime in Tension Around Alexandre Fontaine Rousseau and Francis Desharnais' Les Premiers Aviateurs

Mathieu Li-Goyette

366

"They're Quite Strange in the Larval Stage": Children and Childhood in Gary Larson's "The Far Side"

Michelle Ann Abate

390

Marxism Across Media: Characterization and Montage in Variety Artwork's Capital in Manga

Magnus Nilsson

423

The Desi Archie: Selling India's America to America's India

Debarghya Sanyal

439

Gay Male Porno Comics: Genre, Conventions, and Challenges

Sina Shamsavari

463

Ambitious Women in Male Manga Magazines: Sakuran and Hataraki-Man by Anno Moyoco

Yasuko Akiyama

498

"Hey Kids, Patriarchy!": Satire and Audience on the Back Covers of Bitch Planet

Aimee Vincent

508

The Fine Art of Genocide: Underground Comix and U.S. History as Horror Story

Chad A. Barbour

519

Superman's Remediation of Mid-20th Century American Identity

John Darowski

539

A Matter of Affect: Illustrated Responses to the Immigration Debacle

Hector Fernandez L'Hoeste

551

Random Notes of the Editorial Office of China's Manhua Magazine

Bi Keguan

Edited by Bi Weimin

Translated by Xu Ying

567

The Chus: A Family Teeming with Cartoonists

Chu Der-Chung (Zola Zu) with John A. Lent

Translation by Xu Ying

585

Faith in Comics: Ex-voto Religious Offerings and Comic Art

Alvaro Aleman and Eduardo Villacis

594

Translated Hispano-American Comics in Brazil

Barbara Zocal Da Silva

602

An Afternoon with R. 0. Blechman

Conversation with Jan Ziolkowski and Ariana Chaivaranon

627

Kennedy Conspiracy Comics: en Espanol!

John Gardner

645

The Myth of Frankenstein from Mary Shelley to Gris Grimly: Some Intersemiotic and Ideological Issues

Michela Canepari

665

The Best We Could Do: A Mini-Symposium

The Role of Water in the Construction of Refugee Subjectivity in Thi Bui's The Best We Could Do

Isabelle Martin

693

A Burden of Tales: Memories, Trauma, and Narratorial Legacies in The Best We Could Do and Munnu

Debarghya Sanyal

704

The Fragmentary Body: Traumatic Configurations in Autobiographical Comics by Women of Color

Francesca Lyn

710

A Graphic Medicine Prescription

A. David Lewis

724

Pioneers in Comics Scholarship

My Life with American Comics: How It Started

Kosei Ono

732

Nature of Reality in the Graphic: "Calvin and Hobbes"

Shefali Elizabeth Mathew

738

The Mindset of a Professional Exhibition Curator

Introduced by Jochen Garcke

748

Remembrances

One Life, Many Loves: Dario Mogno's Passion for Cinematography, Publishing, Comics, and Cuba

Licia Citti

772

The Printed Word

John A. Lent

780

Review Essays

Shawn Gilmore

790

David Kunzie

805

Exhibition Review Essay

Jean-Paul Gabilliet

811

Book Reviews

Rachel Kunert-Graf

Stephen Connor

Kirsten Mollegaard

John A. Lent

Maite Urcaregui

820

Exhibition and Media Reviews

Carli Spina

833

Correction

839

 

IJOCA published twice yearly, appearing between March-May and Oct.-Nov.

Prices from 2011 for IJOCA: Institutions: domestic    US$100 foreign        US$120 Individuals: domestic   US$45 foreign       US$60

Payment can be made by international money order personal check (for U.S. subscribers), checks made on U.S. banks, or cash. Sorry, no credit cards.

Back issues are available at the same rates as above. The following are out of print: Vol. 1, nos. 1 and 2; Vol. 4, no.2, and Vol. 7, no.1. We hope to reprint these numbers soon. There is no online version of the IJOCA

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Contact: John A. Lent                  669 Ferne Blvd.                  Drexel Hill, PA 19026                  U.S.A.                  Email: jlent@temple.edu                  Phone: 610-622-3938

Manuscripts should be sent electronically to John A. Lent, email: jlent@temple.edu and john.lent@gmail.com. The manuscript should include, title (not very long), author, text, endnotes, references, short bio data of author, in that order.