Fumetto Opens Up Again in 2022, But Underwhelms: A Review Essay

by Wim Lockefeer; photos by Nick Nguyen

Founded in 1992 as the Luzern Comix Festival, the Fumetto International Comics Festival can rightfully call itself one of the most important comics events in Europe, along with the Festival Internationale de la BD in Angoulême (France), Lucca Comics and Games in Lucca (Italy), and the Erlangen Comics Salon (Germany). Over the years, many internationally-renowned creators attended the festival, including Edmond Baudoin (the Festival’s first creator in residence), Jack Kirby, Daniel Clowes, Ulli Lust, Robert Crumb, Jacques Tardi and Emil Ferris. Additionally, the Festival has proven to be instrumental in bringing comics scenes from various Swiss language communities together.

Pandemic

As a direct result of the Covid-19 pandemic and national and international measures to counteract its spread, the Festival had to cancel its 2020 edition, as was the case for most public gatherings of that time. The 30th anniversary of the festival was celebrated in a hybrid format, with events organized in the city of Luzern, as well as online with the Comic Chat Café and a virtual exhibition.

This year’s edition (2022) was supposed to be a joyous return to form, with a full-fledged festival all across the city of Luzern. Whether the organization would be able to pull this off remained uncertain until about two weeks before the starting date, when program information was finally published on the Festival’s website. Most likely this delay was as a result of the uncertainty regarding international Covid-19 measures, and how this might affect the possibility of international guests to even attend the Festival. After all, only days before the opening, Switzerland radically reduced its pandemic regimen, but even so, various international visitors were unable to attend.

Kornschütte

More than ever, the Festival was centered around the Kornschütte, an old official building in the center of the city that is often used for cultural events. The building hosted the main information hub, as well as a small bookstore with selected new comics, predominantly from Switzerland and Germany, including Strapazin, Switzerland’s leading comics magazine. The room also hosted a craft market, where small press publishers, printmakers and other creative types hawked their wares. In a corner cartoonist Julietta Saccardi presented her Tiny Tragedies project, a series of  minicomics based on true stories of sexual abuse and harassment.

Julietta Saccardi's Tiny Tragedies

Five exhibitions were housed in and around the inner city, with two smaller ones devoted to the Swiss comics magazine Ampel and French Edelporn publisher BD Cul (which, true to form, was designed as the aftermath of a very dodgy party, with empty bottles, condom wrappers and assorted paraphernalia strewn around the room). Similarly small in size was the exhibition on French cartoonist Emilie Gleason, this year’s artist in residence.

A bit more ambitious was the presentation in the Kunstmuseum of a selection of video artworks by the Swedish duo Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg, famous for their idiosyncratic, rowdy and often disturbing stop-motion animation centered around desire, lust, and the inevitability of human decline. Their work typically features grossly deformed personas that prey upon one another, are taken apart and then reassembled or simply wander around to their impending doom, accompanied by soundscapes that, thanks to the setup of the exhibition, blended together in an almost hypnotic, alienating experience. Even though its link with comics as such may have been tenuous, it was a strong show, both artistically and in terms of message. 

Zorro

Plenty of comics content was present in Peter Poplaski’s The Curse Of Zorro exhibit, the Festival’s main event and housed in a rather dilapidated old warehouse. For his show, the American cartoonist selected a large number of items from his personal collection, as well as original artwork from himself and other cartoonists, to sketch an alternative history of the (super-) hero as the typical archetype of the Twentieth Century. While Poplaski’s main argument, that modern superheroes are the direct descendants of ancient gods' pantheons and of the characters from late medieval chivalry, and play the same role as aspirational examples, may be tenuous, disputable and quite likely very American-centered, the show itself was interesting and entertaining, with numerous old editions of Zorro stories (Poplaski’s personal favorite and obsession), as well as board games, action figures, movie posters and the like. 

 

Peter Poplaski's The Curse Of Zorro

The long list of additional features and events on the Festival’s program proved to be mainly showcases of artists or books in various shop windows around the city, mostly without any context or information, and often so small you walked past looking for them before you knew it. One notable exception was the tiny but exquisite exhibition of original artwork that local cartoonist Pirmin Beeler had assembled with pages from his latest graphic novel, Das Leuchten Im Grenzland (The Glow in the Borderlands, Edition Moderne, 2022). With his delicate lines and subtle pastels, Beeler is a name to keep track of.

Even though separately these shows and events certainly were not without value, on the whole the Festival left this visitor rather unsatisfied, and constantly checking the program to see if he wasn’t overlooking anything, after all? Was this really everything, not just in numbers, but also in quality? Indeed, with the possible exception of the Djurberg-Berg presentation, none of the Festival’s offerings really went beyond just acceptable in terms of content, presentation or urgency. At the FIBD in Angoulême, the Poplaski show would at best have been an also-ran, a nice addition to the Festival’s main events.

Pirmin Beeler' beautiful artwork

 

Narrow?

It is unclear whether this year’s Fumetto attracted the 40,000 visitors that it boasted ten or fifteen years ago. We visited the Festival, which was said to run from April 2-10, during its first weekend when, indeed, there were some people around. The presentation of this year’s Stipendien (or grants) filled a small auditorium, and visitors did show up for the exhibitions. But there were no lines for the ticket booth or information stands, no throngs to wade through to see that one piece, no presence in the streets. On Monday, the Festival was basically dead.

Restarting a public event after a long and difficult period like the Covid-19 pandemic is a hard and risky endeavor. In the coming years Fumetto may indeed grow again to dimensions on a par with its reputation. The question, however, is whether that is the Festival’s current direction. 2022’s Festival clearly showed a narrow, quite exclusionary view on comics. Except for the book store, mainstream comics, and even literary comics aimed at a larger audience, were completely absent, while this year’s awards went to niche or activist cartoonists.

This analysis, of course, may be just Hineininterpretierung (German for interpreting in meaning that doesn't exist) from an unprepared guest who did not have the right expectations, or it could be an explicit, and doubtlessly meritorious view on what the Festival should be. Maybe the Festival’s directors feel that the Festival’s future in changing times, and a changing landscape, is not so much in inclusion, but rather in focus on specific audiences and themes, a smaller scale and an explicit view on artistic politics. But in my personal view, it would be unwise to limit the scope of one of the most venerated comics festivals in Europe to just that, especially in a time when the importance and weight of the medium as we know it is not what it used to be.

 A version of this review will appear in print in IJOCA 24:1.

Book Review: A History of Women Cartoonists by Mira Falardeau

 A History of Women Cartoonists. Mira Falardeau. Oakville: Mosaic Press, 2020. 298 pp. ISBN 9781771613514. $24.99. http://www.mosaic-press.com/product/history-women-cartoonists/

 reviewed by Jean Sébastien, Professeur, Collège de Maisonneuve

Working in comics, cartooning, or animation was for a long time perceived as man’s work and this is slow in changing. In A History of Women Cartoonists, Mira Falardeau envisions how we can turn the tide. The title of the book shows that one of the ways in which change can be brought is by including more works by women in the canon and to do this by valuing work published by women from the early 20^th century up to the most current day. Even if the book is largely a history of women artists, the last chapters have a different tone.; they act as a call to action in order to get things to change!

In this book, Falardeau gives an overview of the work of creators from the United States, from English Canada and Quebec, from France, Belgium and Switzerland and from the Middle East and the Maghreb. The main portion of her book is structured according to these four regional cut-outs. In her general introduction, she acknowledges that her book, thus, limits itself to only a part of the world’s production by women artists. Such a project, by its very nature, can be celebratory, but deciding who should be included can always become an issue. Falardeau has chosen to reference a larger number of artists in the introductions she writes for each of the four sections that constitute the main content of the book. For example, in her section on the United States she refers briefly to some 60 authors; out of this number, Falardeau selected 15 for whom she has written a more detailed biography, while describing that author’s most important works.

Falardeau’s book is designed to bring forth the similarities in the obstacles that women are faced with, whether in cartooning, comics or animation. In her introduction, she makes a point of noting that these three mediums share elements of a common language. In animation as in comics, women have been less recognized than men and Falardeau’s book works to tilt the balance. This is especially important, for instance, if one is to have a proper historical view of the animation that came out in 1930-1960 period: among the women animators portrayed are two pioneers: American Mary Ellen Bute and Canadian Evelyn Lambart.

A most interesting aspect of the book is its comparative nature. If the section about the United States will not bring any new names to the attention of those who have read Trina Robbins and Catherine Yronwode’s Women and the Comics, or Trina Robbins’ follow-up works, including her more recent Pretty in Ink. Falardeau does a great job in comparing the general economic context and the prevalence of misogyny at different times in the four contexts that she has chosen to look at. For instance, Falardeau links the relative openness to women in newspaper illustration in the United States to the fact that America developed early on a very dynamic illustrated press and that the sheer number of positions opened some of them up to women. She notes that this was not the case in Canada, either English or French, where she finds that women only began to have a presence as major newspapers added women’s pages and children’s pages to their pages from the 1940’s on. In France, there were numerous girls’ magazines in the early 20^th century. However, very few illustrations in such publications were attributed, and even if it is likely that there were women illustrators, most worked in anonymity. Falardeau’s section on the Middle East and the Maghreb is the shortest of the four and she touches very lightly on the political situations in different countries only to point out that, if some women have found it easier to create as expatriates, others became professional illustrators  to work in their home country. Through this comparison of the history of the press, Falardeau compares feminisms within different national contexts finding more advances for women in the United States.

“Should we link this abundant production to freedom of expression generated, on the one side, by a fundamental tradition and on the other, by successive waves of immigration providing the most innovative ideas of feminist thought? Ultimately, the United States were at the forefront of comic’s innovations while the other countries remained a little more conservative.” (p. 154)

Falardeau also points to the differences as to how second-wave feminism entered comics. Whereas in the U. S., this was mostly in comic book form through counterculture publishers, in France, it was the publishers of the science-fiction magazine Métal hurlant who thought that there was a market for a feminist publication in the world of bande dessinée and developed Ah! Nana a quarterly that came out from 1976 to 1978. The title roughly translates to Hey! Gal, but is homonymous with the French word for “pineapple.” In the section about Quebec, Falardeau briefly situates herself in this. As women’s magazines were taking on feminism, one of them asked her to create a strip which she did for from 1976 to 1978. A few years later (1981-1987), Falardeau joined a specifically feminist monthly, La Vie en rose, covered political and social issues; it gave humor and cartooning an important place.

The small press movement of the early nineties embraced autobiography as an important genre in which quite a few women creators of the period found their niche. Falardeau points to the fact that there already was an important autobiographical strand in the work of many women artists before that and refers to Mary Fleener’s comics in the underground movement, Lynda Barry’s early work in alternative weeklies and Lynn Johnston’s syndicated strip For Better or Worse. Even if there have been some opportunities for women in the past decades, feminist criticism has highlighted the slowness in openings within the mainstream. For those who remember Robbins’ criticism of the closed doors for women at Marvel and DC in her 2001 book The Great Women Cartoonists (to which Falardeau refers), there is a sad resonance to be found in more recent criticisms in France against the Angouleme International Festival which has granted its Grand Prize to only three women since it was founded in 1974. One of the festival’s attempt to correct the situation was miserably sexist; in 2007, the festival had come under heavy fire for having named an event “the brothel”, “La maison close.” In 2016, a collective of women authors called for a boycott because that year there were no women at all in the list of thirty author candidates for the Grand Prize.

In accounting for current production by women, Falardeau takes into account the rise of webcomics. She duly notes issues that come with self-publication on the web, especially that of needing to monetize one’s work, and the fact that, especially for younger artists, webcomics have served as a springboard to get attention from traditional publishers. Here she brings to attention a few artists in each of the four geographical groupings she highlighted. Her book is a who’s who in this new medium, from Meredith Gran and her comedic Octopus Pie to the tidal wave of blogs in France (many of them by women in the early years of this century), to the more recent political use of Facebook posts by Nadia Khiari in which she drew, Willis from Tunis, a cat who commented about the Arab Spring.

Even if Falardeau’s book is mainly designed as a canon-making work, she has found it important to show how empowerment of women cartoonists has been possible over time. In a chapter titled “Three Examples of Positive Action,” she opens with a short history of the New Yorker magazine. Its liberal founders, Harold Ross and Jane Grant published a great number of women illustrators. Her brief overview of the less-than-great record of the magazine in the ‘50s and ‘60s in its openness to women is meant to show that there needs to be an awareness about patriarchy’s hold on the workplace, and on certain types of work at the decision-making level, if change is to be attained. She makes this even more clear with her next example. The National Film Board of Canada developed structures in the early 1980s that encouraged the development of a women’s cinema. However, it was only in 2016 that the organization gave itself the goal of getting to 50% of its productions directed by women. Political cartooning still is, by and large, a line of work in which the number of men is disproportionate.  The organization Cartooning for Peace, founded in 2006, has chosen to value the membership of women cartoonists in many of its activities.

A History of Women Cartoonists translates and updates Falardeau’s 2014 Femmes et humour published by the Presses de l’université Laval. In each of the contextual pieces that precede the portrayals, Falardeau added a new paragraph or two. Among the additions in the section discussing the United States are Lisa Hanawalt and Eleanor Davis. In the section about Canada, she features Emily Carroll’s innovative work with webcomics. The call to boycott the Angouleme festival in 2016 is one of the new additions in the contextual text about France. In the case of artists from the Arab world, she added references to a few political cartoonists, among them Samira Saeed and Menekse Cam. However, the editorial work on the book by Mosaic Press is subpar. There are words in which a letter is missing. Some names have not been checked. For instance, when referring to French academic Judith Stora-Sandor, her name is properly spelled on page 22, but misspelled twice on page 246 as Stora-Standor and Stora-Stantor.

Falardeau concludes her book by taking on a certain number of issues. For instance, in cartooning, how can a character be designed to represent humans in general? She notes that the use of characters identifiable as women will lead to an interpretation of the drawing as referring to women specifically. Can the universality of a situation only be represented by the inclusion of male characters? Then there is the issue of caricature --in exaggerating characteristics, one runs the risk of encouraging stereotypes. The situation is not much better in the work of academics who analyze the work of women, where the cliché is noting the ‘sensitivity’ of the work of a woman author. Falardeau closes this short chapter by noting “the obvious link […] between humor and power, and consequently, the difficulty for women […] to achieve recognition for themselves in the world of humour” (p. 247). Destroying stereotypes takes time. “This is the task that feminist women cartoonists have given to themselves. But which stereotypes? Those held by men? The way that they see women? Or the opposite? The way women see themselves?” (p. 258) The last words in her conclusion come as an answer: “Women cartoonists need to create their own mythology.” (p. 269)

A version of this review will appear in print in IJOCA 23:2.