The winner will be known on the evening of Wednesday January 29, during the official opening of the festival.
The French Catherine Meurisse and Anouk Ricard as well as the American Alison Bechdel have been named finalists for the Grand Prix of the 52nd Angoulême International Comics Festival, which takes place from January 29 to February 2, the organizers announced. This distinction, the most prestigious in the world of comics, rewards an original work in the graphic novel and was awarded in 2024 to the British Posy Simmonds (Tamara Drewe, Gemma Bowery...).
Among the names selected, Catherine Meurisse has been approached for the past five years to chair the event. The one who moves us with her autobiographical stories such as Lightness or The Great Outdoors, and who sharpens our mind with humor, was born in 1980 in Niort. Catherine Meurisse studied at the École Estienne then at the École Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. With her diploma in hand, she began her career in the press and joined the very private club of cartoonists from the team of Charlie Hebdo. The author of the remark My men of letters album retracing a humorous, almost irreverent panorama of French literature, has a sense of formula, accustomed to sketching human comedy in a drawing. This distant cousin of Bretécher seduces many readers with her personal vision of the history of French literature.
Also read La Case BD: The Great Outdoors or nature magnified by the imagination of painters
With The Ponts des Arts in 2012, she studied, always with the same sense of humor, the links between painting and writing. Narrowly escaping the attack on Charlie Hebdo on January 7, 2015, she published Lightness, a poignant album not devoid of humor, exploring the long road to reconstruction which passes through beauty. With The Great Outdoors, published in 2018, the designer evokes her bucolic childhood, made up of a thousand scents and learned discoveries. In 2020, Catherine Meurisse was elected by the Academy of Fine Arts to the chair of Arnaud d’Hauterives (1933-2018) in the painting section.
Her compatriot Anouk Ricard, 54, started in the children’s press before continuing her career in comics by publishing Anna and Frogaa wonderful chronicle of a group of bickering friends, then Patti and the ants, the amusing adventure of a little girl shrunk in the land of insects. The author stands out for her falsely naive style and her realistic and incisive dialogues which contrast with the often polite writing of albums for young people. But it’s with the hilarious Hello Bouzon, published by Gallimard in 2011, which she produced her most cult album. Awarded in Angoulême and by Liberation, this hilarious satire of the corporate world was almost adapted into a cartoon.
Also read
Anouk Ricard and her hilarious menagerie
In 2022, his comic Animan was included in the official selection of the Angoulême festival. It tells the adventures of a man who can change into different creatures, like in the television series animals. Except that this hero is called Francis, that he is in a relationship with a frog and that his sworn enemy, a certain Objecto, can transform into any object.
The third finalist, Alison Bechdel, 64, is a figure in the American counterculture and the LGBTQ movement. Published in 2006, his autobiographical graphic novel Fun Home caused a sensation by recounting the torments that she and her father had each gone through due to their difficulties in coming to terms with their homosexuality. Voted best book of the year by Time Magazinethe work became a musical and triumphed on Broadway, winning no less than five Tony Awards (including Best Musical). Addicted to sport, she delivered, in 2022, a fascinating autobiography based around physical exercise with The Secret of Superhuman Strengthhis third graphic novel in the official 2023 selection, for which his partner, Holly Rae Taylor, was responsible for the coloring. The designer gave her name to the Bechdel test, which measures the degree of feminism in films. This author, whose drawings regularly populate the famous American weekly The New Yorkeralso gave its name to the “Bechdel test” which makes it possible to evaluate the degree of sexism of a fiction based on three criteria: if at least two female characters appear, if they speak together and if their exchanges have nothing to do with a man.
Since 2014, this Grand Prize has been awarded following a two-round ballot in which all comic book authors published at least once in French can participate. It will be awarded this year on January 29, at the opening of the festival. Other distinctions will be awarded during the Angoulême festival, including the Fauve d’or for the best album of the year.
