The Association of Comics Critics and Journalists is pleased to award its 2024 ACBD Youth Prize for Criticism to: Le voyage d’ours-lune, by Ho, with a translation by Aurélien Babet, published by Editions Rue de Sèvres in the Golden Fox collection.
It follows the album Mademoiselle Sophie or the fable of the lion and the hippopotamus by Vincent Zabus and Hippolyte, published by Dargaud editions, awarded in 2023.
For the first time, ACBD members have chosen a manga as the ACBD Youth Critics’ Prize. In Moon Bear’s Journey, Ho depicts the meeting of a crow and a bear. She constructs her story as a philosophical tale for young readers. Their conversations are motivated by reasoning about the world around them and their relationships with human beings. Nature, gentle and beautiful, plays a central role in this first volume of the series. It is therefore an initiatory journey that the ACBD has chosen to reward today with Le voyage d’Ours-lune.
The other four titles in competition were:
- Perched cats, by Antoine Guilloppé (Nathan BD editions)
- The Apprentice Scarer volume 1, by Pierre Oertel and Benjamin Bachelier based on the work of Joseph
- Delaney (Bayard editions / Teen bands)
- The silent kingdoms, by Séverine Gauthier and Jérémie Almanza (Oxymore editions)
Pépin and Olivia – The big party of nothing at all, by Camille Jourdy (Dupuis editions).
The ACBD 2024 Youth Prize will be announced during the bdBOUM 2024 Prize ceremony in Blois on November 23, 2024 and will be awarded on Saturday, November 30, 2024 at 2 p.m. at the Montreuil Youth Book and Press Fair.
All ACBD members elected the winning album from among these five children’s titles in order to “support and highlight, in a spirit of discovery, a comic book for children, published in French, with strong narrative and graphic demands, marking by its power, its originality, the novelty of its subject or the means that the author deploys there.
Laurent GIANATI & Damien CANTEAU, coordinators of the ACBD Youth Prize for Critics 2024 & the ACBD office: President: Laurent Gianati | Vice-presidents: Marine Lannot, Loraine Adam | Secretary General: Benoît Cassel | Deputy Secretary: Yaneck Chareyre | Treasurer: Daniel Muraz | Deputy treasurer: Frédéric Michel
