On the third Friday of January, a hilltop town of some 42,000 people in southwest France starts absorbing a few hundred thousand more. Comic-strip readers queue in the rain for author signings, editors shake hands over espresso, a cartoonist sketches on a café napkin for a stranger, and the cafés run out of chairs. For four days, Angoulême hosts the largest comics festival in the francophone world — and, by attendance, the biggest anywhere. None of it has deep local roots. Fifty years ago, this town’s business was paper, and the paper business was dying.
Paper, then silence
Angoulême had made paper since the sixteenth century; the mills on the Charente were its wealth, its smell and its identity. By the late 1960s the industry was in trouble, and the town was the kind of place people left. The rescue came from local comics fans. In 1969, a Charentais named Francis Groux organized a “comics week” in two youth-centre halls, then kept the evenings going. In November 1972 he and deputy mayor Jean Mardikian pulled off a fortnight of events with stars like Franquin and Gotlib signing at the museum. Emboldened, they traveled to Lucca, then Europe’s leading comics festival, and got its organizers’ blessing to start a French sibling. On 25–27 January 1974, the first Salon international de la bande dessinée opened in a disused wing of the Angoulême museum, under a poster by Hugo Pratt. Ten thousand people came.
A storyboard on limestone
The festival could have stayed an annual event with nothing between editions. Instead, the town started editing itself. The trigger came in 1982, when the Ministry of Culture’s “Des murs en France” operation commissioned 13 painted walls in 13 French towns; Angoulême’s was a vast, joyous collision of Batman, Tarzan and Tintin by the Icelandic artist Erró — considered the town’s first comic mural. From 1997, a municipal program turned the idea into policy. Today a signposted circuit counts 29 painted walls, sixteen of them in the streets where the January crowds flow; street numbers are written in speech bubbles, buses get painted, and bronze statues of the Marsupilami and Corto Maltese loiter near the squares. The trick is that the murals sit on ordinary working walls — schools, garages, apartment blocks — so the town reads like a page you happen to be walking through.
The permanent machine
January is the festival; the rest of the year belongs to an institution most cities would envy. Announced at the 1984 festival by Jack Lang and opened in stages since, the Cité internationale de la bande dessinée et de l’image gathers a comics museum unique in Europe — more than 25,000 original plates — a patrimonial library holding over 100,000 albums and some 150,000 issues of periodicals, and the Maison des auteurs, a residency that hosts more than fifty French and international cartoonists a year. Angoulême has been admitted to UNESCO’s Creative Cities network as a City of Literature — a label that suits a town where bus shelters have narrative arcs. The festival itself, renamed the FIBD in 1996, now draws around 200,000 visitors and hands out the Fauve d’or, one of the medium’s most watched prizes. What looks like a party in January is, the other eleven months, an economy: studios, publishers, a film festival, and a generation of professionals who moved here for the work.
The cliché
Angoulême is a sleepy provincial town that only exists one weekend a year.
Reality
The ninth-art machinery runs all year — a museum with 25,000 original plates, a residency hosting fifty-odd authors, a patrimonial library, animation and gaming studios. January is just when everyone else notices.
Twelve seconds on the ramparts
The town’s other great event belongs to a different horsepower class. Every September, the Circuit des Remparts sends historic racing cars around a 1,279-metre loop through seven corners along the old city walls. The first race ran in July 1939, won by Raymond Sommer in an Alfa Romeo; after the war and a golden run through the early 1950s — Juan Manuel Fangio won here in 1950 — the race went quiet, and was relaunched in 1978 as the vintage-car spectacle it remains today. Comic-strip fans know the loop from Le Défi des Remparts, the fiftieth Michel Vaillant album, which put Jean Graton’s racing hero on exactly these walls. Engines in September, speech bubbles in January: Angoulême makes its living from two kinds of noise.
The town stopped making paper and never stopped making images. Stand at the foot of Erró’s 1982 mural — rescued after years of neglect — and watch locals walk past without looking up: not because they’ve stopped seeing it, but because it’s theirs, the way a river is theirs. Ask them about January, though, and watch the calendar come alive. The bet that a dying paper town could live on drawings has paid out so thoroughly that it no longer looks like a bet.