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If you follow comics news, you may have heard about the controversy over the nominations to the Angoulême Festival’s highest honor, the Grand Prix lifetime achievement award: Out of 30 nominees, there were 0 women. In fact, in the whole history of the festival, only one woman, Florence Cestac, has ever won the Grand Prix. (Although Claire Bretécher did win a special 10th anniversary prize. The first ever winner was André Franquin back in 1974, and among other Spirou creators, Jijé and Trondheim have also won it.)
This exclusion led to widespread protests and calls for a boycott, with 12 of the men nominated eventually withdrawing their names from consideration, led by Riad Sattouf and Daniel Clowes. The festival grudgingly relented and added some women to the list, including Marjane Satrapi and Posy Simmonds, while commenting that “The Festival cannot remake the history of comics” and that “positive discrimination has no place in the arts.” (They subsequently announced that they were doing away with the shortlist entirely, making the final vote open to any name, male or female.)
It’s absolutely false to suggest that there aren’t women who deserve a Grand Prix nominations, but it is true that women have long been underrepresented at many other levels of the industry as well. For example, these events reminded me of something I’ve been thinking about recently: Like with the Grand Prix, in the whole history of Spirou only one woman has ever worked on the series, namely Davine (Blanche Dumolin), who filled in (uncredited) for her husband Rob-Vel back in 1941. That’s compared to about 25 men. There are currently fifteen men working on known upcoming one-shots, and no women. The imbalance speaks for itself, and the idea that there are no women with the talent and wish to take on Spirou is not credible.
If Angoulême and the comics world is going to avoid similar embarrassing debacles in the future, there need to be more opportunities for women in comics. Letting some talented female creators have a go at a Spirou one-shot would be a good start.
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To be fair, there were actually six female artists nominated; Moto Hagio, Marjane Satrapi, Julie Doucet, Lynda Barry, Posy Simmonds and Chantal Montellier.
They were quickly taken down, though. Possibly since three of the nominated artists; Satrapi, Doucet and Montellier actually are connected to the BD Egalité moment that started the boycott claims, and possible fear from the festival board that several would decline the nomination as tokenism and the whole imbroglio would start anew…
I heard a rumor that at least some of them had already contested the delayed nomination, but I have yet to find an independent attestation of the claim.
What are the gender ratio proportions for the magazine, counting secondary series, btw? For a recent issue, or the last month?
To be genuinely fair, there was NONE at the beginning. Not six, zero. Nada. They decided to include the six you’re mentioning a few days later, AFTER the huge complaining. And it barely lasted a few hours before they gave up the concept of a list as a whole.
I referred to the late addition… Six women added, instead of only two…
Of course, still clumsily handled in a lot of ways…
Thanks for the correction, though I’m not actually sure where you get the information from.
The original French announcement is vague. It refers to Marjane Satrapi and Posy Simmonds as having been under consideration two years ago but placing last in the vote. Then at the end it says that some “female names will be reintroduced” in the list of nominees, without naming them. A poor English translation and a slightly misleading or confused summary on ComicsAlliance gave the impression that Satrapi and Simmonds were the only names added to the list.
I don’t actually know the genders of all the writers and artists in the magazine, but my overall impression is that there are not many women (though more than on the Spirou series). Interestingly, the editorial/production staff seems to be predominantly female.
The names are listed here. Apparently they got up without much ado on the home page, but were removed just as quickly before the announcement that there’d be a free voting.
http://www.huffingtonpost.fr/2016/01/07/grand-prix-festival-bd-angouleme-2016-linda-barry-julie-doucet-moto-hagio-chantal-montellier-marjane-satrapi-posy-simmonds_n_8927232.html
There were rumors from Tom Spurgeon (Comicsreporter) on his Twitter account that the nominees declined afterwards, but I have yet to substantiate these rumors.
Editorial staff seems to be mostly female, overall, not only for comics, in large parts of the Western world…
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Spirouette & Fantasia contre le patriarcat https://t.co/VKG7VFJpyK https://t.co/wDmYX6JXBm