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The third annual Spirou Festival will take place a month from now, 2.–4. September, as seen in the announcement above, posted on Facebook and in the Journal.
As before, the Spirou Festival is simply the Dupuis section of the Brussels Comic Strip Festival, and doesn’t focus specifically on Spirou & Fantasio. Dupuis hasn’t provided the detailed program yet (and in fact, even the poster is almost exactly the same as for the 2014 festival), but the Brussels Comic Strip Festival site provides this description:
On the programme of this great gathering of fans of SPIROU and the Dupuis comic strips is everything that has made previous years such a success (but with more floor space), with signings, interviews and entertainment from the platform, live drawing sessions with portraits by Bercovici and workshops for children and toddlers. There will also be exclusive photo sessions based on your favourite series, a show by the Mastodonte workshop, masterclasses, a sneak preview presented by Arthur de Pins himself of scenes from the animated film Zombillénium and, last but not least, signings by your favourite authors!
For three days, some forty authors, including Nob, Yoann, Velhman, Zidrou, Batem, Munuera, Dodier, Feroumont, Janry, Kox, Mathieu Reynès and many others [Spirou creators highlighted —SR], will be sitting behind their tables with only one goal, to offer you drawings and exchange impressions! Delaf and Dubuc, authors of the world-famous Nombrils, will be the guests of honour as this year’s festival is dedicated to Quebec! In addition to the entertainment planned by SPIROU, you will be able to find these two Canadians in their own special pavilion at the Comic Strip Festival.
But that’s certainly not all. This year, the SPIROU Festival will also feature a new area dedicated to GROOM, the new magazine that decodes the news and society in cartoon strip format. A pleasant surprise: edition number 2 of GROOM, which is dedicated to the social networking phenomenon, will be on sale at the Festival. And another pleasant surprise: it will be accompanied by some amazing entertainment! On the programme: The Battle of the News, in which two newspaper cartoonists will face off in an attempt to make you laugh. The Information Challenge, in which an author will have ten minutes by the clock to explain in drawings a supposedly complicated news item. And the Spirouticons, a great game in which you will be asked to guess the names of some great SPIROU series from a set of emoticons. There will be lots of comic books to be won! And as GROOM has decided to decode the social networks, the members of the editorial board will stroll around the Festival with tablets on which you can take part in a grand quiz on this topic, or dress yourself up in a thousand ways using some inspired Snapchat apps. And as a little extra gift: Christian Darasse and Sti will draw small lifelike caricatures of you free of charge to use on your Facebook or Twitter profile! In short: this could be something to really Like!
And because the Spirou magazine wants to pamper its subscribers, those who report to the SPIROU Festival welcome desk (and all visitors who take out a subscription at that time) will receive a surprise package. This will also be the time to meet the editors! You won’t be able to miss them; they’ll all be wearing red t-shirts!
If you plan to attend, it might be time to start planning ahead!
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I’m going! I hope this year there won’t be a mind-playing evil prank like last year.
Spiroureporter, are you going to Spirou Fest?
No, I’m afraid I can’t make it this year either. Hope you have a good time!
Ah, that’s a shame.
There are some other instances of poorly received pranks on the Franco-Belgian market… I haven’t understood the whole story, but here goes…
On this year’s Angouleme Festival, the organizers – after the mismanagement of the jury selection for the Grand Prix – decided to have a stand-up comedian deliver some phony awards. Due to the award named after the mascot cat, this was an award named for the “Best Cat”, and many foreigners failed to get the joke… One cartoonist even went up to happily receive his award, and ended up rather disgruntled after he understood it was all a joke…
This was apparently the last straw, and an organization of almost every major Franco-Belgian publishing house and bookstore officially stated that they’d boycott next year’s festival, unless the organizers start wisening up, and stop goofing off…