The Angoulême International Comics Festival is coming back and it will take place from Thursday March 17 to Sunday March 20. In disaster, the organizers had announced at the end of December that the edition supposed to be held in January should be postponed for several weeks, in order to let the omicron wave pass.
The exhibitions were about to go to assembly, the boards were ready, the catalogs too, but the new sanitary measures imposed caution. A financial disaster for the organizers, who feared that this new postponement would threaten the very future of a festival which was emerging from a dark year, the January 2021 edition having already had to be postponed to a summer meeting which could never stand.
“The choice of these (new) dates was made in consultation with the public and private partners of the Festival and taking into account various factors”, explains a press release, in which management assumes that the peak of contamination by the omicron variant will be at the end of January. After decreasing cases, “a situation which will logically reopen latitudes of action in the field of events, say the organizers. Then come other considerations such as the calendar of cultural events (in order to minimize the reciprocal damage that could occur as much as possible), the need to promote works in a time frame related to their presence in bookstores, election periods, etc.
The two highlights of this 2022 edition, which promises to be very rich, should be the major retrospective Chris Ware, winner of the grand prize of the city of Angoulême last year, and that devoted to the work of the Japanese Shigeru Mizuki.