The Angoulême International Comics Festival announced on Wednesday the cancellation of an exhibition devoted to the cartoonist Bastien Vivès after the “threats” received by this author of controversial works mixing pornography and minors. “Physical threats were made vis-à-vis Bastien Vives. It is therefore not possible for the event to consider that its programming could pose such risks to an author and, potentially, in a few weeks, to its festival-goers”, wrote the direction of the Festival in a press release. The world of comics had been shaken for a few days by a controversy surrounding the honors reserved for the Angoulême Festival at the end of January 2023 for star designer Bastien Vivès, accused of promoting incest and pedocrime. peers and personalities committed to the defense of minors, this honor reserved for the greatest does not pass. In question: several titles that depict minors facing sex, with sometimes incestuous patterns and controversial statements on this subject. In A Sister in 2017, a realistic fiction adapted for the screen (in Falcon Lake by Charlotte Le Bon , currently in theatres), a 13-year-old boy has sex with a 16-year-old girl while on vacation by the sea. two being published by BD Cul, a publishing house specializing in eroticism) and Petit Paul in 2018 show sexual relations between minors and adults. Faced with accusations of child pornography, Cultura and Gibert Joseph had stopped selling Petit Paul. or legitimize the abuse of a minor in any way whatsoever.” At 38, Bastien Vivès has practiced the sophisticated graphic novel (Polina, 2011), the “French manga” (Lastman, 2013-2019) or even the cover of the character of Corto Maltese (Black Ocean, 2021). Under pseudonym This star of the 9th art must be honored with the exhibition “In the eyes of Bastien Vivès”, planned in Angoulême during the comic strip festival, end January. An online petition, denouncing “the trivialization and glorification of incest and paedocriminality” and demanding the deprogramming of the exhibition, had collected 102,000 signatures at the time of writing this article. It was launched by Arnaud Gallais, founder of the BeBrave France movement which campaigns against incest and sexual violence against children. the right to make his filthy comics (I’m not for banning it). We can just ask that the main comic strip festival avoid putting it forward.” In addition to certain comic strips, Bastien Vivès’ detractors have noted old positions. “Incest, me, it excites me to death”, he launched in an interview with the magazine Madmoizelle in 2017. For his defenders, it is obvious that he was joking. He was probably not laughing on the other hand when he attacked, hidden behind a pseudonym on Facebook, another comic book author, Emma, revealed in 2017 with the publication of a series of feminist drawings which had popularized the concept of mental load. “Message level 2 years of mental age”, “does not know how to draw”, and calls for violence on the children of the designer… On Monday, Emma republished these five-year-old messages and qualified Bastien Vivès as the author of several “ Child pornography comics.” “Many threats” Today, this virulence turned against the author, who explained that he “received a lot of threats on the networks” and filed a handrail. “I have plenty of room to file a complaint. I’m encouraged to do so, but I’m not very procedural,” he told Le Parisien on Monday, repeating: “No, I’m not a pedophile and no, it’s not my fantasy. If you want to read my works honestly, you can easily realize that”. Culture Minister Rima Abdul Malak said on Tuesday that “certain past remarks” by Mr. Vivès “are not acceptable”, saying “to understand the ‘excitement’, in an interview with Le Parisien. But “it’s not the exhibition itself that poses a problem”, she underlined, adding that “we cannot reduce this author to two comic strips and a few sentences said in an interview”. authors have taken a stand in the debate, some supporting Mr. Vivès like Jean-Marc Rochette, believing on Facebook that the latter was nailed “in the pillory without any other form of trial”.
