How Comics Festivals Boost Their Art Form and Their Hosts

Yet another "Uni Assignment Hell" companion piece to Australian Comics Need to Be Supported By Policy and How Comics Festivals Legitimise Comics. This one is a literary review/case study of how 3 comics festivals in France and 1 in Italy help activate the economy, culture and creative production of the cities/towns which host them - again in service of how comics should be supported by policy and arts funding to facilitate its numerous positive outcomes. I am hoping that what I studied will also be true for Melbourne Alternative Comics Expo. Melbourne's City of Literature and hipster artsy centre status means that it is uniquely placed to possibly, maybe, who knows, provide a comics event on the scale of Angouleme FIBD with the activation of bookshops, art galleries, town halls, culture spaces etc (though I think Perth Comic Arts Festival will and definitely arrive at that success first); but hey, one in the west and another hopefully in the east - if we can pull it off, Australia will be the big dog of Asia-Pacific.

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As an art form, comics is a popular and relatively new artistic field. It was only recently that comics began to be considered for inclusion and support in cultural policy (starting around the 1960s and as scattered momentum across different countries) (Heikkinen, 2008; Cool Japan Strategy Promotion Council, 2015; Grant et al., 2021). Despite the uneven and inconsistent inclusion of comics as part of the discussions in arts funding on a global scale, or perhaps because of it, independent efforts have emerged to support the practitioners and public who engage in comics.

Comics festivals are a key space for the celebration of the art form, its practitioners and enthusiasts, together with the culture that arises from the products of its making. These festivals, typically annual, may be presented online or on location, and employ a variety of digital and traditional strategies in its planning or marketing. Comics festivals are not often defined by genre (historical, comedy, gothic, etcetera), although there is a bias towards science fiction and fantasy. Instead they are programmed around cultural interests or topics. This may be as broad as so-called nerd or geek-oriented popular culture, which includes related art forms like film, games, animation and cosplay (San Diego Comic Con, Comics Fiesta Kuala Lumpur, SMASH!), or dedicated to comics as itself (Angoulême International Comics Festival, Toronto Comics Arts Festival, SPX). They are then scaled according to a specific type of community: mainstream, independent or niche. In all comics festivals, a section of the venue is dedicated specifically for the sale of merchandise by practitioners, publishers and booksellers, called the Artist Alley or Market where professionals and enthusiasts can purchase art and form connections.

Given the breadth and variety, comics festivals can be huge motivators for practitioners and enthusiasts alike to congregate. Some of the largest comics festivals—Comiket in Japan, Lucca Comics in Italy and San Diego Comic Con in the United States—boast attendance of 180,000 and 319,926 in 2022 and over 135,000 in 2019 respectively (Hodgkins, 2022; Lucca Comics & Games, 2022; Dougherty, 2022). Such a concentrated influx of activity across multiple days transforms a festival as well as its surrounds into sites of collaboration, inspiration and economic activity, activating benefits not just for the art form but also the local host of the festival.

This review will describe how four festivals—Festival AngersBD, Avilés International Comic Journeys, Angoulême International Comics Festival, and Lucca Comics & Games Festival—played vital roles for the promotion of the art form towards assimilation into cultural policy and cultural life, as well as the impact of their presence on their host town or city. It begins with an overview of how festivals establish relationships with local councils and in turn, integrate comics into cultural policy and life, followed by their interactions with local economies, and lastly the ways in which festivals and local businesses become spaces of positive opportunities for practitioners and enthusiasts. The review draws from case studies by Salvador et al. (2022) for Angers and Avilés, Lessage and Gabilliet (2020) for Angoulême, and finally, Lemmi et al. (2018) and Marzo et al. (2020) for Lucca in its discussion.

As mentioned above, the advocacy for comics as an art form worth supporting by policy has been slow and inconsistent, due to a myriad of factors, many related to stigmatisation and censorship (Beaty, 2012). Festivals fill in much of the vacuum that is left behind by a lack of funding and policy, such as the provision of venues for exhibitions and community events, and avenues of financial support through prizes and interactions with commercial partners. Sometimes, festivals arise to become important agents for comics in policy due to the success of their management and their strong relationships with local councils. For France in particular, much progress in national policy can be attributed to the success of Angoulême International Comics Festival (known as FIBD) and the efforts of its organisers towards sealing comics’ place as the ‘ninth art’ nationally. (Lacassin, 1971; Screech, 2005)

Angoulême FIBD began when Claude Moliterni, a practitioner and founding member of SOCERLID (La Société civile d'études et de recherches des littératures dessinées) made contact with Francis Groux, an enthusiast and cultural policy activist based in the city of Angoulême. Originally working together to organise a week-long exhibition of comics at a local cultural centre in 1969, their collaborations were further extended by the election of a new local government receptive to comics in their cultural planning. Despite the city itself having no historical, residential or business connection to comics at the time, for two years Angoulême hosted comics exhibitions and meetups at the municipal museum, attracting the participation of the local youth, visitors and interregional practitioners. The high interest motivated the creation of FIBD’s precursor, the Salon, in 1974, and activated not just the organisers’ contacts within the comic ecosystem in Paris and other parts of France, but the local relationships made in Angoulême as well as its infrastructure. The Salon, which programmed educational and interactive events, grew and eventually matured over the decades into the FIBD.

The first recognition of comics as part of French cultural policy came in the late 70s from the opening of a permanent gallery for original comics artwork in the museum at Angoulême, which had obtained funding from the French Ministry of Culture for the development of the museum’s new contemporary collection. In the 1980s, a new socialist national government broadened the scope of culture in their cultural policy to include new art forms such as street art and comics. This resulted in the founding of the National Centre for Comics Strips and Images (now the International City of Comics Strips and Images) in Angoulême, thanks in no small part to the Salon’s presence and reputation and the city’s role in its development.

Similar developments and interactions with local governments have enabled the naturalisation of comics festivals at Angers, Avilés and Lucca into their host cities’ cultural programming. Unlike Angoulême, the smaller French city of Angers already had strong business and residential connections to comics, and Festival AngersBD was developed in 1999 to promote their local comics practitioners and the city they lived in. It receives annual financial support from the municipality, the regional government and local sponsors. Next door in Spain, Avilés International Comics Journeys begun as an initiative by enthusiasts that was pitched and approved by the Avilés city council, and is now organised by a non-profit organisation that is supported by city council funding. In 2018, a permanent exhibition for comics was established. On the other hand, Lucca Comics & Games Festival was not a brainchild of the Tuscan city. Instead, it was brought over by invitation of the chief provincial officer of tourism and the city mayor for its second edition in 1966, and has remained since (Marzo, 2018), where the city continues to enjoy its status as host of the largest comics event in Europe and the second largest in the world.

While the support of governments on all levels has been instrumental to the development and growth of comics festivals and indirectly, the art form, the festivals, too, perform a reciprocal relationship to their host cities. Comics festivals are heavily localised; when they are in progress, they synergise with the existing economy, employing the infrastructure and surrounding landscape as key players in the execution of a well-rounded experience for guests.

The tourism brought on by international visitors and attendees outside of the host cities drives economic activity, which may result in the creation of paid and volunteer jobs in relevant sectors alongside additional income and local tax revenues, as well as benefits to the local tangible and intangible heritage and traditional crafts (Prayag et al., 2013). The effects are felt not just within those cities, but also in the outskirts and the nearby areas.

In Angers, each year Festival AngersBD partners with a local venue to host exhibitions. Over the years this has included the castle, the multimedia library or the local libraries. Additional support is provided by hotels, media, companies, the town council, and local wine growers.

Angers is a particularly unique and creative example of how city, local business and festival can collaborate. Since its inception, Festival AngersBD is linked to the city’s traditional specialty—wine—and the presence of wine growers in the event itself is guaranteed though small. Interestingly, this meeting of two disparate industries manifests annually in the limited edition production of custom wine labels designed by comics practitioners on commission, which are sold alongside their corresponding wine bottles. Together, multiple aspects of Angers’ cultural pride—comics, the festival and its wine culture—are marketed to attendees and non-attendees (i.e wine enthusiasts from outside the city) in one conveniently-packaged bottle.

The Avilés International Comics Journeys, unlike Angers, is less commercially-oriented and does not explicitly have a strategy to link itself to a local cultural or economic specialty. Still, it does make use of various businesses to facilitate its ‘journeys’: experiences between the public and comics practitioners that take place across the city. Businesses include bars, parks, the cultural centre, the shopping centre, the palace, and other public venues as landmarks for these journeys. Comic shops and the local media are also brought in for the marketing of the festival.

In its first decade, Angoulême FIBD’s precursor, the Salon, was embraced as a long-term strategy by the city for economic redevelopment and rebranding through culture in the aftermath of deindustrialisation during the late 1970s. Through the FIBD, Angoulême rebranded itself into “the city that lives in its images”, and the establishment of the International City of Cartoons and Images within its borders enforces that identity.

Meanwhile, Lucca Comics & Games Festival can present inconveniences to the usually quiet, medium-sized heritage town of 82,000. The sudden temporary appearance of over 300,000 tourists across four days for the contemporary, high-focus, youth-oriented event is somewhat incongruous to the city’s established identity of itself as a deeply traditional heritage city, renowned for its rich history, heritage architecture and natural beauty. The large attendance also introduces logistical issues such as traffic problems, price increases, and waste generation. Despite the aberrance, residents appreciate the festival for contributing vibrancy, dynamicism and young blood into the historical city’s social and cultural calendar, and the economic boost provided to the businesses inside and outside the city. Additionally, due to a high demand for space during the festival, local businesses sublet commercial premises to remotely-based retailers for the establishment of pop-up shops. Local businesses also participate in the festival’s scope and theme by temporarily customising decoration, promotion and retail offerings to match.

As these festivals provoke changes in the economy during its course, the cities too transform into spaces that foster planned and organic opportunities for practitioners to meet each other, fans of their work, and potential business and career connections. Such collaborative spaces, formed by the superimposition of city and festival, facilitate unexpected interactions and are important for the stimulation of creativity, cross fertilisation and knowledge exchange (Gibson & Bathelt, 2014; Marzo et al., 2020).

The programming of Avilés International Comics Journeys is solely structured around setting up face-to-face interactions between comics practitioners and their readership at local venues, thereby creating the spaces of opportunity which they dub as ‘journeys’. On a larger scale, Lucca Comics & Games enables practitioners—through its broader offerings of the artist alley, panels, workshops, technological demonstrations and artistic exhibitions—the opportunities for meetings between nodes in the comics ecosystem; the improvement of knowledge, understanding and skills; and changes in their own practice due to new collaborations and projects initiated post-festival.

Since the Salon days, Angoulême FIBD has always leaned towards the academic in their programming: lectures, scholarly discussions of the art form, its works and its history, and exhibitions of national and international comics hosted by the museum as well as the development of an original comics art collection. The stand-out feature of Angoulême FIBD however is their outreach and promotion of comics practitioners outside of France. Over the decades, Angoulême FIBD was host to guests from other parts of Europe, the United States, Great Britain and Japan, providing overseas practitioners with opportunities to meet their French counterparts and facilitate cross-cultural exchanges. Furthermore, Angoulême’s Grand Prix—an industry award which honours the best works in comics—is open to international entries. The winner of the Grand Prix becomes the president of next year’s festival, tasked with guiding the programming, fostering new talent for inclusion and designing the festival poster—a role which more than a few non-French winners have been honoured with in the past.

Overall, there appears to be strong links between the successful management of a festival, the support of a host government, and the integration of a previously unsupported art form into the cultural and economic life of the host city. The four comics festivals are successful examples of what is possible when governments are open to including comics into their cultural calendar, at a time when comics was still very new. Especially for non-metropolitan, small-to-middle sized cities like Angoulême, Angers, Avilés and Lucca, the inclusion of comics would appear niche in comparison to the more established, supported arts like painting, music or the performing arts. Yet, their support of comics festivals has paid off with economic or cultural benefits, as well as vitality provided by interregional and international guests (practitioner or visitor) who would not have visited otherwise. In the case of Angoulême, the city’s participation in the comics festival led to the increased visibility of the art form and the reinvention of the city, earning national and international recognition. These case studies may form the strategic blueprint for areas where comics is an underdeveloped field.

In conclusion, comics festivals exhibit bilateral benefits for their art form and their host cities. Comics festivals bring in vitality to their community by facilitating spaces of collaboration and opportunities for practitioners, and provide cultural legitimisation and affirmation through its programming. At the same time, they transform their host cities via tourism, economic activity and image branding. More importantly, the interest, risk-taking and participation of local governments in the development of comics festivals can produce far-reaching impacts not just for the cities which they govern, but also in the legitimisation of a new art form on the local and national level.

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