Nearly 400 Artists Threaten to Boycott Angoulême Festival
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Nearly 400 artists and 12 associations are signatories to a petition threatening to boycott the 2026 Angoulême International Comics Festival. The petition accuses the festival’s contracted management company, 9eArt+, of retaliating against a female employee who reported a rape at the 2024 event and criticizes the festival’s organizers (FIBD) for not only resisting efforts to replace 9eArt+ but is considering a merger with the company. The signatories state that if FIBD does not open the management contract to an open RFP, they will call for a “massive boycott” of the next festival to be held in January 2026.
Signatories include four of the last five Grand prix winners: Anouk Ricard (2025), Posy Simmonds (2024), Julie Doucet (2022), Chris Ware (2021), as well as notable American cartoonists: Art Spiegelman (Grand prix 2011) and Alison Bechdel. You can see the full list of associations, and signatories artists on MesOpinions. Additionally, at the time of this writing, 2,322 other individuals have signed the petition.
The Angoulême International Comics Festival is the world’s largest comic festival. Approximately 250,000 visitors attend the annual event. 9eArt+ became the management company in 2007.
The petition, translated from French to English via Google Translate:
WE WILL NOT GO TO ANGOULÊME!
For several months, we, comic book professionals, authors, and other workers in the industry, have been calling on the Angoulême FIBD Association to address the harmful nature of the contract it has had with the company 9eArt+ for nearly 20 years.
A company whose management practices have been questioned in several press articles, including an investigation by L’Humanité magazine that revealed the dismissal of an employee after she reported a rape during the 51st edition.
At the last ADBDA meeting on April 3, the FIBD Association discussed the possibility of terminating its contract with the company 9eArt+, but it did not express a desire to submit the festival’s management to an impartial call for projects. On the contrary, it seems intent on realizing its plan to merge into a simplified joint-stock company (SAS) with 9eArt+, which would effectively become the festival’s unrestricted manager.
We want to firmly remind the FIBD Association that if, in its more than 50 years of existence, the Angoulême Festival has become a must-see comics event, it is thanks to the people who bring it to life and bring it to life: comics workers, authors, publishers, translators, journalists and critics… and, of course, the readers, through their loyalty to this event.
This festival now belongs to the community and, as such, has become an event of public interest for the survival of our medium. It would therefore be unacceptable to constrain it with personal interests or authoritarian choices. It would be unacceptable for the management of this event to be entrusted once again for another decade, or even longer, without consulting the stakeholders who contribute to its vitality and diversity, to a company that raises numerous questions about its prerogatives.
Faced with this blindness and stubbornness, this intolerable appropriation, and the contempt shown for our repeated appeals, WE, the comic book workers, inform the FIBD Association, as well as all its partners, both public and private, that if it does not decide to formally terminate this contract and issue a call for projects for the management of the festival, we will call for a massive boycott of the next edition of the festival in 2026.
Without us, this edition will be an empty shell!
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