Bondoux, Angoulême International Comics Festival Threaten Lawsuit Against Association for the Development of Comics in Angoulême
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If you think that headline is confusing, buckle up. Today, on the first day of the new indie Angoulême festival, Le Grand Off (organized to replace the canceled 2026 Angoulême International Comics Festival), the Angoulême International Comics Festival (aka FIBD), along with disgraced 9e Art+ festival manager Franck Bondoux, announced they will sue the Association for the Development of Comics in Angoulême (ADBDA) that was tasked by the mayor of Angoulême to replace the historic festival for 2027. FIBD and Bondoux accuse ADBDA of “unfair competition and parasitic behavior.”
Earlier this is month ADBDA issued a “request for projects” to find a new organizer for the new festival. The effort effectively sidelines the historic festival, its current owner (FIBD) and manager (9e Art+). ADBDA hopes to move past the scandalized history of 9e Art+’s management.
The yet to be filed lawsuit will ask that the request for projects be cancelled and to “prohibit any act that would aim to organize a comic book festival in Angoulême in the first quarter of each year”, according to Le Figaro News.
In a statement posted on Facebook, FIBD wrote:
The specifications drawn up by the ADBDA thus constitute a clear and deliberate appropriation of the Festival, while claiming to change its name. This crude subterfuge, a simple semantic artifice, cannot mask the reality: it is clearly an attempt to reproduce the FIBD as it has been built, structured, and developed for more than fifty years, and particularly during the most recent editions.
Even more seriously, the ADBDA claims in the same document full ownership of this future event, thus confirming an attempt at dispossession, a pure and simple spoliation of the FIBD Association, its history, its work, its volunteers, and its rights.
Deliberately marginalized and then excluded by the public authorities from this entire process, excluded from any consultation, deprived of its founding event, the FIBD Association, the target of extremely violent remarks from certain elected officials whose sole aim was to delegitimize it, is now forced, reluctantly but resolutely, to take legal action and seek the protection of the courts.
Faced with this unjustifiable appropriation, legal action is now the only possible way to uphold the law and reaffirm the fundamental principles that govern associative and cultural life. Consequently, the FIBD Association, in conjunction with 9ème art+, has initially decided to take legal action against the ADBDA.
For a sequence of events that led to this latest turn, see the bottom of this article.
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