Catherine Meurisse, Anouk Ricard and Alison Bechdel are the three finalists for this year’s Grand Prix de la ville d’Angoulême, the lifetime achievement award for cartoonists presented annually at the Festival de la Bande Desinée d’Angoulême (FIBD) which kicks off this Wednesday.
It’s the first time all three finalists have been women, and would mean a woman will win for two years in a row for the first time: 2024’s winner was Posy Simmonds.
As well as being one of the highest honors a cartoonist can achieve, the winner also serves as honorary marshal of the next year’s event.
The three finalists represent a wide swath of cartooning.
Catherine Meurisse has been a finalist several times before and is best known for her work for the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo. She is also a member of France’s Academy of Fine Arts, one of the few cartoonists to achieve this honor.
Anouk Ricard is best known in the US for her Anna and Froga series, published in N. America by D&Q. Her work frequently appears in Spirou and she was named one of the 25 Funniest Women in France by GQ France.
Alison Bechdel, who was previously nominated in 2023, is a renowned American cartoonist, best known for Fun Home, her groundbreaking and unforgettable memoir which was adapted into a Tony Award winning musical. She has a new book coming out this year: Spent, a humorous roman a clef about a cartoonist named Alison Bechdel, running a pygmy goat sanctuary in Vermont and dealing with fame.
This is the fourth year in a row that Meurisse has been nominated, so it’s safe to say she’s the favorite.
While all three cartoonists are well qualified for this honor on the merits of their work, it’s also quite a change from only a few years ago, when one of the directors of the festival declared that the 2016 long list of nominees was all male because women just hadn’t made their mark yet. This led to call for a boycott and many, many changes at the event which now seems to have a more egalitarian approach to honors.
The winner of this year’s Grand Prix will be announced Wednesday.
