Festival International de la Bande Dessinée

For four days in late January the hill town of Angoulême is given over to comics. Marquees go up on the Champ de Mars, the municipal buildings become exhibition halls, and the publishers' stands run the length of the lower town. The Grand Prix is the career award — its winner curates the following year's edition — and the Fauve d'Or goes to the best album of the year.

The festival was founded in 1974 by local enthusiasts who had seen what Lucca did for Italian comics, and it did the same thing for the Franco-Belgian bande dessinée at the moment that form was being taken seriously as literature. It has since become the fixture the French-language industry schedules around.

Attendance is genuinely hard to state. The organiser reports percentage change between editions without publishing the base, so the growth figures circulating are arithmetic without a starting point. We record no number rather than repeat one.

Angoulême has roughly 40,000 inhabitants and a correspondingly small hotel stock. Accommodation in the town is effectively gone by autumn; the fallback is Cognac or Poitiers and a train.

PlanningSeasonal window in late January; a town of 40,000 sells its beds months out.