Courtesy of The Daily Cartoonist, nearly 400 artists and 12 associations have signed a petition to boycott the 2026 Angoulême International Comics Festival. The issue is the festival’s management company, 9eArt+. The company is accused of retaliating against a female employ who reported a rape at the 2024 event that was revealed after an investigation by L’Humanité magazine. The individuals and associations are calling for the festival to open the management contract to an open RFP or face a boycott of the upcoming festival.

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 have signed the petition. There’s over 2,200 signatures on it in total.

You can see the full list of signatories as well as join the petition here.

WE WILL NOT GO TO ANGOULÊME!

For several months, we, comic book professionals, authors, and other workers in the field, 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 managerial 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 the contract it has with the company 9eArt+, but it has not expressed a desire to submit the festival’s management to an impartial call for projects. On the contrary, it seems to want to finalize its plan to merge into a simplified joint-stock company (SAS) with 9eArt+, which would, in effect, become the unlimited manager of the festival.

We want to firmly remind the FIBD Association that if, in more than 50 years of existence, the Angoulême festival has become an essential comic book event, it is thanks to the people who bring it to life and who animate it: comic book workers, authors, publishers, translators, journalists and critics… and of course the readers, through their loyalty to this event.
It now belongs to the community and, as such, it 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 again for another decade, or even longer, and without consulting the parties who make up its vitality and diversity, to a company that raises many questions about its prerogatives.

Faced with this blindness and this obstinacy, faced with this unbearable appropriation and faced with the contempt shown towards our repeated calls, WE, comic book workers, inform the FIBD Association, as well as all its partners, public and private, that if it does not decide to denounce this contract in due form and to make 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!