Today is the first day of Grand Off, the festival launched to replace this year’s Angoulême. After threats of boycotts, a pulling of funding, and general distrust of the organizers, the 2026 edition of the Angoulême Comics Festival was cancelled in early December 2025. In its place is a different festival, Grand Off, and a proposed launch of a comic festival in 2027. But with all of that, more drama with a lawsuit.

The Angoulême International Comics Festival (FIBD), along 9e Art+ festival manager Franck Bondoux have announced they are suing the Development of Comics in Angoulême (ADBDA). The ADBDA was tasked with replacing Angoulême in 2027. FIBD and Bondoux accuse ADBDA of “unfair competition and parasitic behavior.”

In January 2026, ADBDA sent out a request to find an organizer for a new festival. It would push to the side FIBD and 9e Art+ and move on from recent scandal. Bondoux in statements is saying this new festival is building off of the work he has done building up the reputation of Angoulême.

The lawsuit requests that the proposed convention be cancelled and “prohibit any act that would aim to organize a comic book festival in Angoulême in the first quarter of each year.”

FIBD wrote on Facebook:

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 lega