of the three names chosen this year, to preside over the 47th edition of the festival of Angoulême, the two were already in the fray, the last year for the prestigious award: the French Emmanuel Guibert, sacred in 2017 by the Price Goscinny, allocated to the writers, and the American Chris Ware. Cartoonist japanese Rumiko Takahashi completes the trio, which after Florence Cestac, would be the second woman consecrated to preside over the event (Claire Bretécher being finish ex aequo, in 1983, with Jean-Claude Forest).

Rumiko Takahashi, the queen of manga for boys

Rumiko Takahashi is undoubtedly one of the major authors of the manga, with 200 million copies sold around the world. The designer has been able to impose itself in the world of shônen manga, addressed to young boys. Born in 1957, is considered to be the equal of the great Toriyama ( Dragon Ball ) and Otomo ( Akira ) and belongs to that generation of mangakas that have popularized the genre across the world.

His first series composed of 34 volumes, Urusei Yatsura (Lamu) , introduced by the royal way of the cartoon in France in the 1980s, has become a classic of the genre. His series Ranma 1 /2 completes to establish its popularity multiplying gags, scenes of combat air, and colorful characters taken in situations that are comical and wild, caused by the faculty of the protagonist, the victim of a spell, to transform into a girl in contact with cold water. His characters are picturesque, filled with faults and deeply human have marked more than one generation of readers admiring that the nicknames princess of the manga.

In Ranma1/2, Rumiko Takahashi has nice fight scenes. RANMA 1/2 [SPECIAL] © 2016 Rumiko TAKAHASHI/SHOGAKUKAN

Chris Ware, the painter of feelings in everyday life

in Addition to-Atlantic, Chris Ware, 51 years, is unanimously considered a genius of the comic strip. The melancholy Jimmy Corrigan , award for best album at the 2003 Angoulême until his delusional Acme Novelty Library , and his works are atypical and formats, changing, narrating the adventures of the various characters. Inspired by the writers of the Nineteenth century (Flaubert, Tolstoy), Ware was published very early on in RAW , an avant-garde journal of Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly.

In 2014, the date of its publication in France, the U.s., surprised once more his readership by publishing Building Stories. More than one album, it is a box with multiple treasures. Books, booklets, magazines or newspapers, not less than fourteen heterogeneous elements make up this ufo. Always between narratives running in parallel, or flash-back, the stories evoke the people of a building in Chicago, with the common thread of a florist with a disability, the protagonist, who alternates between moments of bliss and deep loneliness. Labyrinthine, this composite work of Chris Ware, proposes a questioning on the passing of time. The book has received the Special Jury Prize at the Angoulême festival in 2015.

Emmanuel Guibert, the privacy sublimated

The author of The war Alan has been sacred to the whole of his work by the jury of the prix René Goscinny in 2017, dedicated to the feathers of the comic book: “Some men are chameleons, others borrow identities, others, finally, are artists. Emmanuel Guibert, born in 1964, is all of this at once, by the way love that it fits in the privacy of people who are close to the sublime by her gesture”, said then the jury of the prix René Goscinny in a press release.

with this commercial and critical success, he continued in this vein inspired lives with The Photographer , after talks with Didier Lefèvre, who receives a Prize Essential to the Festival in 2007. A great technician, recognized by his peers as a designer of innovative and pioneering, Guibert is also a writer prolific.

Author is long-winded, strong, happy collaborations, including with Joann Sfar and David B, Emmanuel Guibert has enriched the collection Aire Libre of Dupuis’s beautiful Artbook Italia , the fruit of his many wanderings in the country, to whom he pays tribute with 250 drawings from his memories. A very nice experimentation and graphic narrative, in which each copy is numbered and signed by the author.