View down our tent when the exhibition hadn't opened yet. Once it opened it was busy all the time. The Saturday was insanely busy, even the streets of the town were totally rammed with comics people, it was very difficult to walk anywhere.
L'Association were on strike and so had all these leaflets out in their booth instead of selling anything.
People when the tent was open. Our tent was bigger than any of the UK conventions, and was only one of six or seven tents...
Picture from the AX Manga exhibition in the big publishers tent. Shame there were no originals in it, only blown up pictures.
The Comics Museum at the bottom of the hill. They had loads of original art and an exhibition of Parody Comics, with lots of Wally Wood, Harvey Kurtzman and Gotlib art. And also some porn smurf parodies in a fenced off room. Tiny children were running in and out of the room and laughing at the blue cocks while their teachers tried to stop them.
I had seen this manga artist in The Comics Journal so I thought I'd buy his book. It's in French but it doesn't matter as there are hardly any words. There's one of the great full page scenes he draws above. These are the adventures of the cat / water spirit character on the cover. There not really adventures though as they are very surreal and he just wanders about looking at all the weird stuff. They are full of decaying organic machinery, giant factories, people buying rotten meat and fish and monsters. I like them a lot. There are also some stories I wouldn't have expected, like a weird giant monster story and 'TikiRod', about tiki statues and American cars. He draws a lovely decaying urban scene, all damp and filthy with loads of black ink.
