At last ! Finally, brave artists create a comic book monitoring committee. These are serious people, serious and responsible people. As they write in Mediapart :
” [La] put in the spotlight [de Bastien Vivès] at the Angoulême Festival is symptomatic of a global context where struggles against sexism and sexual violence are still struggling to be heard and recognized. This is why we are asking today that the FIBD draw up and establish a charter of commitment, so that the future selections and programming of the festival are carried out with respect for the rights of minoritized people as well as with the equality of their representations. »
No festival with people whose drawings do not “does not respect the rights of minorities” ! Cheer ! We want moral and responsible art! Clean art, damn it! An art that does not overflow and that does not stain, an art that satisfies the legitimate demands of everyone, children, women, trans, LGBT, migrants, Blacks, Muslims, Arabs, Bretons, hunchbacks, handicapped, obese, and they are all satisfactorily represented. No more questionable fantasies, uncomfortable junk, morals, morals, morals. And so that morality is respected, let these committees, these denunciations, these inspections, these censorships, these denouncements flourish. We need political commissars. As the late Monsignor Debreyne rightly wrote in 1845, about the shows:
“Those who compose or perform truly obscene plays, without a doubt sin mortally. »
And he quoted Charles Dupin, peer of France:
“Look at the theaters holding a school of corruption and villainy… trampling on the holiest virtues with the patent intention of making people love, cherish, admire duels, suicide, assassination and parricide, poisoning, rape, adultery, incest, advocating these crimes. »
As the great preacher Massillon wrote before him, in his “Discourse on the Danger of Bad Readings”:
“Here are the disastrous effects of lascivious books; not only do they deprave and corrupt us, but they pervert the soul. »
Why the Bastien Vivès exhibition at the Angoulême Festival tenses the world of comics
These holy men are finally heard, and they could have signed certain formulas from the Mediapart forum, such as this one:
“The author wishes to provoke the excitement of his reader through the expression of his own fantasies. »
And that, we will say what we want, is bad.
All this crap, moreover, is another blow from the far right, as the signatories aptly point out:
“We are calling on magazines, newspapers, publishers, institutions which have read Bastien Vivès’ comics and which have not raised the problem. Shouldn’t they be able to see and grasp the violence that resides in these comics? Have they integrated far-right reactionary thinking so well that they no longer even hesitate to attack feminists who fight for children’s rights? »
To ask the question, is to answer it. To speak of Vivès is to be racist, transphobic and Islamophobic. Attack feminists who fight for children’s rights! No, but what an ignoble individual can quietly soil such sacred things! All this is decidedly nauseating, and reminds us of the darkest hours of our history. The late Vichinsky knew how to speak of this kind of paid reactionaries, lackeys of American imperialism, petty bourgeois subservient to the cosmopolitan plutocracy. Besides, I’ve always wondered if those who defend the very overvalued freedom of creation and expression hadn’t deeply integrated the Nazi ideology.
Bastien Vivès deprogrammed from Angoulême: “In France, drawing a child in a pornographic scene is prohibited”
However, the healthy initiative of these inspectors of artistic morality still seems embryonic to me. It focuses somewhat on the level of sexuality (admittedly haunting, but good…) and on recent productions. It would be good, first of all, to clear up the past. There are some disgusting things about Gotlib, including a frankly sleazy jovial Hamster with her wolf cubs and a Snow White who masturbates and sucks the seven dwarfs. Vuillemin is filthy at times. Corben, Liberatore, Manara give a degrading image of women. There is in “Asterix” a black pirate whose language is caricatured. The list is endless. All together to clean the comics of the past from anything that could shock candid souls!
Above all, we are surprised to see that this remarkable forum ignores violence. How many murders, massacres, tortures, executions in comics! Would it be less serious to murder than to have sex with a child? Nope ! Let us call for an end to violence in comics, so as not to spread complacent scenes in fragile minds that could destabilize them.
There, we may finally have clean comics. I really liked “Fripounet et Marisette”, which seems to me a model of moral, clean, egalitarian and inclusive comics. He is a role model (despite the lack of racialized and LGBT people). It is up to us to do as well, or even better.
There remains literature, cinema, theater, painting, active centers of corruption. There is work, but we will get there!
