The Angoulême festival has a new name and a date on the calendar again. At a press conference on Tuesday, the Association for the Development of Comics in Angoulême and the Morgane Group revealed Angoulême Bande Dessinée as the successor to the defunct Angoulême International Comics Festival, Comics Beat reports.
The show returns to its traditional late-January slot, running Jan. 28-31, 2027. Organizers kept the branding simple on purpose: Angoulême for the place, bande dessinée for the French word for comics. It is the first public outing for the new organization since a legal fight with the previous festival association wrapped last month.
Six exhibitions exclusive to the festival weekend were named up front, including the belated retrospective for 2025 Grand Prix winner Anouk Ricard. Others will explore writer Xavier Dorison’s collaborations, a 20-year look at Florence Dupré la Tour, animator Ugo Bienvenu, France-based South Korean artist Yoon-Sun Park, and the international feminist anthology Hairspray. The town’s comics museum will keep its current LGBT Comics and Thorgal / Grzegorz Rosiński shows running into spring 2027 alongside the weekend program.
Prizes are coming back too, with bronze trophies and — newly — prize money attached. Reflecting manga’s roughly 50% share of the French comics market, the festival is opening a dedicated Tokyo office for international cooperation. Organizers also said AI is banned from the event.
Tickets are already on sale and the official site is live, with another press conference planned for early December as programming fills in.
European festival news has been busy on both sides of the Alps, including Italy’s push toward a permanent comics museum in Lucca’s former tobacco factory. For Angoulême, the long gap after the old festival’s collapse finally has a replacement with dates, prizes and a winter coat recommendation. December’s follow-up press conference should fill in guests, the full prize jury and how the manga office in Tokyo will actually feed the January weekend.
