Pipeline and Sundry: The Year of the BD, Asterix Medals, and Alice in Brussels
2020: The Year of the BD
The Ministry of Culture in France this week declared 2020 to be the Year of the BD. They’re calling it “BD 2020,” for short, and even have a nifty logo for it:
This, of course, comes as a shock to those of us across the Atlantic who thought every year was the year of the BD in France….
There’s a competition this fall to reward up-and-coming creators with grants, and a promised series of events to celebrate BD all next year in the country. No specifics have been announced yet, but I suspect it’ll start at Angouleme in January.
Another Alice In Wonderland?
Steven Dhondt is a Belgian cartoonist I was just introduced to this past week.
His website carries a good sample of his past works. Included in it is “Why is a raven on a hotel desk?”
It’s a 12 page nearly silent story. There are a couple lines of dialogue in the story, but they’re in English.
Yes, it’s Alice in Wonderland themed, which we’ve seen a million times, but I enjoyed this one.
It features Alice running through Brussels, Belgium, following the White Rabbit down into the subway, and then a bunch of other familiar Wonderland characters in other re-imagined places. It’s weird, it’s surreal, but I love the last two pages when it all comes together.
His whole portfolio page is worth a look.
Asterix at 60
They made an Asterix commemorative 2 Euro coin in France, and it looks cool. It’s accompanied by a collection of mini-medals, which look to be about twice the size and feature the characters in colors. Here’s the Dogmatix medal:
You can even get a booklet to collect them in with a scene of the whole village. It’s pretty cool.
Largo Winch: The Text Book
A professor has written a book explaining the ways of the financial world. That, in an of itself, is not terribly exciting.
Here’s the punchline: He does it using Largo Winch for examples. That sounds pretty cool to me.
“This, of course, comes as a shock to those of us across the Atlantic who thought every year was the year of the BD in France….”
This right here is why I enjoy reading Augie’s blog 🙂
This Alice in modern day Belgium setting looks intriguing. Only it’s not realistic that Brussels would be that clean, I live there so I should know. It’s like californians complaining that Hollywood TV shows get the geography of L.A. wrong during car chases, I know…
There have been Asterix (and Tintin, and countless others…) medals many many times before, I think I have some gold ones from about 20 years ago issued by the Paris Mint. At this point for us it’s a very mundane thing. It used to be postage stamps, right? Back when I was a kid. I used to collect US government-issued series of stamps with Disney characters or classic comic strip heroes, that kind of thing. Good times. My parents loved my clean and quiet hobbies lol. If only they could see me now 😀
There is a picture of it right here.
https://www.bleedingcool.com/2019/09/25/asterix-two-euro-coin/
It’s not a medal, it’s an actual coin you can pay your baguette or your cervoise with. Sweet.
It’s always humbling when you post a story to your blog and nobody notices. Two days later, Bleeding Cool posts a link to the same story and I’m seeing references to it on Facebook and Twitter and all the rest. And now on my own site. 😉
It’s my fault — I should have stressed the Euro, even though I thought the pictures of the mini-medals looked cooler. Live and learn.
That said, paying for a baguette with an Asterix coin is about the single most French thing I could ever think of. Bonus points for wearing a beret while doing it. 😉
Now I’m hungry for bread….
Ah, the stamp hobby fell prey to so many of the same things. Once they realized they had collectors, suddenly there were “commemorative” stamps every month for something new. When I was a wee lad, I had a stamp collection. It lasted a year before I got bored of it. That said, the comic book and comic strip stamps were cool, though as I recall they used some horrible lettering on the comic book ones…
Now, don’t ruin my mental model of Brussels. In my mind, it’s clean and beautiful and has a peeing boy on every corner, half of whom are dressed up like Asterix characters. =)
I’m hitting 54 next week and my mom still asks me whenever she receives foreign mail (not often) if she should keep the stamp for me. Then I usually tell her I’m not 7 any more. There still must be a couple boxes of the stuff in her basement… any takers?
Sure you pretend Brussels is like a Schuiten painting and I’ll pretend America still resembles Norman Rockwell’s
I think my mother might still have a box of stamps in the back of a closet somewhere in the old house. It’s been sitting there for 30+ years, but it’s hard to convince my mother to throw stuff out sometimes…
And, yes, all of Belgium is a Schuiten drawing and all of France is probably a Philippe Francq drawing — which is pretty much traced off photos, anyway, so at least that’ll be closer to the truth. 😉