Nice timing, Comix Creatrix

(Image by the House of Illustration)

I know it’s already been said by everyone, but the opening of the Comix Creatrix exhibition, featuring cartoons by 100 women, could hardly have been better timed, given the controversial (and plain wrong) statement from Franck Bondoux, executive officer of the Angouleme International Comics Festival:

“Unfortunately, there are few women in the history of comics”

To which, you can either stare open-mouthed, or you can point to some robust evidence. Like, hmm, I don’t know, let me see, an exhibition which highlights the work of one hundred talented female cartoonists (past and present) in one big, stunning bundle.

Obviously, this exhibition has been some time in the making, so it’s not a deliberate riposte, but it is a delicious one.

Has anyone invited Franck over to take a look? That’d be a great GoFundMe, wouldn’t it?

I managed to visit yesterday, on the first day of the exhibition, and enjoyed a good long couple of hours poring over every exhibit.

It’s a very encouraging exhibition for any comics artist, because it presents such a massive diversity of styles, materials and subject matter. Clearly, there’s no ‘wrong’.

It was also fascinating to see what a variety of size paper people use for their originals, from tiny sketchbook pages to vast A1 sheets. And it’s particularly reassuring to see the amount of tippex and paper cover-ups some of the artists use if they are unsatisfied with their original work:

Apologies for the not very high-quality phone snaps: here are some other pieces of work I enjoyed, in no particular order:

 

 

There were many, many more I could have highlighted, including some old favourites that took me right back to my earliest interest in zines and comics.

My only criticism is that there’s no (physical) catalogue. There’s an app, for which you need to have an iPad, but boy, I would have loved to buy a big volume and see all these strips reproduced to examine again at my leisure.