A number of creators including Jacques Tardi, whose work has been given a major retrospective at this year’s festival, have signed a letter to Frank Bondoux, the director of Europe’s largest comics festival at Angouleme, protesting the fact that one of the festival’s sponsor is SodaStream, a company that has a factory in a disputed portion of the West Bank.

Tardi and others are upset that they didn’t find out about SodaStream’s participation in the festival until festivities at the 41st Angouleme event, which regularly draws well over 100,000 people to southwestern France, were already underway.  Tardi, in fact, told Le Monde that had he known about SodaStream’s participation, he would not have given permission for his work to be displayed at the Festival, where one of this year’s highlights is an elaborate show highlighting Tardi’s renderings of World War I ("Tardi et La Grande Guerre").
 
Protests against SodaStream are hardly new.  Pro-Palestinian groups in the U.S. have been staging protests here, primarily on the East Coast, for over a year.  Protesters point to the fact that SodaStream’s primary factory was built on land seized from several Palestinian villages, in what is considered the largest expropriation of land in the 47-year history of the occupation of the West Bank.  According to protestors, the factory pays no taxes to support any of the Palestinian governmental entities in the West Bank, while supporters of the company maintain that the factory provides jobs and much need economic development in the West Bank region.
 
So far protests at the festival itself have been limited to the SodaStream tent, where 15 people were evicted for handing out leaflets, and the open letter from creators from all across the globe.  While the majority of those who signed the letter are from Europe, a number of Americans have signed including Joe Sacco, Ben Katchor, Peter Kuper, Sue Coe, and Seth Tobocman.