After ignoring female creators entirely in a list of 30 potential candidates for this year’s Grand Prix d’ Angouleme, the lifetime achievement award that’s given out annually at France’s largest and longest running comics festival, Festival organizers first announced that they would be adding six female creators to the nominees list (see “Angouleme to Add Women Nominees to Grand Prix List”), only to scrap that notion in favor of allowing the creators who vote on the award to nominate creators of their own choice in the first round of voting for the Grand Prix.

When at least 12 nominees for the Grand Prix including Daniel Clowes, Chris Ware, Charles Burns, Brian Michael Bendis, Milo Manara, Pierre Christin, Joann Sfar, Etienne Davodeau, and Christophe Blain, Bill Sienkiewicz, and Riad Sattouf all asked that their names be withdrawn, the Festival had to act.  After some not very “convincing” explanations along the lines of excluding Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis) because she no longer makes comics in spite of the fact that Angouleme honored Bill Watterson, who likewise has apparently stopped creating comics for publication, Festival President Frank Bondoux agreed to add female creators to the nominee list, before washing his hands of the situation (a la Pontius Pilot) by letting the creative community come up with the nominees, which previously were determined by a small committee of festival insiders (consisting of two men and one woman according to Paul Gravett).

Voting, which for years was limited to former winners, is now open to any and all creators who have had their work published in France.  Typically the top three choices from the first round of voting go on to a second round where the winner of the Grand Prix is determined.  It should be interesting to see who the creators nominate, and if the festival can recover from the well-deserved black eye it earned from its director’s ludicrous contention that there were no female creators worthy of contention for the Grand Prix.