Rock! Pop! Wizz! When comics turn up the sound

Thoroughly rock, pop, music in all its forms and its links with comics. The Festival d’Angoulême episode 2023 raises the sound with an exhibition from January 25 to December 31 which will explore the links between notes and boxes. It takes place at the International City of Comics and Image of Angoulême and the curators are Vincent Brunner music journalist and writer, author of Rock Strips, Clémentine Deroudille author, independent curator, director, scenographer alongside Perrine Villemur and Nicolas Hubert. We still remember also in 2011 the antediluvian rock exhibition with Baru president.

This will be the very first exhibition to explore the relationship between pop, rock and comic music. Rock! Pop! Wizz! When comics turn up the sound will offer a real dive into these two worlds to show the permanent dialogue between these two arts, their complicity and how they have nourished each other for more than half a century. This exhibition will bring together more than fifty French and international designers, hundreds of original boards, sometimes unpublished, dozens of record covers, but also in situ creations. The exhibition will also present INA’s audiovisual archives, a selection of clips, an ideal playlist and a dance floor: the Cité de la BD will be transformed for more than ten months into a large concert hall where the music will make you tremble. the walls . As part of the exhibition, the Cité de la Bande Dessinée et de l’Image asked 9 authors – Coco, Florence Dupré La Tour, Lisa Chetteau, Louison, Typex, Ludovic Debeurme, Hamid Suleiman, Olivier Balez – to dance nine pop and rock stars – Michael Jackson, Beyonce, Lou Reed, Alpha Blondie, Iggy Pop, Grace Jones, Patti Smith, David Bowie, Donna Summer and Amy Winehouse – thanks to a series of videos animations composed of about twenty sketches each. These videos will be projected on the walls of a rotunda transformed into a real dance floor inviting visitors to wiggle their hips to a soundtrack. Rock ! Pop ! Wizz !

From the 1960s, with the birth of rock, a connection was established between young people from popular culture and counter culture. First in the United States, the appearance of fanzines, such as Zap Comix, Yellow Dogand Robert Crumb’s cover art design for Cheap Thrillspour Big Brother and the Holding Company – Janis Joplin’s group – materialize this convergence of interests. In Europe and particularly in France, the combined influence of American underground comix and rock’n’roll made itself felt in the early 1970s in the pages of Pilot with Gotlib and Solé. At the same time, the record cover becomes a recurring space for artistic encounters between artists from both worlds. In 1975, the magazine Screaming metal takes off with a science fiction theme before taking a rock turn under the impetus of Philippe Manoeuvre. It is in the pages of this newspaper that the “BD Rock” explodes with Philippe Druillet but also new authors: Serge Clerc puts in images songs of the Rolling Stones, the Doors or the Velvet Underground. Frank Margerin makes rocker Lucien one of the newspaper’s key characters, Dodo & Ben Radis have fun with the fictitious group Les Closh, Tramber and Jano stage the hoodlum Kebra. In England and the United States, it is through fanzines and conceptual diversions that artists like Jamie Reid or John Holmstrom use comics to illustrate the punk wave.

In the 1980s, the roles were reversed: singers expressed themselves by drawing and playing, like Kent, Elli Medeiros or Cleet Boris. Mass culture also seizes the subject in TV shows like L’Impeccable or Sex Machine and through Marvel comic books around the Beatles or Kiss. Also in the fanzines, comics and rock’n’roll consolidate their links and advocate an alternative lifestyle. From the 1990s, music was a major theme in the world of comics with authors such as Joe Sacco, Jean-Christophe Menu, Charles Berberian, Luz, Alfred, Nine Antico, Philippe Dupuy, Magali le Huche. Later, new musical genres were covered in comic strips, whether electro (Le Chant de la Machine by David Blot & Mathias Cousin) or rap (Hip-Hop Family Tree by Ed Piskor). In Japan, manga authors such as Harold Sakuishi or Inio Asano feature apprentice rockers. The history of rock is constantly being revisited from a biographical, documentary or semi-fictional angle with Hervé Bourhis, Nine Antico, Derf Backderf, Philippe Girard or Reinhart Kleist. Even today, certain icons are constantly drawn, told and reinvented, such as David Bowie, the Beatles and Elvis Presley.