What do we know about big American comic cons?  We know they are held in convention centers, deafening places filled with bright lights and berber carpeting.  We know they are dominated by huge media companies.  We know they are filled with socially awkward fanboys.

Well, Angouleme International Comics Festival, the largest comics con in the Western hemisphere and the crown jewel of the French bandes-dessines scene, is nothing like that at all.

Picture if you will a charming medevial town, filled with cheese, fine wines and sexy fire-eaters.  In this town there are a number of comic-filled tents.  And the comics they showcase are the most experimental, badass, lavishly printed, dirty, existentially questioning, silly and odd comics in the world.  Except for one tent filled with superheros, which is tiny and sort of shoved into the corner.  That’s what Angouleme is like.

I had never imagined I might enter this enchanted grove, until cartoonist Abby Denson hooked me up with Xavier Lancel, the editor of SCARCE, a magazine covering the American superhero scene.  Soon enough, I was heading to Paris to sign at his booth.

Angouleme Comics Festival takes place inside the ramparts of Angouleme’s old city.  The streets are filled with crepe stands and art comics lovers, and the professional’s lounge, in the city hall, is a burgundy, baroque masterpiece where they ply us with free congnac.

We were stationed in the alternative comics tent.  The first thing you saw on entering was the booth for L’Association, France’s most renowned alternative publishing house, which was empty except for a giant sign announcing the employees were on strike.  Very French.

Requins Marteux was selling beautiful grey bound copies of their new graphic novel, Pinnochio, soon to be published in the US by Last Gasp.  All around, artists were drawing giant comics on the brown paper lining the insides of their booths, or painting elaborate scenes on the title pages of just bought books.  There were R. Crumb prints and publishers rigged out to look like bars and brothels and Romanian graphic novelists and very hardcore porn.

In the big publishers tent (a crepe filled walk across town) you could check out gigantic blowups from Milo Manara’s Borgia: Power and Incest, join the huge lines for sketches at the filthy/hilarious Fluide Glacial booth (which had blanketed town with posters of their pastie clad new comics covergirl), or just check out art comics at Delcourt.

At night, we drank champagne and sketched filth on pieces of paper left out by restaurant owners.

In France, comics are looked at as a branch of art equal to painting, not as a loss-leader for a movie franchise, and everything about how Angouleme was run reflected this.  The convention’s mascot, a cat drawn by Lewis Trondheim, led us through the streets of the Anti-San-Diego, until, filled with wine and regret, we finally had to leave.

Words and photos by Molly Crabapple.