More than 100 comic professionals will represent Spain as a Focus Country at the Angoulême Festival 2025

> With the motto ‘Spain, talent in cartoons’, the Ministry of Culture is organising, together with Acción Cultural Española and the collaboration of the Comic Sector, a broad cultural programme that celebrates current creativity and recalls the history of Spanish comics.
> Creative wealth, bibliodiversity, linguistic plurality and gender equality are the axes of the programme, in which creators in all official languages ​​will participate.
> The action consolidates the Ministry of Culture’s commitment to the Spanish comics sector and reinforces its strategy for the internationalisation of Spanish books.

With a delegation of more than a hundred professionals, Spain will be a Focus Country at the 52nd Angoulême International Comics Festival (France) from 29 January to 2 February. The programme, presented this morning by the Minister of Culture, Ernest Urtasun, will highlight the quality and diversity of Spanish comics at the prestigious French event, the most important event in Europe for the ‘ninth art’. The event, held at the headquarters of the French Institute in Madrid, was attended by the Minister, along with the Director General of Books, Comics and Reading of the Ministry of Culture, María José Gálvez; the Director of Programming of Acción Cultural Española (AC/E), Inmaculada Ballesteros; the President of the Comic Sector, Alejandro Casasola; the author Aneke, representing the Spanish delegation; and, welcoming the audience, the Minister Counsellor in Charge of Business at the French Embassy in Spain, Aymeric Chuzeville.Creativity, bibliodiversity, linguistic plurality and equality

Under the slogan ‘Spain, talent in cartoons’ and a poster designed by Max (Francesc Capdevila Gisbert), the first winner of the National Comic Award in 2007, Spain will celebrate as the Focus Country of the French festival the great creative moment of Spanish comics and, at the same time, will remember its history. The programme, organised by the Ministry of Culture together with Acción Cultural Española (AC/E) and with the collaboration of the Comic Sector, will revolve around four strategic axes: the creative wealth with the great variety of markets for Spanish comics; bibliodiversity; linguistic plurality; and gender equality, addressing the role of women and the vision of the sector from a feminist perspective.

The Spanish delegation will include authors of national and international prestige, including some of the winners of the various editions of the National Comic Awards convened by the Ministry of Culture since 2007. In fact, both the first winner, Max, and the brand new winner of the last edition, Bea Lema, will be there. Also mentioned are Spanish authors who have won the prestigious Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards, such as Salvador Larroca, David Aja, Bruno Redondo and Juanjo Guarnido, among others. In addition, there will be artists with a long career, such as Marika Vila and Albert Monteys, as well as young creators such as Nadia Hafid, Yeyei and Alba Chan. Also participating will be experts and researchers from the world of comics, such as Elisa McAusland and Ana Merino. Among the many activities taking place in the Spanish Pavilion, the most notable are round tables on comics and memory or cartoons and feminism, as well as conversations about great figures in the history of Spanish comics. In total, the agenda includes seven master classes and meetings with the public; and more than twenty round tables on the most varied topics: ‘Genealogies and comics’, ‘Comics and memory’, ‘Writing with drawings’, ‘The boom of the 80s’, ‘Popular pop and folklore’, ‘Creating readers’, ‘Cartoons and feminism’, ‘History of Spanish comics: tribute to Ibáñez’, ‘The times of TBO: tribute to Josep Coll’ or ‘Social comics’, among others.

The space, created by the multidisciplinary design studio specialising in cultural spaces and museography, Jesús Moreno y Asociados, has a surface area of ​​245 square metres and is organised into several sections: an activities area, where there will be uninterrupted programming; a professional area intended for professional meetings between agents in the sector; and an exhibition. It will also host a bibliographical exhibition that will offer an overview of comic publishing in Spain, with works by all the participants of the Spanish delegation.

Four exhibitions spread across the city
The proposal of Spain as a Focus Country in Angoulême is expanded with an exhibition programme with various formats distributed in different enclaves of the city. Thus, the exhibition ‘Graphic Constellation’, produced in collaboration with the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB), proposes a journey through the universes of nine Spanish authors, as an exploration of all the changes that have radically modified the comic ecosystem in Spain and that have allowed the emergence of a ‘constellation’ of avant-garde authors.

The Spanish Pavilion will host an exhibition of the works that have been awarded the National Comic Prize over its eighteen editions; while the ‘Espace Jeneusse’ will give visibility to three collections by Spanish authors with a presence in the French market: ‘Hooky’ by Miriam Bonastre Tur; ‘Las hericornias’ by Kid Toussant and Verónica Álvarez; and ‘Atlas y Axis’ written and drawn by Pau. In addition, the Atrium of the Plaza del Ayuntamiento will host the exhibition ‘Spain talent in cartoons: a historical, present and future vision of Spanish comics’.

Professional programme
During the festival, different activities will take place in the ‘Professional Space’, such as the presentation of Barcelona Comic Pro; a panel discussion on internationalisation strategies; or the presentation of the ‘White Book of Comics in Spain’, a document promoted and produced by the Comic Sector Association with the support of the Ministry of Culture and Spanish Cultural Action (AC/E), which offers a complete x-ray of the sector and has aroused interest in other countries, as it is a comprehensive study with an innovative approach.

Spain will also have a stand within the International Rights Market (MID) of the festival, which will be offered to Spanish publishers for their commercial activities.

Support for the comics sector
The Spanish presence in Angoulême is added to the different initiatives that the Ministry of Culture has been carrying out in support of the Spanish comics sector, such as the celebration of Comics Day every March 17 and the celebration of the Comics Day