Each edition of this month-long festival showcases comic strip professionals. This edition on Friday was no exception with over €100,000 in prizes that will be distributed between the winners.
Brussels is a hotbed of creativity and the comic strip industry is particularly well represented there. Nevertheless, comic strip creation has been weakened in recent years and professionals sometimes have difficulty making a living from their art. To support authors, the Brussels authorities have for five years now awarded the Atomium Comic Strip Prizes as part of the Brussels Comic Strip Festival. Most of these are cash prizes to enable the winners to finance their work. This year, over €100,000 will be distributed between the 11 prizes. Since the health crisis has prevented the holding of the customary ceremony, the winning authors and books will be announced online on Friday 10 September during an online ceremony broadcast on social network accounts of the Comic Strip Festival and of visit.brussels. You can watch the awarding of prizes here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLc7yM9nu4w
Raymond Leblanc Prize for Young Artists
Winner: “Vents de Montagne, pluies d’océan” by the young Taiwanese artist, Shih-hung Wu . The Raymond Leblanc Prize was launched twelve years ago by the Raymond Leblanc non-profit association, whose goal is to publicise, collect and preserve all the cultural heritage created by Raymond Leblanc, founder of the “Tintin” magazine, Éditions du Lombard, the advertising agency Publiart and the animation studios Belvision, among other things. Its goal is to reward the work of a young author that has not published more than two comic books.
Jury’s opinion: The jury was won over by the high level of artistic maturity of this project. Both the drawing style and the structuring are impressive achievements for someone producing their first book. The author has already worked in animation, but it is the first time that he has tried his hand at the comic strip medium. The project presented is extremely accomplished, which means that the jury does not have imagine what a selected project “could become”. In this case, the fundamentals are sound and exciting, we have here an author who knows what is capable of, who masters his technique in order to put it to work for a strong story. Shih-Hung Wu’s work is remarkable and unique. He copies no-one: he is unique. His style, in line with the great masters from Europe and Asia, serves as a bridge between the best of those two graphic languages.
