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International Comics and Animation Festival to welcome cartoonists, scholars from across the globe Spain's Max, USA's Mort Walker, and other international artists and academics to participate
WASHINGTON, D.C. - The fourth annual International Comics and Animation Festival will be held from Thursday, September 24 through Saturday, September 26, 1998, at the Holiday Inn Select, in Bethesda, Maryland. Sponsored by Georgetown University's Department of French and the Cultural Service of the French Embassy, ICAF is an international summit for scholars, creators and enthusiasts of comics and animated cartoons, including academic presentations, chalk talks by distinguished cartoonists, and lectures by scholars from across the globe. ICAF will coincide with the 1998 Small Press Expo (SPX), a convention and trade show for the field of independent comic books, to be held at the same venue.
This year ICAF welcomes as Guest of Honor the Spanish cartoonist Max, who will give a chalk talk on Saturday, September 26th. Other guests include France's Yvan Alagbe and Olivier Marboeuf, Algeria's Slim, New Zealand's Dylan Horrocks, and Israel's five-member publishing collective Actus Tragicus. Also, Igor Prassel and Jacob Klemencic of Strip Core, an artist's group from Ljubanja, Slovenia (former Yugoslavia), will present a talk on comics in the too often neglected countries of Eastern Europe.
Scholarly guests for this year's ICAF include Allen Douglas and Fedwa Malti-Douglas, authors of the study Arab Comic Strips; Asian popular culture expert John Lent; and Joseph Witek, author of Comic Books as History. Jean-Pierre Mercier, director of the Centre National de la Bande Dessinée et de l'Image, France's national comics museum, will deliver a plenary lecture on modern French-language comics. Additionally, Mercier will take part in a roundtable discussion of comics-related museums, along with representatives from several other institutions, including special guest Mort Walker, founder of Boca Raton, Florida's International Museum of Cartoon Art and creator of such well-known strips as Beetle Bailey and Hi and Lois.
Besides these special guests, ICAF offers many shorter academic presentations. These papers form the backbone of ICAF, offering a forum for scholars from many countries to present their work to a diverse audience. Topics covered in these presentations will include the history of Russian comics, changing images of African-Americans in comics, animation by Disney and Tex Avery, health education comics, adult comics, and many others.
This year's ICAF schedule is being coordinated to allow visitors to get the most out of the SPX as well. All are welcome to attend ICAF panels. Admission to the ICAF is free, although there is a small admission fee for SPX. For travel and lodging information, or further
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