I think it’s safe to write about the Angoulême International Comics Festival in terms of obsession. It’s a whole other artistic world out there – one that is prone to a little fanaticism, but I was just there to watch and learn.

I think perhaps I was hoping to pick up an understanding of bandes dessinées (BD) by osmosis, and to a certain extent this was true. With some of the comics I was lulled into appreciation by the vivid graphics and had a flick through without any real attempt to pick up the story. With others, I attempted to have a read where the French seemed simple enough – but this was mainly in BD with really obvious jokes and running gags, or simplistically illustrated biographies of 1920s libertines, like the account of Kiki de Montparnasse by Catel & Bocquet in the Festival’s Official Selection.

Catered for all tastes – from cooking manga and children’s Christian comics to the history of Rasputin and vampish gothic erotic – the festival prompted me to realisation of life’s big questions (i.e. that I much prefer the rugged, aesthetic histories of Hugo Pratt to the haggard exaggeration of Enki Bilal, for instance).

Of the comical BD, I laughed along purely because I could understand the jokes. Like the Bamboo comics Rugbymen parody of the Dieux du Stade calendar or the Fonctionnaires (public servants) edition entitled “Métro, Dodo, Dodo” (playing on the popular phrase “Métro, Boulot, Dodo” which describes the working life routine of transport, job, sleep). The one I could relate most to was the Parisiens. Being greeted by this cover certainly made me smile knowingly – for the image depicted a swearing and seething mass of cars, buses and motorbikes, all at an aggressive stand-still, ground to a halt by a sweet infirm of a grandmother crossing the road at a pedestrian crossing.

Actually – back to real life – there are all sorts of posters around Paris at the moment advertising the new film by the Coen brothers, No Country for Old Men. Obviously, they hadn’t been to Paris, because then the film would have been entitled No Place for Old Men and it would have been all about the perils of the elderly attempting to reverse park their cars and copping a mouthful and hornful from the rest of the traffic…