Award for comic adventure

FRANCE’S biggest comic book festival drew 200,000 visitors last month and awarded its top prize to a film director.

The Festival International de la Bande Dessinée d’Angoulême is the third most popular cultural event in France, after the Cannes Film Festival and Avignon’s theatre festival - showing the seriousness with which France takes its "9th Art."

The winner of this year’s Fauve d’Or for the best new album was Riad Sattouf, a Parisian writer/illustrator, for the third volume of adventures of his macho character Pascal Brutal.

Sattouf, whose character appears regularly in humourous magazine Fluide Glacial directed his first film last year, Les Beaux Gosses, on a theme of teenage love.