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The Japan Media Arts Festival is a comprehensive festival of Media Arts that honors outstanding works from a diverse range of media from animation and comics to media art and games. The festival gives awards in each of its four divisions: Art, Entertainment, Animation, Manga, and this year the grand prize in Manga division has given to "Les Cités Obscures (Cities of the Fantastic)" by Benoît Peeters and François Schuten.
Let us suppose that there are three important stream in Manga culture. The one is Japanese Manga, off course, and another is American Comics. And the other one should be "Bande Dessinée", Franco-Belgian comics. Bande Dessinée, or shortly called "BD", is well known with the titles of "Tintin" series by Hergé, "Blueberry" by Jean Giraud, or "Arzach" under the name of Mœbius as Giraud's alias.
Also the award-winning title "Les Cités Obscures" is so popular in BD since it started in the early 1980s. But unfortunately, this excellent BD had not been introduced in Japan. Main reason for the grand prize in this time is that "Les Cités Obscures" has been published in Japan, last year, for the very first time.
Officials said "If we think that Manga is global leading pop culture, we have to know how high the level of foreign Manga culture is".
By the way, Mœbius was one of very first person to tell about cultral importance of Japanese Manga in the early 1980s, and found the talent of Katsuhiro Otomo before his best known Manga "Akira". Katsuhiro Otomo was given the French order "Ordre des Arts et des Lettres: Chevalier" in 2005, and also Leiji Matsumoto of "Space Battleship Yamato" or "Captain Harlock" was given the same order in 2012. The relationship between Japanese Manga and Franco-Belgian Bande Dessinée seems still to be tight.
