See All the Events in This Year’s Festival

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Fáilte!

According to the recently late, unceasingly great Tom Lehrer, satire died when they gave Henry Kissinger the Nobel Peace Prize. We wanted to be sure, so we called a conference. Cartoonists from France and around the world will be asking: Are We Still Charlie?

Offsetting this sober reflection, a wild bouquet of comic-book brilliance: Pioneer of the ’60s underground Gilbert Shelton will be in conversation with British (Tube?) artist Hunt Emerson, while Andy Leuenberger will bring the Berlin metro. Brendan McCarthy of – among many other things – Judge Dredd fame will show us his stuff while Lucie Arnoux takes up our residency and gives another great workshop.

Other returning favourites include the wonderful Cristina Sampaio, plus the usual crew of reprobates including Graeme Keyes, Jim Cogan, Harry Burton, Dean Patterson and Tom Mathews. Leading American political cartoonist Jeff Danziger pays a surprise visit, while our featured Irish artist will be Ian Knox who for decades has ploughed the hard furrow of Northern Ireland politics. Our theme exhibition, Danse Macabre, explores the darker side of humour, and we have a whole extra mini-festival on Inis Oírr!

It’s our biggest and best yet. For this we want to thank all our sponsors, in particular Galway City Council who have given us tremendous support, not to mention our guests, the team who worked so hard to pull all this together, and you – for being exactly where you are at this moment, reading this very sentence. I commend you on your excellent life choices.

Richard Chapman

Artistic Director