A Brief History of Cognac's POLAR Festival

For a quarter of a century, the POLAR festival in Cognac, France has been one of the world’s biggest crime fiction festivals, both in size and in importance. For the 25th Anniversary of the festival’s founding, POLAR, in collaboration with Humanoids Press, put together a special anthology of noir stories told in comic form by dozens of writers and illustrators from all over the continent (and the world). You can find an exclusive excerpt from the anthology here. Below, you’ll find a humble and heart-felt introduction to the volume by festival founder Bernard Bec, who writes about the history of the festival and the “polar” (meaning thriller) genre. 

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