Ancco's 'Ragazze Cattive' Wins Angoulême Revelation Prize

South Korean cartoonist Ancco (born 1983 in Seongnam) won the Revelation Prize at the 2017 Angoulême International Comics Festival for her debut graphic novel 'Ragazze Cattive' (Bad Girls), published in Italian by Canicola Edizioni in 2018. The book recounts the artist's own experiences of abuse and violence during her late adolescence in 1990s South Korea, a period marked by deep financial crisis, unemployment, and widespread gender-based violence. Ancco's raw black-and-white drawings depict a patriarchal society where domestic abuse by her father was normalized, and girls faced beatings at school, home, and on the streets. The narrative interweaves past and present, as the author revisits traumatic memories of fleeing parents, encounters with violent men, and friendships with women sharing similar humiliation and desire for freedom. The graphic novel avoids pathos and easy compassion, instead delivering a furious, courageous excavation of memory. Ancco's work follows in the footsteps of Korean writers Han Kang and Kyung-Sook Shin, who gained international recognition for novels addressing women's suffering in a patriarchal society.