Musée de la bande dessinée
Photo: Own work — CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
The Musée de la bande dessinée in Angoulême, France, showcases a vast collection of comics and graphic novels, offering exhibitions, workshops, and a specialized library.
Planning your visit
France treats comics as the ninth art, seriously and institutionally, and Angouleme is where that is concentrated — the town hosts Europe's most important comics festival every January, and the Musee de la bande dessinee is the national museum of the form.
The permanent collection traces the medium from nineteenth-century precursors through the Franco-Belgian tradition — Herge, Franquin, Moebius, Tardi — alongside American comics, Japanese manga and contemporary graphic novels, displaying original artwork rather than printed pages, which is the point: seeing the actual inked board, with corrections and pasted revisions visible, changes how the work reads.
The museum sits in converted riverside warehouses, and the wider Cite internationale de la bande dessinee includes a specialist library of over 100,000 volumes, a cinema and artists' residencies.
The town itself is painted with enormous comic murals on building walls.
Bookable options include open-date skip-the-line tickets. Current availability is listed below.
Before you book
Where is Musée de la bande dessinée?
Musée de la bande dessinée is in Angoulême, France. The map on this page marks its exact location.
Do I need to book Musée de la bande dessinée in advance?
Skip-the-line entry is worth booking ahead here: the saving is the queue, which is exactly what sells out.