📖 BD Pole – Panels, worlds, and drawn legends

Comic books are part of the DNA of Trolls & Legends: this is where fantasy is read, contemplated, and encountered, up close with those who draw and tell it. Heir to the great Franco-Belgian tradition and the major cycles of heroic fantasy comics like The Chronicles of the Black Moon by François Marcela-Froideval and Olivier Ledroit, the festival has always given a central place to the ninth art in its programming.

From April 3 to 5, 2026 in Mons, the BD Pole will bring together authors and illustrators for a weekend of meetings, exchanges, and signing sessions, at the heart of the event. This is where one comes to have an album signed that has accompanied them for years, discover a new series, discuss with a screenwriter about the genesis of their universe, or simply wander from table to table, captivated by a cover, a page, a character.

🌘 From shadow to light: comics at the heart of the 2026 theme

In the spirit of the 2026 edition — “From Shadow to Light” — comics will be one of the privileged grounds to explore all the contrasts of the imagination. Comic books possess a unique visual language to play with light, framing, shadows, the silences between panels, and to give life to worlds where the epic, the dark, the marvelous, humor, or dark fantasy coexist.

It will feature very different universes: baroque fantasy frescoes, intimate stories with deep blacks, all-ages adventures bathed in bright colors, quirky comedies populated by trolls, dragons, and weary heroes. The diversity of graphic styles – from realistic lines to more stylized or experimental approaches – responds to the diversity of narratives, allowing the reader to move from a shadowy area to a light area, sometimes with just a turn of a page.

🕯️ A tribute to François Marcela-Froideval

This year, the BD Pole also carries a strong emotional dimension. The 2026 edition pays special tribute to François Marcela-Froideval, screenwriter of The Chronicles of the Black Moon, a major figure in dark fantasy in the French-speaking world and a pioneer of the link between role-playing games and comics.

With The Chronicles of the Black Moon, created in the late 1980s in collaboration with Olivier Ledroit on the drawing, Froideval helped establish heroic fantasy comics as a genre in its own right: a flourishing medieval-fantasy universe, Machiavellian plots, black humor, and graphic excess have marked generations of readers and have had a lasting influence on the representation of fantasy in comics.

For the 2026 edition of Trolls & Legends, the official poster is created by Olivier Ledroit, co-creator of The Chronicles of the Black Moon, whose highly fantasy-styled work – extreme contrasts, iconic characters, dense atmospheres – perfectly embodies the theme “from shadow to light” at the heart of this edition.

Surprises and nods will come throughout the festival to extend this tribute to an author who profoundly marked dark fantasy and who was also a friend of the festival.

✍️ Meetings, signings, and behind-the-scenes of creation

The BD Pole and its exhibition are designed as a space where one can closely approach graphic creation. You can see the pages, notebooks, character research, and sometimes even the stages of work between sketching and inking. The signing sessions then become more than just a simple “autograph”: they are moments of dialogue where one can ask questions about the construction of a page, the staging of a fight, the choice of a color palette, or how a universe has gradually taken shape.

The authors, illustrators, and artists present come from varied backgrounds: major fantasy series, medieval-fantasy humor comics, adaptations of novels, more independent creations… This diversity shows that fantasy comics are not monolithic, but form a living ecosystem, where cult works and new voices coexist.

🌍 Comics, fantasy, and other festival poles

Comic books also serve as a bridge between the different poles of the festival.

It interacts with literature, when it adapts or extends fantasy novels; with the Games Pole, when comic book universes become role-playing games, board games, or video games; with the Music Pole, when a band visually draws inspiration from an illustrator or when an artist creates an album cover. The connections are numerous and reinforce the idea that Trolls & Legends is a festival of the imagination in the broadest sense, where forms respond to each other.