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A Chef of Nobunaga, Sunny, Inferno In Bottles Nominated for Angoulême's Top Prize

The 42nd annual Angoulême International Comics Festival, which will take place from January 29 to February 1 in , announced that Mitsuru Nishimura and Takurō Kajikawa's A Chef of Nobunaga (Le Chef de Nobunaga), Suehiro Maruo's Binzume no Jigoku (Inferno in Bottles/L'Enfer en Boutille), and Taiyo Matsumoto's Sunny are nominated for Best Comic.

Nishimura and Kajikawa launched A Chef of Nobunaga in Hobunsha's Weekly Manga Times anthology in March 2011. The story follows a time-travelling chef who ends up in the Sengoku (warring states) period of Japan as Emperor Oda Nobunaga's head chef. The manga inspired two live-action television series.

Binzume no Jigoku is a collection of short stories by Suehiro Maruo featuring different versions of "Hell." The manga adapts the short story collection by novelist Yumeno Kyūsaku.

Hiroshi Harada turned Maruo's 1984 erotic horror manga Mr. Arashi's Amazing Freak Show (Shojo Tsubaki) into an anime film in 1992. Blast Books published the manga's one compiled volume in North America in 1993. Maruo won the "New Artist Prize" of the 13th Annual Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prizes in 2009, although he has been drawing manga professionally since 1980.

Last Gasp Publishing nominated for the 2014 Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards.

Matsumoto's Sunny manga was won Slate Book Review and Vermont's Center for Cartoon Studies' Best Graphic Novel prize in 2013. Viz Media released the fourth volume last April.

Matsumoto's slice-of-life story focuses on children at Star Kids Home orphanage. An abandoned yellow car, Sunny, takes them anywhere they want to go. With Sunny, the children can escape their circumstances and go on imaginary adventures around the world and beyond.

The festival also revealed its nominees for Best Youth Comic, Best Heritage Comic, and Best Crime Comic. Angoulême nominated the following manga in these categories:

Best Youth Comic

The Seven Deadly Sins (Nanatsu no Taizai)
Nakaba Suzuki

Best Heritage Comic

Space Pirate Captain Harlock (Capitain Albator)
Leiji Matsumoto

Sex & Fury
Tarō Bonten

Best Crime Comic

Wet Moon
Atsushi Kaneko

Kaneko's SOIL manga was previously nominated in the same category in 2011. Florent Chavout's Petites coupures à Shioguni comic about a Japanese man named Kenji who borrows money to open a restaurant was also nominated for Best Crime Comic.

The festival launches on January 29, just weeks after 17 people, including five Charlie Hebdo cartoonists, were killed in terrorist attacks in . More than three million people have filled the streets of this weekend to march in unity against the attacks.

The festival launched in 1974 as an event celebrating comics from countries throughout the world. Katsuhiro Otomo (Akira, Steamboy, Short Peace) was one of three won the Prix Intergénérations (Intergenerational Award) and Prix Regards sur le monde (World Outlook Award), respectively, in 2012.

Sources: animeanime.jp, BBC

Update: Sunny's volume number corrected. Thanks, Cardbo