Charlie Hebdo launched an international cartoon competition inviting people to draw"against the domination of freedoms by all religions". The competition is being held to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attack on its editorial office on 7 January 2015.
Mocking God calls on professional cartoonists and press cartoonists of any age and nationality and invites them:
"To those who are fed up with living in a society ruled by God and religion,
Those who are fed up with being lectured about so-called good and evil,
To those who are fed up with all the religious leaders dictating our lives".
The deadline for submissions opened on Wednesday 13 November 2024 and closes on Sunday 15 December 2024 at 18:00. Drawings should be sent to mockinggod@charliehebdo.fr mentioning your nationality and"the best drawing(s) will be published in Charlie Hebdo".
Opinion that no one has asked me for.
Although I stopped participating in competitions many years ago for various reasons, I don't think the approach of this one is quite right. I think it's all very well for Charlie Hebdo to "celebrate" that fucking event as a vindication of freedom of expression and against fundamentalism, fundamentalism and terrorism.
What I don't quite get is that it's an appeal to professionals and the prize is about seeing your cartoons published in the magazine. It seems to me an old-fashioned approach from when there was no choice but to send your work to the paper magazines or newspapers to see if they would publish something. Perhaps it would have been better and fairer to call it simply "exhibition".
Attack on Charlie Hebdo newsroom
On 7 January 2015, two brothers, Chérif and Saïd Kouachi, entered the headquarters of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo in Paris and murdered twelve people. Eight of them were editorial staff: five cartoonists (Wolinski, Cabu, Honoré, Tignous and Charb, the editor-in-chief), a proofreader (Mustapha Ourrad), a psychoanalyst (Elsa Cayat) and an anti-neoliberal economist (Bernard Maris, known as "Oncle Bernard").
The other victims were a journalist and guest of the weekly, Michel Renaud, an elite policeman and Charb's bodyguard, Franck Brinsolaro, the (Muslim) policeman Ahmed Merabet and an employee of a maintenance company, Frédéric Boisseau. At the same time, an accomplice of the Kouachi brothers, Amedy Coulibaly, executed a municipal policewoman, Clarissa Jean-Philippe, on the 8th and four Jewish people in a Kosher supermarket (Yohan Cohen, Yohav Hattab, François Michel Saada, Philippe Braham) on the 9th, before the police killed the three perpetrators of the massacres.
The attack gave rise to the now historic slogan"Je Suis Charlie", created by the graphic artist Joachim Roncin.
The clue to the contest was passed on to me by David Osorio at Bluesky, who has also written a note.
