2023-04-16 11:06:00
1973-2023, in our legends
A fake newspaper, written by real journalists, including an editorial by Serge July: the supplement slipped into the comic book “La Femme Trap” plays with temporalities.
For our 50th birthday, here are 50 crazy stories that could never have happened anywhere but in Release. In our walls, in our columns, behind the scenes, in legend or in our delusions; funny, tragic, astonishing, forgotten or secret, relive with us the highlights of the years Freed. Find all the articles on our fiftieth anniversary in our special file.
ReleaseOctober 14, 1993. The newspaper is wrapped up in one: “The day the future telescripted”, he titles in capitals. “On the tickers of Releasea cataract of thirty-year-old post-dated dispatches clogged up, between October 2 and 10, can we read. Reissue of Orson Welles the Imposter’s Pre-War Martians, in New York? Or lightning precipitate of space-time?
In the “Event” pages, our daily newspaper tells that a certain Jill Bioskop has sent messages directly since February 3, 2025. He describes the world in which he lives, a society where ultraliberalism has triumphed, where “Afro-Pakistani and Zuben’ubian minorities” compete in London while since “alien rain” of 2014, a new population from elsewhere invaded the Earth and the penniless suburbs of the world’s megalopolises in disherence.
“Story to sleep in weightlessness”
“This text will make history, Serge July gets carried away in a long editorial. Certainly, nothing allows us to deduce that it is indeed an authentic document from 2025. But, for all that, it is not possible to absolutely exclude this possibility either…” he writes, fascinated by this “story to sleep in weightlessness for a whole eternity”.
In reality, if we accept this ugly dream-breaking word, our newspaper was not taken in, or knowingly so. We are in 1986, Enki Bilal publishes Trap Woman, the second volume of the Nikopol trilogy about a post-truth world on the verge of collapse. To his comic strip, which would become one of his great successes and a marker of 80s SF, he decided to add a copy of Releaseof four pages, falsely dated October 14, 1993. The typo codes, the signatures, the model, everything is there.
“I was a great reader of the press and of this newspaper in particular, which I had followed from its beginnings”, remembers Enki Bilal, “always subscribed” : “I had met Bayon, we had sympathized and I worked from time to time to Freed. He had sent me to do an interview with Manset. “It was a very lively, daring time in publishing and comics, he continues. And I asked them one day: “Would you agree to play with me on temporality, with papers that would come from the future?”
Disturbing and haunting
It does not take more for the machine to set up. July says yes, writes the editorial, Jean-Michel Helvig, Didier Pourquery, Jean-François Fogel, Bayon, Gérard Lefort and Alain Pacadis short texts and Enki Bilal has fun with the main paper which allows “to prolong the reading of Trap Woman, to find answers”. If wrong numbers Freed appear regularly in works of fiction, in particular in films or series, it is the only time when the edition has really been printed and distributed in thousands of copies (it is reduced to two pages over the reissues, with a logo that changes from red to green). This disturbing and bewitching front page has become much more famous than the real front page of October 14, 1993, devoted to the showdown between France and the United States over the renegotiation of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade ( Gatt), which everyone has forgotten.
Thirty-seven years later, as the fateful date of February 3, 2025 approaches, we do not, fortunately, live in a world as devastated as that of the Paris of Nikopol. “But we’re not that far off,” alert Enki Bilal, both satisfied and worried about his prescience.
#diary #written #future #Enki #Bilal #Liberation