new name, new direction… the 2024 editions are renamed 2042

With the year 2024 over, the Strasbourg comic book publishing house took the risk of changing its name. Enough to give yourself a “freshener”, and a new deadline, to better continue to look towards the future.

EThey were founded on April 1, 2010, without being a joke: the 2024 editions, specializing in comics (including albums by Jérémie Moreau, Sophie Guerrive or Tom Gauld, and also by… Gustave Doré), decided to change your name. Once the year that bears their name is over, they are renamed “2042”. “When we launched the house, we wanted to anchor ourselves in genre literature, including science fiction, explain the founders Simon Liberman and Olivier Bron – who met at the Estienne school in Paris, before meeting at the Arts Déco in Strasbourg, where their publishing house was based. 2024 seemed like an abstract and distant date, when we would be more or less in our forties…”

Here it is, just a few years after the duo finally managed to pay themselves a salary and structure the operation around ten employees, most of them part-time. “Some albums, like The Panther’s Speech by Jérémie Moreau, The Great Void de Léa Murawiec [dont les droits audiovisuels ont été vendus pour un long métrage en prises de vues réelles, ndlr] or Living people by Simon Roussin, Raphaël Meltz and Louise Moaty, worked very well. »

2042 has emerged as a new goal, that of a potential retirement! “And then we like to say to ourselves that the same problem could arise again in not so long a time,” note the two bosses mischievously. Reversing numbers results in a “fresh blow” on the models of their books (beautiful, carefully crafted objects) and increased work on the brand’s online referencing; “he had been attacked quite a bit by the Olympics for two years”, notes the duo mischievously. The editorial line is also evolving, rather naturally: “At the start, we refused to make “comics about reality”; but the authors we publish are very interested in society and are quite engaged, so we follow their desires. »

If the reissues of published books will remain labeled “2024”, the menu of 2042 editions looks attractive: a new book by Simon Roussin at the end of January, an album by Laurie Agusti on masculinism, the reissue of F’murr’s first work, several youth projects (under the existing label 4048, please do not mix brushes…). And even board games — starting off simple, with tarot cards, memory cards or puzzles, before imagining more complex devices around books from the catalog. To continue, imaginatively, to take risks.