Reissue of the best of Métal Hurlant and covers of Fluide Glacial: nostalgia for the heyday of the comic book magazine is doing well in bookstores, for a media that has lost its splendor.
There was a launch at the start of the 2024 school year, “Charlotte Mensuel”, which brought together a great cast around Bastien Vivès: Chris Ware, Florence Cestac, Louis Paillard illustrating Michel Houellebecq… But the economic model is fragile. “It's too early to say if it's going to work. I only have the results of issue 1, around 10,000 copies. But just the fact of being the first general comic monthly to launch since the end of À follow in 1997, that's already something”, estimates its publisher, Vincent Bernière. He was at the origin of the relaunch of Métal Hurlant in 2021, in the form of a quarterly. This legendary science fiction comics magazine is celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2025, in a flamboyant way. The publisher, Les Humanoids Associés, publishes a retrospective by decade every two months. “Opus Humano 1975-1985”, number 1, was released in September. “Opus Humano 1985-1995”, November 6. The following three decades will appear in January, March and May. “Fifty years is a lot of material,” concedes one of the co-founders, comic book publisher Jean-Pierre Dionnet, to AFP. “I saw more and more young people who had either inherited their dad's collection of Métal Hurlant issues, or were interested in it in another way. These young people believe in a mythology of the wonderful 70s. I Don't mislead them, but we also had our worries. For them, it was freedom. For me, years with dark aspects,” he continues. The science fiction of Druillet and other Moebius reflected it: “When we talked about the future, we were in a kind of blissful futurism, post-American dream. We, Métal Hurlant, had a nightmare of it, that of the 'hyperconsumption'.
Same observation with Jean-Pierre Dionnet and Vincent Bernière: the magazine is a format which suffers from changes in habits, that of going to your newsagent. “It’s a huge problem. I’m in Livry-Gargan and you have to go very far to find one,” notes the first, who lives in the Paris suburbs. “The network, as they say, that of points of sale, seems less responsive year after year,” adds the second.
Fluide Glacial, a monthly of irreverent humor, is also celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2025. It lives, without advertising, backed by a comic book publisher, Bamboo, and, when it celebrated its 45th anniversary, it had launched an online subscription where he deplored “the progressive disappearance of points of sale, kiosks, press houses”. There is no question of letting Christmas, a crucial sales period, pass: on November 7 he published his retrospective of “50 years of covers”, which brings together dozens of names like Gotlib, obviously, Franquin, Tronchet, Larcenet, Charb, Sattouf, and others familiar to fans of French humor comics. The book, at 34.90 euros, does not bring in as much as a year's subscription. So, on the last page, co-founder Gotlib, who died in 2016, depicts an old bearded man dressed in white who complains about missing numbers. “You too… Do as God… Subscribe!”
