Figurehead of Label 619, which blows up the Franco-Belgian comic mixing the aesthetics of the comic with the dynamism of the manga, publishes this Wednesday Guillaume Singelin border. An SF story along the lines of Carbon and Silicon by Mathieu Bablet, which was immediately established as one of the most essential albums of the year, and one of the classics of the genre.
Fruit of a decade of work, border tells the adventures of a trio of characters -a scientist, a mercenary and a miner- in full exploration of a virgin territory, space, while little by little industrial groups begin to colonize it, and plunder its resources, at the risk of destroying it, like the earth
Far from the traditional story of space exploration, border it testifies to the concerned look that Guillaume Singelin has on the contemporary world and the place that everyone occupies in it. Faced with a profoundly violent, unjust and cynical society, he nonetheless calls for distrusting any form of self-absorption and not falling into the naiveté of collective utopias. “Utopia is never really accessible,” he warns.
Fleeing from workplace violence
Though imagined before the recent demonstrations against pension reform, border he repeats it in a disturbing way. Metaphor for the dangers of working in a company, from burn-out to professional exhaustion, border presents characters who will put everything in order to escape the violence of the world of work.
Inside border, his heroines are thus “snatched of their ambition and their will by companies that transform humans into a product”. “Everyone is aware of the harshness of their daily lives. But how many people will dare to rebel? It is often easier to reflect on our discomfort.”
Guillaume Singelin, whose stories most often represent “people who are not well and who will find their well-being without necessarily breaking everything”, therefore wants to find border keys “to learn not to suffer anymore”. “The basic idea of the project is to try to reinvent your day to day to live better”, she insists.
The use of the science fiction genre, and a story of space exploitation, allows “extrapolating all these ideas,” he adds. “We are in a very special moment in terms of social movements and movements of thought. Of course, science fiction allows you to better digest these ideas.
crazy sense of detail
But the designer is not fooled by the blind alleys of this type of discourse. The graphical discrepancy between its very cartoonish characters and the very realistic settings in which they evolve demonstrates this well. Each box bears witness to an insane sense of detail, reinforcing the characters’ sense of suffocation. A feeling that they will learn to get rid of little by little.
“They are overwhelmed with cables, computers. I’m moved by things that don’t go together. It also makes the characters endearing despite a rather harsh universe”, explains the designer.
This discrepancy between a tender aesthetic and a hyper-realistic drawing also allows him to support the idea that one must always be on guard against the violence of the contemporary world. “I’m always a little suspicious. When something goes right, I always wonder if it’s a figment of the imagination, when it will end.”
positive science fiction
The fear of abandonment and death is fundamental to border, which addresses in particular the importance of maintaining funeral rites in space, in order to learn to better free oneself. “I found the contrast between this world of beliefs and this very pragmatic, very technological universe interesting,” he slides.
border touch the heart with this game-worthy melancholy death stranding from Hideo Kojima or the manga galaxy express 999 by Leiji Matsumoto. In keeping with these outstanding works of Japanese culture, border shows how to make the best of a situation where death is omnipresent.
“It is a state of mind that we find in Asian cultures, a kind of self-denial and resilience in the face of events. Life goes on despite adversities”, explains who has wanted to turn his back on an approach to classic science fiction, mainly developed in the cinema.
I read a book called Needle by Laurent Genefort, which deals with everyday life, the little people in space. This book made a great impression on me. It is an approach that I find attractive. I didn’t want to do pure action or pure horror. I also wasn’t ready to do a political space opera story.”
Guillaume Singelin promotes positive science fiction. If the present is desperate, the future, at least in fiction, will be less so: “I’m super pessimistic about the world today. Do I want to exacerbate it in my books? Not really. It’s the only place you can have optimism in a world It’s not too nice.”
Source: BFM TV
