Gébé’s Letter to Survivors Launch w/ Translator Edward Gauvin

Gébé (George Blondeaux; 1929-2004) is the patron saint of French illustrated satire. He was a founder of the influential magazine Hara-Kiri, a major influence and broadsheet of the Paris student movement of 1968, and after it was shut down Charlie Hebdo where he remained an editor until his death, as well as Pilote (home of Astérix) and L’Enragé (publisher of de Sade, Bataille, Dalí, Breton, and The Story of O). His weekly strip L’AN 01 imagines a world where modernization has been resisted, consumerism refused, a freedom granted to life as one wants—and became a cult movie of the same title directed Jacques Doillon, Alain Resnais, and Jean Rouch.

Letter to Survivors, a later and complete work, is set in a post-apocalyptic, barren world where survivors huddle in bunkers and their only contact with the outside is through postmen on bicycles and in hazmat suits who read letters to the families below through the air vent. The letters are stories from the past when the earth was green, the towns had festivals, and people fell in love. But the message is clear: what happen was caused by how humans behaved in the past; if we have a future, how will we behave now?

Edward Gauvin has translated over three hundred graphic novels, of which Letter to Survivors is the latest. Gauvin will do a presentation of the life and work of Gébé and how he turned this biting book, more scary and important now than ever, into its first English edition.

Gauvin will be in conversation with comics scholar Andréa Gilroy.