Jean Giraud
alias
MOEBIUS

Spreading praise over his work and his artistic way of thinking would have been a little sterile, and furthermore hypocrite, 'cause, after all, I'm not an unconditional of EVERYTHING he made, and a full admiration spread page would not have, doubtless, any interest, neither for this page's visitors nor for the one to which it's dedicated: Jean Giraud, alias Gir, alias Moebius, who must - I guess - have had a large dose of congratulations and gratitude, to wait, doubtless, something more original...

I remembered an episode of my life that was quite important for me, that was particulary linked to Moebius, and that showed a feature that justified it to be related here: this little unusual story about Moebius, waiting to be told in this page, and opening a window on dream and reality - in a Moebius' story way, is a loop story such as the ribbon that turn himself upside down to make, from its two sides, only one...

Long time ago - I was then 15 -, besides time spent drawing (I had already caught the virus for a long time) I spent my spare time to realize sci-fi and delirious model kits, mixing pieces of planes, tank, cars, and all sort of vehicles plastic model kits...

So I created spatial aircrafts and futuristic vehicles, totally fabulous or inspired by works of that kind which I was fond of. (it was the Star Wars and Blade Runner era...)

But one day, I had enough of erratic creations.

I decided to manage something more thoughtful , more elaborate... I began making plans, gathering and classifying all sort of pieces and designing a far more sophisticated model than the others. My goal was to make a time travelling machine model kit!

Besides stocking bits of models, wrappers, flash bulbs and electronic wrecks, I had led research about the machine to insure its credibility: I searched for magnetic fields, near light-speed phenomenons, particles accelerators running, and quarks behavior...

Then came the moment, where once the project completed, I told myself that such a realisation deserved a backgroud proportionnate to it... So, I should think about a setting, about a environment. Putting the machine in an easy understandable episode of History was talking but not really original. In a futuristic environment, it would have permitted much more fantasy but would have seemed too much "first degree".

No, it needed something really significant of time travelling. It had to be showed in its travel in the non-space, out of known continuum, somewhere out of time... I needed to show intemporality!
	There, an obvious problem: what does this thing look like?

A few months ago, I just discovered, with surprise and delight that French comics were something else than Asterix or Achile Talon... I read Moebius' comics! Wow! What a shock... Yet, there, I told myself: "But if this can be comics, perhaps that I too, later, when I will be older, could, well..." aso,aso...

So obviously, talking about creativity and imagination, my reference was quite moebiusian! Logically, I thought that if I didn't know what intemporality looked like, Moebius would surely know... As quick as possible, I made photocopies of my plans, explained politely and briefly my problem to The Master, and sent it all by mail, care of his editor.

... A month went by.

Then, as I believed no more (it's true that he might recieve some huge mail), surprise: a letter from Moebius! Great, hype, I didn't believe it?! In fact, the letter didn't bring answers to my call, and he was far too busy to draw a color view of intemporality in all its splendor, but even so, it's was quite faboulous to have a letter from an artist I admire, and more, what he told was really nice, because, apparently, my research interested him and he encouraged me to go forward...

I was flying on a little cloud...

... from, time acting, I got down to face up life strictness: high school bad times, a never ending boyhood, the "failing the final exam" fear, and once you got it disappointed at what good to do with it, the so called "higher studies" that doesn't teach anything, girls that you didn't hope to know so much, job problems, mistakes to assume, dishonesty to bear... So much things, in fact, that my youth hopes could not survive. My marvelous time travelling machine remained in separated bits and was staining in my loft. To say the truth, I completly forgot it... My fantastic adventure's dreams seemed to have passed away.

Gradually, my way seemed to gain back a sense: after a few years of exciting but exhausting work in press illustration, my team-up with Marc Bati allowed me, at least, to realize my highest dream: making comics! Synopsis of "les 5 mondes de Sylfeline", my first album, was finished and so was the five first pages, inked and colorized. An appointment was made with the publisher that we had to meet at lately afternoon. But Bati had made me a surprise.

Before going to the publisher, we went round. Marc was leading me to show some of our pages to... Moebius! I was much intimidated, happy too, and above all....

Tilt!...

Suddenly, it came back to me: I remembered my time travelling machine... Hell, it was long ago! It was in, well.. I could find the year (I finished high school), even the month and the day, because it was the last working day's evening that I wrote to Moebius to explain my problem about intemporality. But...Incredible! It was EXACTLY TEN YEARS BEFORE, to a day!…

Obviously, when we met, this afternoon, I didn't resist and told him my story... He too remembered my ten-years-ago letter! And there we were, talking, instead about comics and drawing, about intemporality and destiny, resuming a talk begun ten years before, as we would have stopped ten minutes ago...

And there, I had the feeling that something magic was there... It remembered me of the H.G.Wells novel, when the time travelling machine's creator try to convince his unbelieving colleagues that his prototype works.

He presented his reducted model that he turns on... the machine disappears and, of course, everyone believes of a magic trick, as the machine has really disappeared out of time, to come back at a precised appointment.

Everything has happened as if my time travelling machine had worked! It seemed that I was linked back to my child's dreams and the goals that I wanted to complete back then, when I found my vocation, reading Moebius comics. It was like if all that was precious had disappeared at that time to come back, untouched and preserved from all the troubles I met meanwhile and which it would not have survived, at a precise appointment, ten years after, to a day.

Perhaps was my machine my hopes' quintessence, that I had mentally packaged to preserve them for the moment where I would have an opportunity to realize it. Perhaps is there really some kind of magic in this life...

... even if we persist in seeing in this things just mere coincidences, more or less poeticly interpreted.

	I have not any straight answer to this issue. I'm not superstitious nor integrist of rationalism.
	I just don't like straight answers...

One way or the other, I can affirm that my time traveeling machine (the "inside" version, not the model kit) has worked!

It will seem looney that I tell, in this page, in principle dedicated to someone else, a bit of my own life, but I find that it IS a Moebius-styled story, which starting idea is the need to make something visible that apparently seems unimaginable.

It's this talent that Moebius knew how to develop, and it's the same ambition that he planted in me. So it seemed to me that the best way to celebrate him was to tell how and why, reading comics, I found so important to understand that fantasy and reality are so closely linked...

Like two sides of a same universe, that finally gathers, like a Moebius ribbon...