Albin Michel’s Astro Allan will be etched onto a sapphire disc bound for the lunar surface in 2030, becoming the first comic book ever ‘distributed’ on the Moon.

By Eric Dupuy, Contributor

French publisher Albin Michel will release Astro Allan, une odyssée interstellaire by Allan Petre and Meidelev on November 4th, 2026—but the graphic novel will not stay earthbound for long. The complete work will be micro-engraved onto one of 24 sapphire discs forming part of Sanctuary on the Moon, a cultural time-capsule initiative led by French engineer Benoît Faiveley with backing from NASA and UNESCO.

The disc is scheduled to reach the lunar surface in 2030 aboard a mission under NASA’s Artemis/CLPS program, which is tasked with returning astronauts to the Moon and laying groundwork for a sustained human presence there.

The choice of medium is deliberate. Sapphire was selected for its near-indestructibility and its resistance to the extreme temperature swings of the lunar surface, while micro-engraving allows a substantial volume of content to be preserved without relying on any future reading technology—a core design constraint for organizers seeking legibility across millennia. Astro Allan’s disc will sit alongside a broader archive spanning mathematics, art, biology and human genomes: a cultural and scientific portrait of humanity intended to outlast war, disaster and time itself.

As for the book itself, it is a 152-page black-and-white album, 15 x 21 centimeters, with a broché cover under a color dust jacket finished in selective varnish—a production standard aimed at strong in-store visibility. Its subject, 24-year-old Allan Petre, grew up in Seine-Saint-Denis, a working-class suburb north of Paris, before joining NASA and later beginning a doctorate in aerospace engineering. His trajectory had already generated significant French media coverage well before this publishing deal, a profile increasingly attractive to publishers seeking narratives with built-in public recognition.

Editor Nicolas de Cointet frames the project as joining a small lineage of objects left on the Moon: “This book, which I’m very pleased to publish, will be available on Earth on November 1, 2026… and on the Moon in 2030! It will join a copy of the Bible left on August 2, 1971 by astronaut David Scott during the Apollo 15 mission, placed on the dashboard of NASA’s first lunar rover in the Sea of Rains, between Hadley Rille and the Apennine Mountains, just before he climbed back into the lunar module… In short, extraterrestrials will have a choice of reading material!”

The release comes as the French comics and manga market contracted 5% in 2025, to €419 million in sales—a backdrop against which a project carrying NASA and UNESCO branding offers publishers a rare marketing hook, one likely to draw international rights interest well beyond the French-language market, if not the planet.