AstroCities: June 2010

The SciFi comic book series Valérian, the SpatioTemporal Agent, created by writer Pierre Christin and artist Jean-Claude Mézières, was launched as early as 1967 in the french magazine Pilote.

"World Without Stars" (1971) was the first Valérian album I ever read.
It starred the-not-the-brightest-but-very-likable-lad Valérian and his fellow protagonist the-independent-and-intelligent Laureline, and I fell instantly in love with the series. It was amazing. I had the feeling of actually visiting another, almost real place, or maybe even more exact: to witness a study in Extraterrestrial Anthropology. A slice of Life on the planet Zahir, where a serious battle of the sexes took place (A full resume can be read here, though I strongly suggest you buy the album).

The main characters were both agents in time and space in the 28th century, boldly going where only few men (and women) had gone before them. But this wasn't just Star Trek version Française - This was the more gritty kind. The kind without people with huge, balled heads in tin foil suits, shiny plastic bubbles all over the place and a horizon 13 meters away. It was mud and oil. Huge planets and rocky landscapes. And two people far away from home.

But what really makes Valérian and Laureline stand out, is the profound humanism, that seems to be leaking out between the pages. The story would typically take it's beginning in some ideological differences between various alien groups, and the differences would be resolved through reason and perseverance. Not by firing nukes or photon torpedoes.

People has been known to accuse Christin and Mézières of being too much inspired by George Lucas and vice versa. It's hard to tell who's inspired by who, though I'm not aware of George Lucas ever having been introduced to Valérian, whereas Star Wars on the other hand is quite hard to miss. It is said though, that Doug Chiang, design director on The Phantom Menace, kept a set of Valérian albums in his library.

Mézières' response upon seeing Star Wars was that he was "dazzled, jealous... and furious!". As a riposte, he produced an illustration for Pilote magazine in 1983 depicting the Star Wars characters Luke Skywalker and Leia Organa meeting Valérian and Laureline in a bar surrounded by a bestiary of alien creatures typical of that seen in both series. "Fancy meeting you here!" says Leia. "Oh, we've been hanging around here for a long time!" retorts Laureline.

The Millennium Falcon may to some degree look like their ship - the XB 982, but it's purely coincidental. There are some recurring details in the designs, but none I'd say were evidence of design theft. And that goes for the alien designs too. They may just be a visual expressions of the period the designers themselves were living in.

Valérian ran for 43 years(!) years until it's conclusion in 2010, which in my opinion were quite some time too late. Since "On the Frontiers" (1988) reading Valérian had been like watching an old relative slipping into dementia. You'd think of all the good times you used to have together and not really looking forward to whatever would come next. In the first album of the series "The City of Shifting Waters" (1968) the Earth infrastructure had collapsed due to nuclear detonations in the year 1986 - an occurrence that in the 28th century had lead to the establishing of the future society and Galaxity (the home of The Time and Space Agency)- but as time caught up and the eighties came around, Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mézières agreed to let Valérian and Laureline travel back in time to stop the nuclear disaster, and thereby destroying Galaxity! Suddenly the two main characters were left without any purpose in deep space, and since then the quality of both the story line as well as the art has gone drastically down.

The lesson here should be, that if you ever want to destroy the world as we know it (narratively speaking), stage it to happen after you're dead, so you won't end up in the same, embarrassed situation.