Nowadays French comics are most strongly associated with sex and psychedelia, Metal hurlant magazine, Meubius and Chodorowsky. But even before that, artist Mézières and screenwriter Kristen gave the world one of the longest running and most famous BD series.
“Valerian and Loreleen” is a typical brainchild of the 1960s, a kind, naive and light fantasy. It is a relative of “Star Trek” and “Alice Seleznyova,” only in comic book form and liberated in the French way. The world of the future according to “Valerian” is funny and positive – however, it is difficult to reduce it to a single world. The actual Earth of the 28th century receives a minimum of attention. In each issue, the agents wander through different eras and planets unlike one another. Already in the first novel Valerian goes to the time machine in the analogue of Bulychev’s “era of fairy tales” to fight with the sorcerer professor. And in the second heroes is delayed in a post-apocalyptic era, but even there they are waiting for easy and fun adventures.
“Valerian” looks pleasantly old-fashioned these days. Even for those who didn’t grow up with these comic books, it evokes a kind of nostalgia for the childhood and immediacy of sci-fi. What to say about the French: for many of them, including Besson, it was one of the main experiences of childhood.
In the current collection, timed to coincide with the release of the film, the publishers have tried to emphasize this cultishness and instill in the reader a reverence for the classics. The comics are preceded by an extensive preface and interviews with Mezière, Kristen, and Besson. An entire page is devoted to the similarities between “Valerian” and “Star Wars” – the creators of the comic never tire of suspecting Lucas of plagiarism. We are not allowed to forget: if “Valerian” in some places is similar to other famous sci-fi, it was before.
By the way, with all due respect to Mézières and Kristen, their claims about “Star Wars” are far-fetched. All the above “borrowings” – the armored bras, the freezing, the ugly faces under the iron masks – aren’t exactly original, they’ve been around in pulp fiction since the 1920s. Lucas was hardly inspired by French comics, which had not even been translated at the time (the first English edition of Valerian is dated 1981). More likely the native American Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers. Both “Star Wars” and “Valerian” were following in the footsteps of their predecessors, so even in those years they had a retro feel to them.
After such a high-profile introduction, there is a risk that upon seeing the first pages of the comic book itself, readers will exclaim disappointedly, “What, this is your classic?” So let’s warn you right away: the first collection includes the earliest stories about Valerian – the ones from which the comic began in Pilote magazine. The first stories have a much more artless style of drawing than you’ll find in today’s BDs, and naive plots of amusing adventures, rather than serious sci-fi.