STRIP TRIPS
The French comic strip that dreamt a universe
When Valerian debuted on 9 November 1967 in issue 420 of Pilote, the weekly anthology was home to super-powered Gallic rebel Asterix and atypical Western hero Lieutenant Blueberry, and science fiction was largely absent from French comics. The genre’s main predecessors in France were the earnest post-war serial Les Pionniers de
l’Espérance and the strictly adults-only Barbarella. So in Valerian’s almost virgin territory, writer Pierre Christin and artist Jean-Claude Mézières unveiled a distinctly French and fresh vision of tomorrow, one undeniably influential on comics and movies to come.
The Frenchmen had been childhood friends and avid readers of the masters of science fiction. In 1965 they reconnected in the USA, where Christin was a university teacher of French literature and journalism in Salt Lake City, and Mézières, a jobbing illustrator, had escaped to pursue his dream of experiencing the working life of a cowboy. Out of this came their first collaborative comics for
Pilote and, back in France, their first Valerian serial, a colour double-spread that ran for 15 weeks.
Christin set out not to imitate his much-loved authors, but build on their examples. “I wanted to follow Asimov into a vision of a universe that stretched very far, like a window into the unknown. We could tell stories about anything!” he said. And as Mézières recalled, “We were trying to make the opposite of American comics.”
From the start they would reverse the usual gender roles of macho action man and damsel-in-distress. Valerian, their timetravelling, square-jawed lead, finds himself in 11th century France, trapped inside a giant leaf, only to be saved by a resourceful peasant girl. Laureline becomes his guide, companion and a spirited, sensitive, sensual woman who is also remarkably adaptable after being transported to the wonders and dangers of Valerian’s 28th century future. Dazzlingly imagined,
Valerian was among the French graphic novels that became design bibles in Hollywood studios in the ’70s. Asked in 1983 about whether Valerian should be adapted into a movie, Mézières only half-joked, “No, it’s been done already, that’s Star Wars!”