The setting is the 28th century. The city of Galaxity is the capital of Earth’s galactic empire. Science and technology have created unlimited prosperity. Government is in the hands of technocrats and scientists. In 1967 that sounded utopian. Today of course the idea of rule by technocrats and scientists sounds like a recipe for a dystopian nightmare.
The overwhelming majority of people do no work at all. They spend their entire lives in artificially induced dreams. Which also sounds a bit dystopian!
Valérian and Laureline are among the tiny majority who still do useful work. They are spatio-temporal secret agents who travel through space and time and act to prevent any tampering with time and space. Like Time Lords.
Bad Dreams was the first Valérian and Laureline adventure, published in the magazine Pilote in 1967. Valérian is sent back to the 11th century to apprehend a mad scientist, Xombul, who is making use of sorcery with the intention of taking over people’s dreams. He wants to shock them out of their dream existence (which might be a good thing but might be dangerous). And of course he wants supreme power for himself (which is definitely a bad thing).
Valérian meets a cute 11th century forest girl named Laureline. In the course of the adventure she is temporarily tuned into a unicorn and since as everybody knows unicorns can read minds she now knows that the world of the 28th century exists and she knows what it’s like. This means that she can no longer be permitted to remain in the Middle Ages, so she is recruited as a spatio-temporal agent. She and Valérian will henceforth operate as a team.
The City of Shifting Waters and Earth in Flames, written in 1968, form a single adventure in two parts. Valérian and Laureline are sent to New York in 1986. Nobody really knows what happened in those times, prior to the 23rd century. That time period is a dangerous forbidden zone. They find a flooded Manhattan being looted by feral hippies.
Xombul has come up with another nefarious plan which has something to do with a lost scientific library. There are two scientific geniuses is this tale, Xombul the mad scientist and Schroeder the eccentric but certainly not evil young scientist who is on the verge of discovering the secret of time travel. Given that nothing is known of this time period perhaps at some stage he really did unlock the secret.
The American setting was not chosen randomly. Christin and Mézières had spent some considerable time in the United States and had picked up a love of the American landscape.
The third story, Empire of a Thousand Planets (dating from 1971), moves us into full-blown space opera territory. The planet Sirte is the centre of an interplanetary empire but the Sirtean had never discovered spatio-temporal travel. Now their empire is decaying. The prince’s rule is fragile and perhaps mostly illusory. The Merchants’ Guild is hatching conspiracies. And then there are the mysterious Enlighteneds, possibly a priestly caste with great powers but possibly something stranger.
It’s a confusing situation with no clearcut good guys and bad guys.
The first two stories are fun but a little tentative but by the third story the series has really hit its stride. Mézières’ visual style is becoming more confident and more flamboyant and Christin’s storytelling is becoming more ambitious. This is the European approach to comic books which is quite unconcerned with genre boundaries but very concerned with aesthetic style. Highly recommended.
In 2017 Luc Besson brought Valérian and Laureline to the big screen in the underrated Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets. Besson drops the time travel angle (which would have added too many complications) but he captures the overall feel of the comic wonderfully well.
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